The Chimera of College Brands - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views
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What you get from a college, by contrast, varies wildly from department to department, professor to professor, and course to course. The idea implicit in college brands—that every course reflects certain institutional values and standards—is mostly a fraud. In reality, there are both great and terrible courses at the most esteemed and at the most denigrated institutions.
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With a grant from the nonprofit Lumina Foundation for Education, physics and history professors from a range of Utah two- and four-year institutions are applying the "tuning" methods developed as part of the sweeping Bologna Process reforms in Europe.
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The group also created "employability maps" by surveying employers of recent physics graduates—including General Electric, Simco Electronics, and the Air Force—to find out what knowledge and skills are needed for successful science careers.
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Kathryn MacKay, an associate professor of history at Weber State University, drew on recent work from the American Historical Association to define learning goals in historical knowledge, thinking, and skills.
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In the immediate future, as the higher-education market continues to globalize and the allure of prestige continues to grow, the value of university brands is likely to rise. But at some point, the countervailing forces of empiricism will begin to take hold. The openness inherent to tuning and other, similar processes will make plain that college courses do not vary in quality in anything like the way that archaic, prestige- and money-driven brands imply. Once you've defined the goals, you can prove what everyone knows but few want to admit: From an educational standpoint, institutional brands are largely an illusion for which students routinely overpay.