Student-Survey Results: Too Useful to Keep Private - Commentary - The Chronicle of High... - 0 views
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"There are … disturbing signs that many students who do earn degrees have not actually mastered the reading, writing, and thinking skills we expect of college graduates. Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined."
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But a major contributing factor is that the customers of higher education—students, parents, and employers—have few true measures of quality on which to rely. Is a Harvard education really better than that from a typical flagship state university, or does Harvard just benefit from being able to enroll better students? Without measures of value added in higher education, that's difficult, if not impossible, to determine.
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Yet what is remarkable about the survey is that participating institutions generally do not release the results so that parents and students can compare their performance with those of other colleges.
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Requiring all colleges to make such information public would pressure them to improve their undergraduate teaching
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It would empower prospective students and their parents with solid information about colleges' educational quality and help them make better choices. To make that happen, the federal government should simply require that any institution receiving federal support—Pell Grants, student loans, National Science Foundation grants, and so on—make its results public on the Web site of the National Survey of Student Engagement in an open, interactive way.
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Indeed, a growing number of organizations in our economy now have to live with customer-performance measures. It's time higher education did the same.