Assessing graduate education -with inputs again

Richard Vedder’s blog, the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, is always interesting, and often provocative. In a recent post, he pointed out an article that I had somehow missed in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a new company called Academic Analytics that has a new approach to ranking graduate programs.  Rather than depending heavily on reputations, as do so many rankings, Academic Analytics uses a variety of productivity measures. The measures used, and the weightings they are given in arriving at a final score, are field dependent to better reflect the ways in which different fields operate. The outcomes are interesting, to be sure, and differ in surprising ways from some of the more traditional rankings.

Vedder quite rightly notes that this approach may great for measuring and comparing inputs, but does nothing for measuring outcomes. He says:

“Much more needs to be done to truly move to good measurement of outcomes in higher education, and this new evaluation does not truly even attempt to do it. But it points the way to solutions. Private entrepreneurs can make money, I think, developing truly objective measures of what students learn or derive from college, information if provided in user-friendly form would help parents make better choices -- and instill more competition into higher education. I would love to see a "learning per dollar spent" measure developed, for example. Along with the National Institute of Deaf's use of Social Security earnings data, this is a promising approach to finding true bottom lines in higher education.”

This conclusion fits very nicely with my points regarding competition in Price and cost in higher education: price and the political-economic system.  Vedder adds the very important signal to private entrepreneurs - and caution to higher education - that there is money to be made here! !  If higher education sits back and refuses to consider outcome measures, the marketplace will provide us with measures because it will be good business. But we should all be aware that outcome measures may not capture the important outcomes of a good education if they are defined without the active participation of higher education.

Having said that, I must admit that past attempts to create graduate outcome measures have, for the most part, reflected typical academic myopia.   A good graduate program is most often defined as one that reproduces its faculty, that is, places its graduates in faculty lines in academe. The best graduate program is one that gets its graduates into lines in the best universities.  This is obviously a very important outcome measure, but certainly not the only one, and perhaps not even the most important one. Academe almost always turns out many more Pd.D.’s than can be absorbed in faculty lines, so such a limited measure dooms many or most of our graduates to jobs that we define through our measure as definitely second class. In fact, the Ph.D’s outside of academe in industry and government play a critical role in maintaining the vigor of the economy and the strength of the nation.   A truly effective set of outcome measures for graduate education will have to figure out how to reflect or predict the contributions of graduates of an institution to the overall health of society, rather than just measuring the contribution to the next generation of academics.

Comments

[Garagesale2ebay.com]

Great post, education is getting ridiculously expensive nowadays. I have many friends leaving college with near 100k in student loans and then having a hard time finding a job paying $20/hr.

[Driving Schools Finder]

Graduate education is one stage of person's lifge which shapes that whole caree so i think this stage should be taken with great care