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What will they learn?
College tuition is skyrocketing, and measurable learning outcomes are dismal — so much so that the conversation is beginning to include the possibility that a college degree may not be the panacea we’ve long regarded it to be. Employers spend billions every year remediating new hires with meaningless bachelor’s degrees. And with the economy bobbing and weaving, parents and young adults are reluctant to take on debt to finance an education that may not translate into a job capable of repaying the loans.
It sounds like a stalemate and a trap. But it doesn’t have to be. There are still affordable schools out there–and some of them actually offer strong core curricula and reasonable time-to-degree. ACTA has done a ton of heavy lifting to find out where they are — and is sharing what they’ve discovered at WhatWillTheyLearn.com.
In a review of 714 four-year colleges and universities, ACTA found out some interesting things: when it comes to ensuring that students graduate with essential core knowledge and skills, public schools tend to do a better job than private ones. But most schools surveyed — more than 60 percent — fall down on the job when it comes to core graduation requirements.
We’re not talking about majors here. We’re talking about all those other classes you have to take to graduate. Most schools are doing what’s easiest and cheapest for them to do on that front — if they technically require students to fulfill distribution course requirements in math and science and history, the fine print often reveals that you can take just about anything to fulfill those requirements. There is no underlying, solid expectation about what students should know — and because of that, students can graduate without knowing much at all.
Writing at the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker explains:
The study was conducted by the nonprofit American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) to help parents and students determine where they might get the best bang for their buck. It was timed to coincide with the release of U.S. News and World Report’s annual evaluation of the “best” colleges and universities, which is based primarily on various statistical data, reputation and prestige.
ACTA focused its efforts on requirements as a measure of what an institution actually delivers. Anne Neal, ACTA president, is quick to point out that the grading system doesn’t tell the whole story about an institution but does offer a crucial part that has been missing.
[...]
both public and private universities are failing to ensure that students cover the important subjects, notably economics and U.S. government or history.
Among the reasons for this void in “the basics” is that many professors prefer research to teaching, and course content often reflects that. There’s no paucity of subjects to choose from, which is part of the problem. More courses equals more expense equals higher tuition. The question is whether the offerings are of any value.
At Emory University, for example, to fulfill a “History, Society and Culture” requirement, students may choose from about 600 courses, including “Gynecology in the Ancient World.” At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a “Humanities, Literature and Arts” requirement may be met by taking an introduction to television. Neal, herself a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, doesn’t dispute that these may be excellent classes. “But the question being asked is whether this is the only exposure a student is getting when going to university.”
Students given so many choices aren’t likely to select what’s good for them. Given human nature, they’ll choose what’s fun, easy or cool — and not early in the morning or on Fridays. It’s up to universities to guide them away from the dessert tray to the vegetable courses they need to develop healthy minds. Neal says that colleges have abdicated that responsibility.
“It’s ludicrous to take an 18-year-old and give them hundreds of choices when they don’t have any basis for making a decision.”
ACTA graded the schools it surveyed. More than 60 percent got a C or worse. Only sixteen got an A. They are: Baylor University, City University of New York — Brooklyn College, Texas A&M University (College Station and Corpus Christi), the U.S. Air Force Academy, the U.S. Military Academy, the University of Arkansas, St. Thomas Aquinas, East Tennessee State, Kennesaw State, Lamar University, Midwestern State, St. John’s College (MD and NM), Tennessee State, and the University of Dallas.
I can hear you. You are saying, “WHAT“? Where are Harvard and Yale, Berkeley and Michigan, Williams and Oberlin? They’re there. They just don’t do well under ACTA’s criteria.
We need to start thinking outside the box when it comes to higher education. ACTA’s What Will They Learn? project offers parents and students a way to begin doing that.
So I clicked on the WhatWillTheyLearn.com link and was reminded of one of the reasons I so despise ACTA: Because its work and presentation are so shallow and lacking in context. My school is presented as “not requiring” literature, history, economics, etc., and while technically that’s true, it’s highly misleading. The truth is that students have to take three humanities courses out of a basket of four (Literature, Theatre, Music, Art). And they have to take four human sciences/history courses out of a basket containing six (Economics, Government, Psychology, Sociology, American History, Development of Civ).
But the casual peruser of the ACTA site will learn only that economics, literature, etc. are “not required.” Would it really have been so difficult for them to convey the reality more accurately?
FWIW, I’m a strong proponent of beefing up the gen-ed core, more so even than ACTA. (I find ACTA’s selection of courses pretty narrow. No philosophy? No comparative religion?) I think ALL of the following should be required: composition I/II, American history, world history, American government, literature, music, visual art, film, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, comparative religion, math, physical science, life science, and two semesters of a foreign language. I’d like to pump the gen-ed requirements right up to 60 credits. I don’t see how one can be an adequately liberally-educated citizen otherwise.
But I’d also like to see ACTA be less polemical and more accurate and nuanced.
Another thing that ticked me off when I clicked over to my institution’s page: the Graduation Rate, included in the table for easy comparison to other schools. My school’s graduation rate is in the 20s, and that of a neighboring school on the list is in the 80s. What does that mean? My school is de facto open admission; that’s part of our mission. We take ‘em all, most of them poor and poorly prepared in crappy schools, and then we give ‘em all kinds of remediation opportunities, and we hope they succeed. Not surprisingly, a lot of them don’t succeed, at least not in the usual four years. Just down the list from my school is another with which we’re being “compared,” a school that charges more than $35,000 in tuition (eight times what my school charges) to educate some of the smartest, wealthiest, best-prepared students in the country. And that school’s graduation rate is in the 80s. What do the two graduation rates actually say about the quality of education or instruction at the two schools? Nothing. What do they say about how much a given student might actually learn at the two schools? Nothing. Nothing at all. But the casual peruser of the list will naturally associate an 80 percent graduation rate with “good school” and a 20 percent graduation rate with “bad school.” Thanks a whole fracking lot, ACTA.
In what meaningful sense do ACTA’s tables provide a “comparison” at all? None that I can see. ACTA compares apples to oranges, without providing enough context for people even to *know* they’re comparing apples to oranges. In doing so they’re doing a disservice.
Anne Neal and the other people at ACTA are not stupid, yet they crank out some monumentally stupid work. Any idea why that might be?
[...] I had also meant to link this post from Erin O’Connor: What will they learn? [...]
ES: If you feel your college wasn’t handled properly by WWTL, I suggest you contact ACTA and make your case.
Erin, though you’d be interested in this analysis.
The PayScale study might be useful for certain purposes, but my guess is that it will be mostly misused (as is usual with such efforts). Its methodology unfits it for supporting the kind of conclusions that most readers are likely to draw from it.
The methodology (to simplify vastly) compares 30-year earnings of high school grads to BA grads, adjusts for inflation, divides by college costs at a given college, performs a few other tweaks, and then spits out a Return on Investment.
The resulting figures might have some uses, particularly re debates about the efficacy of public funding, etc. But they can’t give much help to individual college-bound students. Think of a high school graduate with the scores to get into MIT (at the top of the PayScale list). Realistically, this student is not choosing between going to MIT and not going to college at all. This kid is choosing between MIT, Cal Tech, Harvard, etc. Can the PayScale chart tell us which of these schools would provide the best ROI for this particular student? Not at all. Nor can it tell us anything about the overall quality of a given school, of the quality of the education one can get there, and so on. There are just too many uncontrolled variables, too much self-selection of inputs, etc. (The most important uncontrolled variables of all, of course, are those inhering in the student.)
There’s also a methodology limitation on the output side: the study calculates an ROI only for students who graduate with a BA and never go to graduate or professional school. Yet students who continue on to graduate or professional school make up a huge chunk of graduates at the schools that dominate the PayScale chart. In addition, I would guess that elite students are more likely to go on to graduate or professional school if they’re in the humanities or human sciences; those who stop at the BA level, I suspect, are more likely to be in engineering and the like. If so, the PayScale methodology might skew heavily toward certain disciplines, which in turn would be yet another reason the study cannot really tell us much that would be useful for any given student.
The PayScale analysis might provide a good foundation on which to base further studies that could be more truly useful. But I don’t see what useful conclusions can be drawn from it as it stands right now. We don’t need PayScale to tell us that an MIT education pays off for those who can get one.