Is our children learning?

Hillary Clinton joins her Democratic presidential contenders in laying out a plan to create a new cap on student loan debt.  While her plan couples a proposed infusion of resources for college affordability with reforms forcing colleges and states to pay attention to outcomes like degree production, neither she nor her challengers have asked colleges the key – albeit grammatically incorrect – question former President George W. Bush presented to K-12 schools years ago:

“Is our children learning?”

{mosads}For all the rhetoric and angst about increasing college prices, the dirty little secret of higher education is that a college degree doesn’t actually represent any particular set of knowledge or skills. 

We have no idea what our nation is getting – substantively – in exchange for an enormous public investment in higher education and constantly rising private tuition. Do students leave with just a piece of paper or do they leave intellectually with something appreciably greater?

Clinton rightly has identified the need for more investment to stem the rising costs of a now-virtually necessary degree. We should justify that increased public spending on higher education with at least barometer data indicating what our college graduates are learning and if they’re improving. If an overall national performance assessment can exist for our nation’s 4^th, 8^th, and 12^th graders, then one can also exist for our nation’s college graduates. It’s time for a “Higher Ed NAEP.”

NAEP, which stands for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is a test of a small sample of students nationwide.  It was developed in the 1960s to determine the overall quality of academic performance in K-12 schools.  It costs about $15 million every year to administer.  It has bipartisan support.

The Education Commissioner at the time NAEP was created lamented that “the nation could…discover how many years children stay in school; [but] had no satisfactory way of assessing whether the time spent in school was effective.”

There are disturbing parallels with higher education. We know much about inputs and cost, but comparatively little about student outcomes.  What little we do know suggests cause for concern and the need to learn more.

Consider that a relatively recent snapshot of adult literacy found barely a third of bachelor degree holders were able to comprehend and compare common narrative texts like two opposing newspaper op-eds.

According to Richard Arum and Josipa Roska, sociologists at the University of Virginia and NYU, over one-third of some 2,000 tested students at 24 four-year colleges showed no gain in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills after four years of postsecondary education.

Over 75 percent of employers report dissatisfaction with the workforce preparation of four-year college graduates. Deficiency in writing, in particular, is alarming.

And yet, a Gallup poll of college educators finds 96 percent feel their college is effective in preparing students for the workplace. These stats should cause alarm not only for students themselves, but for us all.

The idea behind a Higher Ed NAEP is simple. Just like the K-12 assessment, a new exam given to a small sample of graduating students would measure levels of vital academic skills that form the basis of any four-year undergraduate education: reading comprehension, writing, critical thinking, and numerical problem solving.

We’d get national trend data on how higher education is doing with results disaggregated by college sector, selectivity, and state, and just as importantly by student race, gender, and family income.  Are graduating students learning more or less as compared to previous year classes (which apparently cost less to educate)? Do selective colleges truly teach their students better? How do Massachusetts’ colleges compare to California’s? Self-reported data from schools can be skewed and isn’t measured consistently from one school to the next—NAEP would solve that.

Presumably, armed with data, colleges would work harder at their core teaching function.  Likewise, states would compete.  They’d invest more in higher education to generate better outcomes, develop workforce talent, and in turn, attract business investment and new jobs. 

Testing carries a bad rap in political circles. To be clear, a Higher Ed NAEP is not a mandatory test of every college student at every institution. The last time that idea was raised – by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings under President George W. Bush – colleges howled that four years of learning could not be reduced to a single score and that such tests would be “pedagogically destructive.”

A Higher Ed NAEP would be a sample test of only 50,000 college students out of nearly 20 million, conducted once every few years.  It’s unobtrusive, relatively inexpensive, and would allow us to gauge higher education’s success in carrying out an indisputable core mission of all four-year colleges.  

Surely no one would argue that an engineering major, separate from an English or business major, shouldn’t be expected to read, write, and think critically at the end of four years.  If ensuring basic skills like reading, writing, and critical thinking forces colleges to alter their pedagogical technique, well, guess what? That’s a good thing!

Hillary Clinton should be lauded for her plan to couple massive resources for college affordability in exchange for reforms asked of all higher education stakeholders. But she and her challengers should go further and ask for impartial evidence of effectiveness.

Otherwise, our country may end up spending even more for graduates that barely emulate a less-than-articulate former president.  What a scary proposition that would be.

Barry is a policy analyst with Education Reform Now, a non-profit think tank for Democrats for Education Reform and others.