The Real Value of What Students Do in College

By Bob Shireman

This post originally appeared on The Century Foundation’s website

Today in the United States, more than a third of adults have a college degree, compared to fewer than five percent of adults at the time of World War II, representing a dramatic change in what people do when they reach adulthood.1This year alone nearly two million people in the United States will earn their bachelor’s degrees.2 Our country’s success in promoting a college education would be something to celebrate, if not for one big, embarrassing blemish: those who are already privileged are the most likely to get to and through college, while the underprivileged do not.

The disparities by race and income are stark. High school students from the top fourth of family income are four times as likely to have earned a bachelor’s degree ten years out of high school than those in the bottom fourth of family income.3 In the adult population at large, African Americans are half as likely, and Latinos one-third as likely, as Asian Americans to have at least a bachelor’s degree.4 And the average financial gain that comes with a college degree — or, more accurately, the financial penalty that comes from not graduating — is as large as it has ever been, making the consequences of the inequality more severe.

This blemish — more like a blight, really — threatens not only America’s self-image as the land of opportunity, but undermines our nation’s civic health. A country in which the wealthy and powerful pass their privilege down to their offspring, leaving everyone else behind, is an aristocracy, not a democracy.

We were warned this might happen. In 1947, a panel commission by President Truman cautioned that education might not solve inequality but instead make it worse:

We have proclaimed our faith in education as a means of equalizing the conditions of men. But there is a grave danger that our present policy will make it an instrument for creating the very inequalities it was designed to prevent. If the ladder of educational opportunity rises high at the doors of some youth and scarcely rises at the doors of others, while at the same time formal education is made a prerequisite to occupational and social advance, then education may become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening and solidifying them.5

Exactly what the Truman Commission feared has come to pass: a college degree has become the primary route to economic security, while getting the degree is virtually assured for the rich and rare for the poor.

Increasing rates of completion would make a difference: if all of the adults who had started college completed a degree, the gap between African American and whites would be nearly 40 percent lower than it is today (a decline from a 12.3 percentage-point gap to 7.6 percentage points).6

There are many reasons students do not make it all the way through to a college degree. The most prominent is simply the price — the time and money it takes to get a college degree can be an insurmountable hurdle for low-income students, even those who receive relatively generous financial aid packages. Students with weaker academic skills face additional barriers when they are placed in courses that make the degree an even more distant goal. And the social and psychological challenges to students’ attempts to fit in on college campuses take their toll as well. In the end, some students, faced with the multiple stresses of this new environment, find it extremely difficult to do the one thing that is most important: engage with their coursework.

This report takes a look at how government officials have pressed college accreditors to focus more on “student outcomes” — quantifiable indicators of knowledge acquired, skills learned, degrees attained, and so on. It then argues that it is not these enumerated outcomes that are the best way to hold colleges accountable, but rather the evidence of student engagement in the curriculum — their papers, written examinations, projects, and presentations — that holds the most promise for spurring improvement in higher education. Furthermore, this engagement is also a key factor in keeping students in school all the way to graduation. The report concludes that reformers seeking to enhance college performance and accountability should focus not on fabricated outcome measures but instead on the actual outputs from students’ academic engagement, the best indicators of whether a college is providing the quality teaching, financial aid, and supportive environment that make higher learning possible, especially for the disadvantaged.

This report is the first of a series from The Century Foundation, sponsored by Pearson. The views and opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or position of Pearson. The series grew out of an August 2014 conference at which researchers and several university presidents were exploring new paths to diversity in higher education in light of emerging legal constraints on race-based affirmative action. As participants discussed ideas to ensure access for low-income and minority students, university leaders were equally concerned about how to improve rates of college graduation by disadvantaged students.

The Current Misguided Focus on Outcomes

As part of his State of the Union address in 2013, President Obama recommended that funding to colleges be contingent on “student outcomes.”7Since then, there has been a bipartisan drumbeat in favor of outcomes from colleges, and standards from the independent accreditors that decide whether a college is good enough to get federal support. U.S. senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio wants to reward colleges that demonstrate “high student outcomes.”8 The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal has chimed in, too. Complaining that accreditors focus too much on inputs — such as the number of books in the library — rather than on outcomes, they want the federal government to bypass accreditors and adopt “simple, clear standards” to cut off federal funding from bad colleges.9 In a November announcement of its plans to reform accreditation, the U.S. Department of Education used the wordoutcome or standards thirty-one times (student outcomes, institutional outcomes, outcomes-based reviews, outcomes-driven accountability, outcome measures, outcomes-driven oversight, critical outcomes data, outcomes-directed measures, key outcomes, outcome standards, achievement standards, accreditor standards, recognition standards, and more).10 Recently, theDepartment of Education announced it will insist that accreditors adopt “strong and meaningful outcome standards.”11

We have heard the outcomes chorus before, ten years ago, when Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings made similar demands, ultimately gaining pledges from the accreditors that they would focus more on outcomes in their reviews of colleges.12 Secretary Spellings was simply tapping into a movement in higher education that was gaining momentum at the time, without knowing that its momentum actually came from rolling downhill.

The Birth of Outcomes, and How They Went Awry

In the 1990s, reformers thought they could improve teaching and learning in college if they insisted that colleges declare their specific “learning goals,” with instructors defining “the knowledge, intellectual skills, competencies, and attitudes that each student is expected to gain.”13 The reformers’ theory was that these faculty-enumerated learning objectives would serve as the hooks that would then be used by administrators to initiate reviews of actual student work, the key to improving teaching. The logic went like this:

• Step 1. Faculty members declare their goals for students, what became known as “student learning outcomes,” or SLOs.
• Step 2. Observers seek evidence of whether students met those goals, what became known as “assessment.”
• Step 3. Faculty improve their instruction based on the assessment.

That was the idea. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Not even close.

In 2001, Peter Ewell, a leader in the student-learning-outcome movement, reported that there had been progress toward the reformers’ goal: most accreditors had included at least some mention of “student learning” in the standards they used to judge colleges. In a paper commissioned by accreditors, he urged them to be “more aggressive and creative in requiring evidence of student learning outcomes as an integral part of their standards and processes for review.”14 In 2006, Secretary Spellings took up the charge, and accreditors pledged to focus more on outcomes, as Ewell had recommended. They went along because it was hard to oppose something that seemed, on the surface, to be so reasonable. What could go wrong?15

…continue reading the remainder of the story on The Century Foundation’s website.

Bob Shireman is a fellow at The Century Foundation where he researches and writes on higher education.