Sizing Up the College Rating System - NYTimes.com

Sizing Up the College Rating System - NYTimes.com: "roempty IL 3 minutes ago
Our system of K-12 and higher education has "democratized" education- anyone can get into K-12, and schools are incentivized to maximize the output of K-12. The higher education system provides thousands of options for students, at various price points, to get an undergraduate degree, irrespective of the student's academic and non-academic level of development. Sadly, public, with this level of education, is now demanding a single "rating" to assess the worth of a college. From a process viewpoint a College takes inputs of varying quality (incoming students), uses processes (curricular and non-curricular), and produces outcomes (the attributes of graduates). Assessing the value added by the educational process requires controlling for input quality, and defining the quality of the outcomes. If we want to have a high quality affordable "college education" we have to (1) recognize that not all K-12 grads should be able to go to College after graduation, (2) require that College assessments (exams, tests, etc.) be assessed far more rigorously, (3) require that non-teaching related expenses be less than a fixed (small) percent of teaching expenses, and (4) require that all information on process quality and outcomes be made public, along with the "true" prices. In many parts of Europe, not all high school grads can go on to college, there are significantly difficult assessments after high school, and in College students are given far more responsibility for their own education."



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