That Old College Lie

Image by cooljinny via Flickr

This month, hundreds of thousands of American high school seniors are anxiously putting the finishing touches on their college applications, hoping to join the ranks of The Many, The Proud…The College-Educated. There can be little doubt that the incredible expansion in access to higher education over the past six decades, since the end of World War II, has been a good thing. Yet does our system of undergraduate education today serve our students well? It seems not.

Instead of educating, far too many schools are focused on maximizing their own reputations and ascending the rankings of U.S. News and World Report–rather than, say, teaching the students who shell out increasingly ludicrous sums to attend. Indeed, while tuition has skyrocketed in the past three decades, there’s virtually no evidence of a commensurate increase in educational quality. And there’s certainly no evidence of improved outcomes; that is, no one can say that our colleges have improved, or are even trying to improve, the degree to which they change students for the better and prepare them for post-college careers.

Kevin Carey–in the journal I help edit, Democracy–has a brilliant take on this state of affairs. Kevin writes:

…the biggest culprit is the lack of objective, publicly available information about how well colleges teach and how much college students learn. Nobody knows which colleges really do the best job of taking the students they enroll and helping them learn over the course of four years. After decades of inaction, some recent efforts have been undertaken to collect that information: It now exists, but colleges and their powerful (and virtually unknown) lobbies will not permit the public to see it. As a result, colleges are far less focused on student learning than they should be, and consumers haven’t a clue what to do and have come to believe, mistakenly, that the most expensive colleges are also the best.

So what’s stopping this information from becoming public–information that would illuminate the mysteries of which schools are teaching our children well, and which aren’t? The most powerful lobby you’ve never heard of. Read all about it, here. If you’re applying to school, or will soon, this is essential reading.