The misadventures of a wonk

From Wikipedia - WONK (colloquial American English) was originally a 1960s slang word applied to an excessively studious person (equivalent to "grind" or "nerd"). The origins of the term are obscure. It has been described as a simple reversal of "know," linked to an obscure Old English word, and attributed to Royal Navy slang for a learned but inexperienced midshipman.

WIKI also lists one a series of children's books by a British author named Muriel Levy and illustrated by Joan Kiddell-Monroe. The two pictures suggest a remarkable likeness between the current Secretary of Education and this character in children's literature.

Why all this background? One of the hallmarks of the current administration has been a series of attempts in education to redefine the relationships between education and the federal government. The first effort was in the development of something, which some wits have called Dickens-like, called No Child Left Behind (or NCLB). The law sets a series of national standards which each school district in the country is required to follow. The act has been criticized by many in the school establishment. And some in the administration see this as a badge of honor. But because the school establishment opposes NCLB should not suggest that many outside that relatively narrow group have legitimate concerns. NCLB assumes that be setting standards and counting things - education will get better. It is hard to find any examples in any market where the complexity of outcomes is as great as it is in education, where counting and measuring alone will improve quality.

That brings us to higher education. For the past year or so the Secretary has also been pursuing an agenda to seek new requirements for higher education that are similar in intent to the ones in NCLB. She has continuously complained that her daughter, who is now a student at Davidson College (one of the more selective liberal arts colleges in the country) could not find adequate information to make an intelligent search. (Although Davidson is a pretty good place-so evidently something worked in the search process.)One of her fixes for that problem is to create a national database of all 13 million college students maintained by the federal government. Spellings claims that would allow policy makers to have a better understanding of the things that colleges claim they do and at the same time allow consumers better information with which to make their choices of a college.

The Secretary discounts the substantial risks to privacy that such a database could create and at the same time disregards the potential huge costs of putting this kind of gargantuan record together. But that is not to say that the goal of improving consumer information for colleges and universities is an inappropriate goal. Colleges and universities could be a bit clearer about how they disclose consumer information. But her error is to confuse needs for data and needs for consumer information.

The consumer information about colleges is actually pretty good. For the vast majority of students one can find almost anything about a college that they want to. The Secretary says that the information on colleges is not like the information available for a set of tires. But that is a bizarre and inappropriate analogy. In any complex purchase, a house for instance, a shopper needs to do some careful evaluation of the consumer information on a couple of levels to understand options. In the current college environment there are tons of comparative sites that allow a student to find places that offer a degree in their area of interest, or allow them to search by interest areas to even find out how a BA in biology might use the skills acquired in the degree, or to compare even things like average financial packages. In the end, however, a prospective student needs to drill down in a couple of areas with the couple of serious choices to understand what works. I advise prospective students to go to a campus and walk around - it gives one a clearer impression.

The federal government already requires each institution in the country to compile some pretty good institutional data on students and finances called the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Series (or IPEDS). Using IPEDS data can give you a good idea about what happens in institutions across the country by type and size or any other kind of variable. But colleges and universities are reluctant to create the new unit record data for a number of very good reasons.

In the end, some colleges have taken the Secretary's comments seriously and are developing a new set of consumer tools which can make data across institutions even more comparable. What we should avoid is any efforts to homogenize higher education. Some policy wonks believe that data collection will simplify, down to the level of a set of tires. That belief is a naive and dangerous one for anyone who understands that the strength of the American system of higher education is its wide range of options.