Educational Shibboleths and Sound Policy

For some reason educational policy seems especially prone to the Shibboleth of the hour. Let me offer three examples.

#1 - No Child Left Behind - Everyone recognizes that the K-12 system is not as good as it should be with the range of children that are served by the American higher education system. There are tons of comparisons. Data from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development suggests that most of the other developed nations do a better job than the US in giving students a basic drilling in key subjects - the other countries (except perhaps Portugal and Mexico) are better at basic indicators of math skills (which leads to engineering proweress). We are not as good as we should be in getting the broadest range of kids to appropriate levels of higher math. Writing is also not a skill. A lot of that, it seems to me, comes from an increased industrialization of K-12 (the imposition of teacher unions has rigidified the administration of K-12 into a series of policy kabukis that are disfunctional). The response, at least since the beginning of the Bush administration, has been to increase outcomes measurements. That standardizes education to a national set of goals. But it is really not that simple. Hayek warned that the dangers of using numbers in economics is that we may be counting the wrong things. It seems to me that NCLB has the same defect.

#2 - Occupational and Non-traditional students in higher education - The US Department of Education released a report last week that suggested that 55% of the total students in higher education were occupational in focus. That has helped to begin to redefine how students pursue education after high school. Only an idiot would pursue a degree which trained them for their first job. We need more engineers and people in technical fields but getting students to simply focus on their first career is short-sighted. What should we do with all the people who trained to be key punch operators in the 1980s?
A second concern in this area came from a discussion last week. Increasingly, as we think about higher education a good percentage of the students are "non-traditional." But that should not blind our vision. A non-traditional student is over 22. We know that in many states that the demographics will create an increased demand for traditional aged students based on the bulge that is often called Tidal Wave II. So is the right policy to argue that we should increasingly concentrate on students who are outside those curves or those within the traditional bands of college attendance? If we reduce our commitment to 18 year olds a couple of things happen. First, we begin (as we have in the last couple of years) to see a decline in the full time attendance of all students, which in turn reduces the efficiency of higher education. There are basically two types of non-traditional students. The first are students who are returning to higher education for whatever reason at an age above the traditional college age population - many of those students are enhancing their skills either with an initial or a supplemental degree. Part time students are not as successful in completing their programs but they also have more resources to bring to bear on their educations than traditional college age students. The second are students who dropped out in their first try and are going back to complete a degree.
In both cases, it seems to me that public policy would benefit from focusing resources on traditional age students. The data is pretty unequivical. In the last decade the college going rate for traditional students, especially males, has declined. We are lousy at encouraging 18 year olds, especially Latino and Black males, to go to college on the first bounce. That is a costly error.
By increasing our attention to non-traditional students we are likely to allow these trends to continue. In the long term that is silly policy. A fundamental question that we should always ask is what is different about a college student from the same person and age who is not a student. Sound policy would focus resources on making it easier for students' direct need for resources.

#3 - Accreditation - This is again an issue of counting. Secretary Spellings has tried to force the regional accrediting associations to focus on "outcomes" measures. I would agree that higher education has often gotten a pass on how well we educate our students. It takes a longer time than it should for students to graduate and that number has increased over time. We now often count graduation rates in six year terms for a four year degree. But the risk of completely thinking about outcomes is that the science of making these measurements is bogus on at least two bases. First, outcomes measurements are at best crude. It is great to think you can reduce human motives down to a set of measurements - but it is folly to think that is possible. Second, the measurements in these kinds of situations tend to come to standardized measurements. That is nonsense. Two of the strengths of the American system of higher education make it much harder to reduce to a single set of numbers. Higher education is remarkably diverse - the differences in motives and aspirations between a student in a selective liberal arts college and a community college are wide. At the same time the measurements may produce a snapshot which is misleading. When I was an undergraduate I learned a lot about Cobol and Comecon. Neither set of knowledge is useful to me today, except at a footnote. But I also learned a lot about how to think about critical issues. And those skills are the very hardest to measure.

So should we allow education to be unmeasured? Obviously not. But at the same time we should be humble about the measures we are developing and constantly cognizant of the multiplicity of motives that students in American higher education pursue.