A 2002 research report by Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid,  gives a discussion of economic models of college tuition that includes such drivers as increased grants of financial aid.  Some key findings:

• Volatility in tuition rates depends on the percentage of total revenues derived from tuition and fees. For each 1% decline in non-tuition revenue, gross tuition revenue must increase by 1.3% at private colleges and 4.3% at public colleges. Public college tuition changes are much more volatile because it depends on non-tuition sources of revenue to a greater extent than private colleges.

• Increases in public college tuition are strongly correlated with the declines in state support of higher education.

Note that this is a report from 2002 — long before the current round of severe state budget cuts and public university tuition hikes.  However, there’s little reason to believe that the dynamic is very different today;  other reports such as the 2009 Delta Cost Project report (covered here by US News and World Report) tend to confirm Kantrowitz’ model for public higher education.

…it’s not just enough to increase student aid, and you can imagine why. Look, we can’t just keep on subsidizing skyrocketing tuition. If tuition is going up faster than inflation, faster than even health care is going up, no matter how much we subsidize it, sooner or later, we’re going to run out of money. And that means that others have to do their part. Colleges and universities need to do their part to keep costs down as well. (Applause.)

Recently, I spoke with a group of college presidents who’ve done just that. Here at Michigan, you’ve done a lot to find savings in your budget. We know this is possible. So from now on, I’m telling Congress we should steer federal campus-based aid to those colleges that keep tuition affordable, provide good value, serve their students well. (Applause.) We are putting colleges on notice — you can’t keep — you cant assume that you’ll just jack up tuition every single year. If you can’t stop tuition from going up, then the funding you get from taxpayers each year will go down. We should push colleges to do better. We should hold them accountable if they don’t. (Applause.)

Now, states also have to do their part. I was talking to your president — and this is true all across the country — states have to do their part by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets. Applause. Last year, over 40 states cut their higher education spending — 40 states cut their higher education budget. And we know that these state budget cuts have been the largest factor in tuition increases at public colleges over the past decade.

So we’re challenging states: Take responsibility as well on this issue. Applause. What we’re doing is, today we’re going to launch a Race to the Top for college affordability. We’re telling the states, if you can find new ways to bring down the cost of college and make it easier for more students to graduate, we’ll help you do it. We will give you additional federal support if you are doing a good job of making sure that all of you aren’t loaded up with debt when you graduate from college. (Applause.)

And, finally, today I’m also calling for a new report card for colleges. Parents like getting report cards. I know you guys may not always look forward to it. (Laughter.) But we parents, we like to know what you’re doing. From now on, parents and students deserve to know how a college is doing — how affordable is it, how well are its students doing? We want you to know how well a car stacks up before you buy it. You should know how well a college stacks up.

We call this — one of the things that we’re doing at the Consumer Finance Protection Board that I just set up with Richard Cordray — (applause) — is to make sure that young people understand the financing of colleges. He calls it, “Know Before You Owe.” (Laughter.) Know before you owe. So we want to push more information out so consumers can make good choices, so you as consumers of higher education understand what it is that you’re getting.

via Full transcript: Obamas speech today on education in Ann Arbor | Detroit Free Press | freep.com.

I have heard the assertion that this is an endorsement of educational assessment.  But it is really?   It is not clear that the Consumer Financial Protection Board’s “report card” is going to include assessment of learning outcomes at all; the President referred to “holding them [colleges] accountable” for tuition hikes, not learning outcomes.  In the absence of learning assessment, the new “Race to the Top” could easily become a “Race to the Bottom” in educational terms.

The assumption underlying all this is that poor management is responsible for soaring tuition, and that a tough regime of incentives and disincentives is the way to improve management.  Improving the college value proposition by improving learning outcomes (as opposed to focusing on cost) is an idea not even broached.

A 2009 U.S. News summary of a report by the Delta Cost Project argues that “since 2002, spending at public universities has generally not exceeded inflation”, but that “the main reason tuition has been rising faster than college costs is that colleges had to make up for reductions in the per-student subsidy state taxpayers sent colleges.”  [Note that this is based on pre-recession data; this cost driver is probably even more important today.]  In other words, it is government management, not college management, that is responsible for tuition hikes, at least in public colleges.

What impact the CFPB’s “report card” can have on that dynamic is unclear to me.

Apparently some efforts at “transparency” are more “transparent” than others — UCAN schools are silent, but VSA achools are “out there” .

The whole discussion of “transparency” founders for me when its purpose is described as to help parents and students select colleges.  How aggregate statistics on student grades would contribute to college selection is beyond me.  Even student evaluations, which are at least direct reports of student experiences, would be difficult to understand in a school vs. school comparison.

The Chronicle provides insight (some of it unintentional) into the problems facing accreditation.  The article starts by listing four competing goals for accreditation held by different parties to the process, then goes on to quote various authorities who, like the blind men describing the elephant, are hanging on to one aspect only.

Curiously, the objective of improving the practices or the outcomes of higher education institutions is not mentioned among the goals of accreditation.

State officials unveiled the “Open Course Library,” which brings together resources for 42 courses. The materials include syllabi, readings, activities, assessments, and textbooks. Anyone can access the courses online.

The courses at the OCL site appear to be based on Angel as a delivery platform.  Seven of the courses have also been “adapted and expanded” by the Saylor Foundation into their “unique modular format” at saylor.org, with more to follow.

A Regional Public University Scales Back Its Research Ambitions

I see a gap growing between the big-time research universities and the undergraduate workforce-training schools.  On which side will your university fall?

Kiplinger describes their rankings: ” As colleges and universities across the U.S. struggle to maintain quality, we identify the public schools that, like Carolina, deliver the best BA for the buck.” The numerator of this “bang per buck” fraction is their “academic quality ranking”, which they describe this way:

We narrow the list to about 120 schools based on measures of academic quality — including SAT or ACT scores, admission and retention rates, student-faculty ratios, and four- and six-year graduation rates, which most schools reported for the class that entered in 2003.

[ Read more: <http://www.kiplinger.com/magazine/archives/best-values-in-public-colleges-2011.html#rank> ]

Kiplinger doesn’t say what criteria they used to “narrow” the list;  perhaps they eliminated schools where the data they had wasn’t complete.

For the 120 school, the data they are using doesn’t include any direct measures of student learning outcomes. [It is fair to say that the graduation rates are direct measures of "academic" outcomes.]  Their indirect measures may or may not be measures of academic quality:

1. SAT or ACT scores: a measure of the intellectual qualifications of fellow students. Probably significant for many students, especially in the traditional age group.
2. admission rate: The ratio of applications accepted to applications made, a measure of selectivity. The factors impacting the denominator may not be academic-quality issues (e.g., home-state “safety school”).
3. retention rate: A measure primarily of student satisfaction, along with other factors (e.g., low SES may cause more dropouts).
4. student-faculty ratios: but how many of the “faculty” are actually engaged with students (even if they are engaged in instruction)? This stat is easily gamed.
5. four- and six-year graduation rates: The relationship of graduation to education is taken for granted here. Since more than half of today’s college students attend more than one college in their career, and there is no student unit record system to track their path, it’s hard to know how much contribution any given institution has to student success in graduating.

Given Kiplinger’s financial bent, I would expect them to rank the “value” of attending an institution based on the estimated increase in lifetime earnings divided by the cost of attending, perhaps weighted by time of attendance.  Preparation of such and estimate might lack predictive credibility unless the students were at least several years post-college, but that approach would make the data somewhat… dated.

Also note that the University of Washington ranks 10th in “value” if paying in-state tuition and 20th if paying out-of-state tuition; Evergreen State College is 53rd and 57th, respectively; Western Washington University is 56th and 53rd; and Washington State University is 98th and 88th, out of a field of 120. Some clues to the academic quality element of the institutions’ relative positions may be found in this data listed by Kiplinger (click on the university name):

Edsgar Dijkstra, one of the founder of the discipline of Computer Science, said that “It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs. “   Remembering the role of universities in dissent (for example, during the McCarthy era and during the Vietnam war), that observation has added resonance.  Current calls for tighter federal control of higher education all run the risk of defeating this important social purpose by undercutting what is left of the independence of the academy.  Whether the controls are viewed as adversarial (“prove that parents are getting their money’s worth”) or supportive (“tuition-free full-federal-funding higher ed”), the risk is the same.

Camily Wedende and students from the Eldoret Student Solar Cooker Science pilot project display two cookers that were part of their testing. The cooker on the right is one that the students helped to design, and it out-performed two others in comparative experiments.

My particular connection to this project comes through my wife, Sharon Cousins, as you will see on the web page above. I find it remarkable that these students in Kenya are engaged in a such a multi-faceted educational experience.

I believe we can gain a clearer vision of where the higher education process should be headed by looking at activities like this.

At first, the thought of a 192-page report on the impact of another report seemed like a bad joke.  But as I read the Executive Summary, I found some interesting perspective on being a change agent in higher education.

I saw two issues highlighted which are particularly important for a university Office of Assessment.   The study says, ” The recommendation that generated the most controversy concerns assessment: “creating a robust culture of measurement, accountability, and transparency.”” (p. 9).  The study attributes much of the controversy to the notion that accountability and transparency are opposed to autonomy.

The second issue I noticed was the controversy about urgency vs. complacency: ” Furthermore, there was a general resistance to what many higher education leaders believed was an overly harsh critique of the current state of higher education. They expressed opinions in public media and association Web sites that the gap between the present and desired state of higher education is not as wide as the Commission implied in its Report.” (p.8)

People working in higher education assessment encounter both of these issues frequently in reactions to calls for change.  Whether it is the insistence that only faculty should evaluate student performance, or a claim that adequate scores on student evaluations mean that teaching is satisfactory, the meaning is the same: “Don’t stretch me.”

The reaction to the Spelling report indicates to me that blunt approaches will generate predictable (and successful) resistance.  Without visible and unequivocal support from the highest levels, assessment initiatives will need to be circumspect to avoid self-destruction.