Editor's Note: The author, Fordham President Chester E. Finn, Jr., is currently on sabbatical in California writing a memoir.
Gadfly is usually so brilliantly insightful that most weeks I find myself nodding in agreement with him. He's wrong, however, about testing college kids. (See "Accountability U," April 6, 2006.) And Houston businessman Charles Miller, who chairs Secretary Spellings's Commission on the Future of Higher Education (and formerly chaired the University of Texas regents), is dead right when he observes that "the pressures for accountability are everywhere. Evidence of the need to improve student learning is pretty clear."
Spellings is correct, too, when she says that "We're missing valuable information on how the system works today and what can be improved."
And commission member Robert Zemsky, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, is accurate when he explains that "Underlying all this is a growing suspicion that American higher education may not be as good as it ought to be, or as it thinks it is."
Darn right. It isn't. And whatever American higher education once lacked in quality, it made up in quantity. Today, however, that's not true. Half a dozen countries now send larger fractions of their populations to university than we do-and have substantially higher graduation rates. Moreover, in lots of places they study tough things like engineering while U.S. students play around with gender studies.
Meanwhile, the price of American higher education (to tuition payer and taxpayer alike) continues rising through the roof-and by myriad measures our institutions grow less efficient. Professors teach less. Students study less. Grades inflate.
Someone needs to blow the whistle and demand results-based accountability in higher education, as has happened-after a long struggle-in K-12 education. Someone needs to press for enhanced productivity. Above all, someone needs to insist on comparable data relating to institutional effectiveness and student learning. Let's hope the national commission does those things-and is then heeded.
I haven't space here to go into all the details or respond to all the laments about institutional "diversity." Suffice to say, a rather simple test of basic skills and knowledge at the beginning, middle and end of undergraduate education would suit me. One could start with the better state high-school graduation tests. (It'll be interesting to see if they do any better after going to college!) Let students and institutions opt out for good cause. Deal with the diversity challenges. But deal with them as exceptions or exemptions, not as arguments against the core idea. On this, Gadfly should hang his head in shame.
Meanwhile, commission chairman Miller and a colleague have written magnificently about these matters. I refer you here.
