As this Philadelpha Inquirer article explains, pressure is building on colleges and universities to show that they actually provide useful education in return for all the money they take in from students and taxpayers. Charles Miller, the Chairman of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, has been saying and doing things that have the higher ed establishment very nervous.
For one thing, he advocates an exam, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which has two 90 minute exercises, both of which put the student’s thinking and writing abilities on display.
Naturally, that idea has higher ed officials defensive. The president of Penn State complains “Every university is different. There’s no national test that Penn State students could take that’s going to help us educate them better or make us more accountable.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, but thinking and writing ability transcend disciplines and schools. Why shouldn’t we find out which schools tend to produce students with high abilities and which ones produce students with low abilities? Ditto for departments within schools.
Good line from Prof. Robert Zemsky: “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.”
Exactly.
