The whole enterprise of the “report cards” on higher education is monumentally silly. As Jeff Taylor notes, most states get Fs on affordability. The best “grade” is a B for the heavily subsidized California system. What do they want — college to be free?
Moreover, there is one category where every state gets an Incomplete: Learning. That’s because, the study admits (as it has done so for each year it’s been produced) that there is no real way of evaluating how much or how little college students learn. Until we know if students are learning anything, why bother with the “report card?”
I can’t resist quoting from Michigan State University Professor David Labaree’s book How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning:
The practical effect of this subsidy is a glut of graduates. The difficulty posed by this outcome is not that the population becomes over-educated…but that it becomes overcredentialed, as people pursue diplomas less for the knowledge they are thereby acquiring (I’ll add here “if any” — GL) than for the access that the diplomas themselves will provide. The result is a spiral of credential inflation, for as each level of education in turn gradually floods with a crowd of ambitious consumers, individuals have to keep seeking ever higher levels of credentials in order to move a step ahead of the pack In such a system nobody wins.
