College Uses Test Results to Show Value – WSJ.com

• College Uses Test Results to Show Value – WSJ.com

  The data driven college with 100% transparency will deliver a superior product and service to students and parents.

  tags: education technology higher education learning college university graduates

  • the small, picturesque liberal-arts school decided on a bold step. It started publicizing test results showing what its students had learned in their four years—a surprisingly rare strategy in a higher-education industry that usually prefers to keep such things private.

  • Parents of prospective students "come here and they want to know, ‘What are we getting for our money?

  • But the nation’s colleges and universities have long bristled at efforts to use similar metrics to scrutinize how well they teach students.

  • Any national system would likely include metrics like graduation rates and student-loan default rates

  • That lack of information is "this huge paradox sitting at the center of higher education," said Richard Freeland, Massachusetts Commissioner of Higher Education. At most schools, "we don’t really know what learning is going on."

  • as prospective students and their cash-strapped families eye schools with greater skepticism since the recession,

  • Mr. Freeland, the former president of Northeastern University, hopes that transparency will create a level playing field for competition between schools—and help schools make a fact-based case for state support.

  • In 2006, then-Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings issued a report that called for the federal government to demand more accountability and transparency fromhigher education.

  • "We’re in the business of teaching and learning, but how well we are really helping to prepare students isn’t something that we have been very open about," Ms. Jankowski said.

  • The more selective schools are the least likely to share their assessments, the survey found.

  • "Elite institutions have everything to lose and very little to gain,"

  • When                                    John Chipman,                               the father of a high-school senior recently accepted to Kalamazoo, learned of the school’s performance this week, he was impressed, but he wished he had data from other schools. "We’ve visited eight or 10 schools so far," he said. "Would it be nice to have some data to look at to be able to compare how well these schools are really teaching? It would be a huge help."

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