A recent trend seems to be the evaluation of higher education institutions. I'm not sure about other states, but in Louisiana the state funding each university receives is partly based on "performance metrics". Personally, I think all of these things are just silly. At one point or another, I have heard administrators and politicians saying the following are important:
- High Standards: The University will have meaningful and challenging classes.
- Open Admissions: The great thing about the USA is that everyone gets a chance. Everyone should have a chance to get a college education.
- High Production: Ok, I hate that term but it's about what they say. What they really mean is high graduation rate or a large number of students that graduate.
Yes, there are other things that you could want from a university - like low cost, but let me stick with these three things.
Before I complain, let me share a common graphic that computational scientists often use when talking about calculations.
So this says that if you want to calculate something, you could make it fast and accurate, but it won't be cheap. If you want fast and cheap, it won't be accurate. Got it?
My colleague David Norwood suggested a similar thing for education. He says that of the three goals in education, you can pick any two.
Just to show you how this works, let me go over the possible combinations.
High Standards and Everyone Passes. Surely this must be impossible right? If the curriculum is difficult, how can everyone pass? All you have to do is to look back at the education triangle. What thing is left out? Yes, "everyone gets a chance" is not included. The only way you can make this system work is that you have a highly selective university. If you only let in the students that are going to succeed, they will probably all graduate.
High Pass Rate and Everyone Gets a Chance. In this case, a university gives everyone the chance to get a degree. According to state funding rules, the more students that graduate the better. These two things can only work if you make the curriculum easier and remove the high standards. Ok, that's not exactly true. You could have super awesome curriculum such that even under prepared students perform well. That is possible, but I suspect this would involve significant changes to the structure of a university (with crazy things like classes without lectures or without contact hours or project based courses). But this case is where most universities sit (not fully by choice). They try to find a balance between admitting more students and keeping a high graduation rate.
High Standards and Everyone Gets a Chance. You can see where this is going. If a university has a low barrier to entry and still has high standards, they might not have a very high graduation rate. For me, this is the best case. Give students a chance, but also give them what they deserve - quality education. Of course by doing this you have to sacrifice the high graduation rates. I'm ok with that. For the other situation with high standards, there are surely some students that would have been very successful but were prevented from getting a chance to graduate. I say give everyone a chance.
Is this all there is to education? Absolutely not. This is what happens when you have things like "performance based funding". It's just a disaster waiting to happen. What should we do instead? I say that the states should properly fund all of the public universities at the appropriate level.
