Detestable

Given the executive branch’s reluctance to regulate various industries, it is surprising that it has chosen to force arbitrary and misguided standards on an industry less in which autonomy is particularly vital: higher education.

The Secretary of Education, Margaret Spelling, is continuing with her push, backed by the bipartisan Commission on the Future of Education, to require colleges to evaluate how much students learn in college and publish the results of these tests in the public domain.

The movement began last fall when the Commission called for better evaluation of the academic growth of students and the denial of federal funds to colleges that refused to measure what students learn and publicly release the results. Now, according to a recent report by the Boston Globe, the Department of Education is working with accrediting agencies to devise new accreditation rules that would push colleges to produce evidence proving that they are educating their students to a certain standard that could go into effect as early as 2008.

But the government’s demand for greater college accountability ignores the purpose of accreditation: to ensure that institutions of higher learning meet a minimal standard, not to impose normative standards on what or how much students should learn. Furthermore, the government should not be in the business of creating a de facto ranking system for institutions of higher education.

The Education Department’s proposal would only make sense if undergraduates across the country were evaluated by a standardized test—otherwise comparing schools by any sort of measure they did devise would be nearly impossible.

But imposing a requirement for schools to administer standardized tests to their students poses its own problems. Such a standardized test would inherently enforce norms as to what subjects students should learn and what skills they should have, norms that could be quite different from university to university, and with good reason. A liberal arts education cannot be measured in such a rigid fashion—it’s largely not about marks on tests or grades on transcripts—it’s about teaching students to think, to broaden their experiences, to expose them to different viewpoints, to prepare them to live more rewarding lives—all objectives nearly impossible to capture in standardized exams.

Furthermore, there would be no incentive for students to do well on such tests—the carrot and the stick, as the Education Department apparently envisions it, are directed towards the institution. If such a system were implemented, colleges would likely spend precious funds on preparing their students for the test instead of giving them an actual liberal arts education. But the preparation would be futile, since students’ welfare would not be tied to their scores.

We do agree, however, that colleges should make some attempt to ensure that their students are graduating with the knowledge and skills that concord with their own particular educational philosophy and standards. Such evaluations, taken seriously by leadership, can be prime motivators for better instruction. Interm President Derek C. Bok’s recent initiative to evaluate students’ writing skills before and after graduation is a good example.

Pedagogical and curricular diversity in the nation’s institutions of higher learning is inherently a good thing. The government should be celebrating those differences, not trying to force everyone into the same mold.