Higher Standards?

This month, high-school seniors across the country are deciding where to spend their next four years, and anyone who fought through the droves of tour groups crowding the yard last Friday knows they’re doing their research. Every college, after all, is different—in fact, too much so, according to educators in some states.

On Wednesday, universities and colleges across Indiana, Minnesota, and Utah announced a pilot project that would set common learning standards across institutions in those states. The project, supported by the Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation for Education, will specify a consensus-based set of skills, rather than a subjective number of credits earned or courses taken, that qualify a candidate to receive a degree in a particular field. In effect, one program advocate told The New York Times, “If you’re majoring in chemistry, here is what I expect you to learn in terms of laboratory skills, theoretical knowledge, applications, the intersection of chemistry with other sciences, and broader questions of environment and forensics.” The goal, it appears, is to give students, universities, and employers a greater degree of comparability and quality assurance across institutions that current, less consistent degree standards cannot provide.

Some standardization may be desirable, and even necessary, in what is often so subjective an enterprise as education, but the project’s pioneers should tread carefully. While any standardized test—whether MCATs, SATs, or APs—risks encouraging educators to “teach to the test,” explicitly requiring that degree programs include certain material effectively forces them to do so. When done too zealously, curriculum standardization not only stifles ingenuity, but also severely limits academic freedom.

Even without the newly proposed standardization, colleges are already subject to objective standards and at least some degree of quality control. Universities are evaluated every ten years by accrediting institutions, such as the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (for Harvard and other area institutions), are recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. Beyond that, universities develop their own reputations with employers based on qualities that are perhaps the most practicable of gauges: the real-world competence of graduates. That said, the onus should be on employers to understand what each candidate will bring to a position based on their degree and school and, where they are unfamiliar with these, to do their research. While more degree standardization may make hiring a bit easier, its implications for education as a whole outweigh whatever convenience it may provide.

Especially at the university level, where each institution has its own distinct character, regulating instruction across institutional lines only discourages intellectual diversity. Moreover, each professor who develops a course can add a different ingredient to that particular field—an aspect of higher education that makes it especially unique and one for which a large degree of autonomy is essential. This is not to say that the Lumina Foundation’s new project threatens to end diversity in itself—its framers explain that educators at each individual school will retain their prerogative to design courses and curricula so long as they comply with the agreed-upon framework. Nonetheless, Lumina should question whether its program is heading in the right direction. Significant curricular differences may make decisions harder for the Class of 2013, but they would be foolish to have it any other way.