Everyone agrees that education is more important than ever. But how do we know if an educational institution is doing a good job? How do we know if a college or university is serving its students?
“In many instances, the way we measure these institutions hasn’t kept up with the times,” Binh Thuy Do, Calbright’s Vice President of Research and Development, writes in University Business. “Accountability metrics typically are not looking at program strength but narrowed on student access, simply getting through programs, or whether students transfer to a four-year institution.”
Yet that doesn’t measure what brings millions of students to college, especially adults in their 30s and 40s, or what they are enrolling in college for.
They are “returning to college not to transfer to another school but to position themselves quickly to find better jobs, further their careers, and find economic stability that college can provide,” she writes.
In all, she says, roughly a third of students have educational goals that have nothing to do with the traditional ways colleges measure effectiveness, which typically are narrowly looking at transfer rates or earning credits for degrees.
“Sometimes,” she writes, “they’re pursuing goals much harder to measure, such as the opportunity to serve in student government, gain work-based learning experiences, get support for writing their resumes and building career networks, and proving to themselves and their families that they can start and finish an education and job skills training program.” And of course, many are taking classes specifically to improve their career success and find a better job.
Holding universities accountable for results like these is much harder, but no less vital. “The good news,” Do says, “is that these questions are becoming easier to answer.”
Read her article on how colleges can use data to better measure program effectiveness in University Business: New generation of learners requires a new way to measure outcomes.
