Uncle Sam is No Professor

Last week, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings unveiled the U.S. Department of Education’s latest attempt to swat down the hydra-headed problems facing higher education in the United States. While the report by the Commission on the Future Higher Education illuminates many real concerns, it unfortunately chooses to prescribe as a solution a dubious system of bureaucratic oversight for the nation’s higher education system which would ill-serve the interests of our nation’s students.

Plagued by the worry that our collegiate system is not teaching students in a rigorous fashion, the report’s authors suggest a program of testing to ensure and enforce academic progress, or, in their words, “a robust culture of accountability and transparency throughout higher education.” If this sounds suspiciously like the failed No Child Left Behind Act, it’s because it takes its spirit from the same wrongheaded view of academic quality. Although words like “accountability” and “transparency” may on their face connote positive sentiments, they mask a serious misunderstanding about how to ensure that colleges are fulfilling their duty to society.

Unlike secondary schools, institutes of higher education are not designed to provide their students with the basic knowledge for everyday life. If the federal government feels that young Americans are being minted with bachelor’s degrees without basic literacy and quantitative skills, it should perhaps reconsider its massive funding cuts to school districts across the country before suggesting that colleges take up the slack. Colleges, instead, are charged with cultivating broad understandings of the world and producing citizens who are productive and curious members of our society. Little of this, however, can be tracked by an expensive and cumbersome apparatus of surveys and statisticians.

The Department of Education is not an organ of the Department of Commerce, and rightfully so—the methods for qualifying and assessing exemplary educational performance are not the same as those that track our gross domestic product. Unfortunately, the report proposes an extensive “consumer-friendly information database” that will allow people to “weigh and rank comparative institutional performance.” Not only is this proposal cynical about the purpose of education—reducing, as it does, students to “consumers” and academics to “institutional performance”—but it additionally places colleges in the uncomfortable position of having to justify themselves against some fictional standard of output.

This isn’t raising the bar. It’s a diversion of attention from more serious structural failures in our education system. The final purpose of higher education is to provide an environment in which young adults explore and build according to their own plans. Though this process may be error-laden and oftentimes without a clear marketable value at its endpoint, it is a process which is crucial to personal development. The responsibility for ensuring that colleges perform as they should lies on the individual student. No administration from above can function well as a surrogate for this.

Instead of reacting to the perception that higher education has let us down by forcing colleges into justifying their value through statistics, the Department of Education ought to address root problems of higher education—many of which stem all the way back to early childhood learning—in order to ensure the United States’s continued academic success. In fact, other parts of the department’s report chart out commendable efforts in the pursuit of educational accessibility and availability. It’s unfortunate that these come nestled in amongst the commission’s bureaucratic miasma that reads more like a corporate annual report than a genuine educational strategy.