Should Government Take A Yardstick to Colleges?

Looks like someone thinks so:

Ever since Education Secretary Margaret Spellings unveiled plans seven weeks ago to overhaul the nation's higher education system, she and her staff have been trying to relieve anxieties.

All she wants, Spellings says, is better information made available to families, taxpayers and policymakers so they can make better decisions about how they spend their money. And given how little is really known about how well students are served by higher education, she says, she doesn't see why anyone would find that unreasonable.

“If you want to buy a new car, you go online and compare a full range of models, makes and pricing options,” she says. “The same transparency and ease should be the case when students and families shop for colleges, especially when one year of college can cost more than a car.”

Some don't like the car analogy. Choosing a college is a more like choosing a spouse — it can't be quantified, says Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity University in Washington, D.C.

Nearly two-thirds of all high-growth, high-wage jobs created in the next decade will require a college degree, Spellings says, yet only one-third of Americans have one. “If we believe we must educate more Americans, particularly those of color and reduced economic means, how are we going to be able to do that without any information about how well we're serving that customer?”

A 2006 report by the Washington-based American Institutes for Research shows that more than half of graduating students at four-year colleges and at least 75% at two-year colleges lack the literacy skills needed to handle tasks such as understanding credit card offers or summarizing arguments of newspaper editorials.

My take: I do think advanced education could benefit from greater transparency. It would give greater accountability to institutions of higher learning that would incentivize them towards efficiency and innovation. I am a bit uncomfortable with government adopting this role, however, because I'm concerned what would be measured would be far too subject to political manipulation.

What I do think would be good is to require certain information (such as median time to graduation, percent employed within 3 months of graduation, median debt loads, annual tuition, average SAT scores of incoming freshman, etc.) to be made public, especially for publicly funded institutions. I can't see any harm in this and see much good that could come from this information.

Instapundit shares his thoughts:

Universities don't like this, but it's hard to (1) tell everyone how important higher education is to America; (2) take lots of government money while providing it; (3) support regulation of every other industry; and (4) argue for laissez faire in your own.

One counter-argument might be that establishing a requirement for this type of information may incentivize greater government regulation of higher-education. My hunch is that it seems like this argument is overwhelmed by the need to have accountability for publicly used funds.

I like the idea of legal requirements for publicly funded institutions to share certain information with the public and a private organization forming to synthesize this and contrast it against private institutions.