Are the most expensive colleges really the “best” colleges?

I have written before about the problem of relying on reputation to judge a college or university’s quality, and I recommended that we need to measure outputs, especially learning outcomes. But I had not really thought about how that reliance on reputation as an indication of quality has impacted the rising cost of college. In this Inside Higher Ed article, Robert Martin and Andrew Gillen say that “when people don’t know the true quality of something, they tend to rely on the reputation of the supplier.” People don’t have information to judge higher education quality, and rather than supply that information, colleges spend considerable sums to compete on reputation. They say that colleges spend every dollar they have and that as prices increase, so does spending. There is a spiral in which every time revenues increase, spending increases to consume all revenues. Worse yet, people perceive that high cost equates with good quality and so reputation increases as a college charges higher prices and, in turn, the higher prices drive up costs since every dollar gets spent.

Martin and Gillen call for breaking the spiral by reducing uncertainty about quality. That could be done by reporting outputs such as learning and research outcomes. This shift would move colleges to a “more beneficial type of competition based on who provides the greatest value (who can produce the most value-added education per dollar).” They imply that research outputs are measured and available while teaching outputs and productivity are neither measured nor available. They say that there is a need for “serious studies to measure teaching productivity; once this is accomplished, professors can be rewarded for the quality of their teaching instead of just the quality of their research.” And they conclude by calling for “improved transparency.”

I think they are on the right track and it is transparency about learning outcomes that has been at the core of an effort that I have written about before: Transparency by Design. While the primary purpose of this initiative is to provide consumer information for adult students, this initiative provides visibility into learning outcomes. For this initiative, quality is defined as consisting of the experience a student has and the learning she is able to demonstrate. The experience is measured through feedback from current students on external instruments asking about their satisfaction and sense of engagement, and from alumni asking about how satisfied they remain after graduation. Learning outcomes are measured and reported at both core (writing, critical thinking, etc.) and program levels.

While I had not thought about the cost implications of failing to share outputs, those of us who are working on Transparency by Design and College Choices for Adults are very aware that quality needs to be defined by outcomes. And we are presenting our outcomes so that the world may see the quality we deliver. We want to build reputation based on that demonstrated quality. And if that helps to stop the cost spiral, all the better.

Please feel free to leave a comment.

Mike