Is the value of a college education measurable? Part 1

Yet we want measures for everything we do. We are addicted to “best” and “worst” lists, and that applies to the schools where we send our children as well as to celebrities and household gadgets. When it comes to colleges and universities, what measures do we rely on?

The sad answer is that we rely on inadequate measures. Even university presidents whose schools benefit from high rankings by U.S. News & World Report recognize the limitations of measures based on a small number of factors. As Dan Mote (at the time president of the University of Maryland) pointed out to me three years ago during an interview, those rankings should only be one factor in a student’s decision of where to go to school. College is much more than its ranking on a list.

Taking this to the next level, the academic community has searched for a way to measure the value of a college education as a way to compare schools and as a tool for future employers. The Collegiate Learning Assessment is the tool with the most promise, and has been endorsed by the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, as well as the Association of American Colleges and Universities. These organizations value the test’s real-world performance tasks and emphasis on the analysis of complex material.

The CLA is an example of value-added assessment — a term we have become familiar with as a measure of teacher performance in public schools. “Value-added” simply means that teachers or students are measured based on where they started and not just on test scores in a vacuum; this allows teachers or schools in underachieving areas to improve relative to where they began.

Although the CLA test has been available to institutions of higher learning since 2004, there is still much debate about how to administer it and how to use the results. It’s still in the testing stages. Its virtues include the CLA’s very specific goals: It does not pretend to measure intelligence or knowledge of a student’s major subject, since they are covered by other standardized measures (the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the Education Testing Service’s Major Field Tests, respectively.)

The CLA measures reasoning, critical thinking, problem solving, decision making and communication skills — precisely those skills needed in most workplaces. For employers, those results could be invaluable.

Next week I will look at a typical task presented on the CLA so you can make your own judgment on its value. But there are still major questions universities and employers wrestle with as they consider standardized tests as a measure of a graduate’s employability or the value of a student’s education. Should we accept a score as a fair indication of the value of a college education, or is a college education’s value too intangible to measure?

Erica Jacobs, whose column appears Wednesday, teaches at George Mason University. E-mail her at [email protected]