Why not evaluate colleges on the achievement level of their graduates?

When we evaluate car manufacturers we look at the quality of their cars. When we evaluate doctors we look at the success rate of their treatments. When we evaluate restaurants we look at the quality of their meals, service and decor.

Why then do we not evaluate colleges by how well they teach their students? It's a question I expect will be asked more and more often as the news starts to spread about how poor a job party schools are doing at educating the leaders of tomorrow.

One sign of this is the dispute that has broken out recently in the legal field about the quality of law school graduates. You can read a report about it here in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Law firms, it seems, have become increasingly alarmed about the low level of knowledge recent law school grads show up with. It takes months and even years of expensive  retraining to bring them up to the level where they can try cases on their own. And this is in an industry that requires you to pass a bar exam before you can practice.

What's really interesting in this article, however, are the excuses law school administrators give for not testing their graduates before awarding diplomas. It would cost too much. It would take too much time. The economy is too poor. We don't have anyone to do it. Excuses. Excuses. Excuses.

I don't know much about law schools, but I would suspect the real reason for this avoidance is the one that prevents American party schools from failing to test their own graduates. The results would reveal the shockingly low level of achievement that outside tests have already pointed out. Graduates who can't understand a newspaper editorial or a simple graph, who can't calculate how many miles they can drive before they run out of gas or balance a check book, graduates who can't tell you what rights the first amendment protects and who are baffled by third grade grammar rules.

Party school administrators don't want to hear the bad news and they sure don't want parents to find out what they are getting for their money. The dumbed-down classes, inflated grades and nonexistent reading lists make slacker students happy and keep the tuition money coming in, but when you replace education with entertainment you are not going to produce educated graduates.

When you look at books comparing colleges there are loads of figures about the number of faculty, the number of books in the library and the size of classes. The number that should really matter, the median score that graduates receive on the national college graduate exam, is not there. Such a number would be a much better clue as to how effective the college is in what should be the prime goal: education.

Comments

[Frank]

In a roundabout way you can do this through student loan default rates and starting salaries:

http://wdcrobcolp01.ed.gov/CFAPPS/COHORT/search_cohort.cfm

http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/top-us-colleges-graduate-salary-statistics.asp

There are probably other variables such as LSAT/MCAT/GRE/GMAT scores. Suffice to say that the data is probably out there and easily obtained if lazy university admin types would bother.

I like the rankings from Washington Monthly:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings/national_university_rank.php

But you'll find plenty of party schools in the ranks of that list.