(West Tisbury, MA) We at CIRCLE are in the business of measuring educational outcomes, including those in colleges and universities. I have fairly complex and nuanced opinions about the role of measurement, whether it’s qualitative or quantitative. Measurement is helpful when it supports making wise value-judgments, and harmful when it obscures the value-judgments that one must make.

Of all the professional groups we encounter–including philanthropists and grantmakers, government officials, k-12 educators, and corporate executives–I’d say that professors are the most resistant to measuring the impact of their work. K-12 teachers have reasonable objections to crude measures of “value added,” but they are resigned to (or even supportive of) the idea that someone should assess what their students have learned. Not so with professors, many of whom reject the whole conversation. Their response may be a little surprising, considering that most of the available tools and methods for measurement originate in academia. I suspect several factors are in play:

• Some professors are sophisticated about measurement and evaluation, and they reasonably fear that efforts to evaluate their work will be crude.
• Other professors are very far removed from social science research, and they see evaluation as an incursion into their fields by unqualified outsiders.
• Especially in the liberal arts, many professors recognize intrinsic value in their disciplines and courses and believe that most of the public cannot understand that. So if someone asks whether a college education is really worth $200,000, their implicit, private response is: “An hour discussing Plato is priceless, and if you ask its value, you’re a Philistine.”
• Professors do not want to be the Person in the Gray Flannel Suit. They do not want to be employees or cogs in a bureaucracy. They are intellectuals, and the intellectual vanguard is defined by its autonomy and intrinsic motivations.

In my opinion, higher education (which is funded by the rest of society) has a legitimacy crisis and does owe outsiders accounts of what it accomplishes for them. The problem of crude and inappropriate measurement is serious, but it is unacceptable to avoid evaluation completely.

(Macon, GA) Next year, I will teach the introductory course (“Education for Active Citizenship”) for the Tisch Scholars for Citizenship and Public Service program at Tufts. Most of the Scholars’ work involves conducting community projects of their choice, beginning in our “host communities” of Medford, Somerville, and Boston’s Chinatown. The purpose of the introductory course is to convey the concepts, skills, and information that students will need to be effective Tisch Scholars for the next several years.

Designing the course is challenging because so much could be included: various (often conflicting) conceptions of good citizenship; social theories and philosophies that might prove relevant to the Scholars’ projects; information about our local communities, their current issues, and organizations; the skills and values that students need if they are to work well in community settings; and questions of personal identity and ethics (such as how to think about one’s own privilege as a student at a selective and expensive private university). Each of these topics could fill a whole course. The good news: students have several more years of undergraduate study ahead of them, so a major goal is to help them choose wisely the subjects that they will study next to become good citizens.

I am thinking about asking my class to begin building a public website about our host communities. This product would be a genuine public resource, not just an educational exercise for the students’ benefit. They would not produce all its content in a semester, but would rather begin a cumulative project of producing and revising text, data, maps, and images–to be continued by successive classes.

Each week, the class would operate a little like a traditional newsroom, developing and assigning story ideas. Since we need an overall focus for the readings on the syllabus and for students’ mini-research projects, I am thinking of asking them to investigate population changes. in our host communities.

The demographics of Somerville, Medford, and Chinatown have changed and continue to change rapidly because of a combination of gentrification, de-industrialization, immigration, and social policies (such as the construction of highways and subway lines). Some of the most wrenching issues in the history of greater Boston have been related to demographic change, and today’s shifts in population are relevant to policy issues–from education to carbon consumption. The mass movements of people also raise complex theoretical and moral questions. So I think population movements in our host communities would be a good theme for the first year of work, after which annual themes might include: power dynamics, economic conditions, assets for learning in the host communities, or cultural and linguistic diversity.

Communicating is what we do in academia: we talk, we write. But is anyone listening? Many students are not prepared or motivated to absorb and critically evaluate what their professors say. The broad public is uninterested in, or skeptical about, much of what professors write. For example, large numbers of people don’t believe in human-caused global warming, the lasting effects of social class on life prospects, or the persistence of anti-Black racism, despite scholarly consensus on all these points.

Perhaps it was always so. The gap between public and scholarly knowledge is not new and may be an inevitable function of differences in attention and experience. (Nor does the gap imply that scholars are right and the public is wrong; I am open to the opposite diagnosis.)

But things have changed in one respect: academia used to be able to rely on a division of labor. We communicated in our own way, and other institutions mediated. High schools prepared our prospective students: that was their business. Journalists selected our most interesting findings and explained them to the two thirds of Americans who received a daily newspaper. The function of a newspaper was to attract people by giving them what they wanted–including sports, comics, etc.–but also to tell them what they should know on the front page.

Professors complained (incessantly) about actual high schools and actual newspapers. Their whining was unattractive but it reflected a social contract. Communication was a shared responsibility. Academics felt they did their own job well and had the right to criticize others.

Today, communications is our business if it is anyone’s. Newsrooms are closing; journalists are being laid off. The communications marketplace has fragmented so that there is nothing like the front page of the newspaper any more. High schools have other problems to deal with.

Meanwhile, we in academia have resources: nearly 5,000 institutions distributed across the country, commanding about 3 percent of GDP, employing and enrolling millions. We can address the communications problem if anyone can.

Here is a modest proposal. A liberal arts college–or even a whole university–would launch its own general-interest online magazine. This publication, professionally edited by a journalist, would present interesting and important work by faculty and students on a regular basis, perhaps weekly. It would be highly selective; authors would usually be required to revise before publication. The institution would reward them if they contributed frequently and well to the magazine.

I think the magazine would have to allow public comments, but if it received a high volume, many of the comments would be repetitive, hostile, and uninteresting. (The comment threads of most newspapers make depressing reading.) Thus I think a better way to promote constructive criticism would be to hire particular people to provide official responses. Leaders of local community groups could respond. So could proponents of ideological views not well represented on campus, such as social conservatives (if those happen to be rare).

This proposal would certainly not solve the problems with which I began this post, but it would have the following objectives:

1. To provide the magazine as a public service.

2. To encourage faculty to explain their work publicly, and to teach them how to do that.

3. To help the institution to identify scholars who are able to communicate with the public, thereby modifying somewhat its hiring and promotion criteria.

4. To provide an impressive venue for the best student work.

5. To offer a model of how one should respond critically to scholarship.

A search for “college” and “bubble” will yield many articles about rising tuition rates (up by 440 percent since 1985), frantic efforts to attend the most selective colleges, mountains of student debt, and the possibility that this whole system will soon collapse like the market for tulips in baroque Amsterdam. See, for instance, this relatively sober piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I won’t quite join in the denunciations of tuition inflation. Some students receive truly inspiring and enriching college educations whose value is hard to estimate but probably exceeds the price.

Also, at institutions like mine, middle class students qualify for financial aid. It’s smart to charge a sticker price of $50,000 if substantial numbers of families can pay that much, and then offer discounts for the many families who cannot. Setting a lower sticker price would be like leaving money on the table (money that can be used for educational and scholarly purposes). The only drawback–and it’s a serious one–is the misimpression that everyone really pays $50,000. That could (and probably does) dissuade some poor and middle-class students from applying.

In any case, I’m convinced that tuition is rising faster than inflation because of the Baumol Effect, not just a bubble. Sectors like manufacturing, transportation, and retail achieve constant productivity gains because of technology. But colleges basically sell hours of attention by professors. To be more specific, they offer this implicit formula:

Hours with a professor times reputation or qualifications of the professor divided by the number of other students in the room.

If that’s the product, there is no way to cut its cost, which constantly rises relative to other goods. The cost of maintaining a faculty with a distinguished reputation rises even faster whenever the world of science and scholarship expands and research becomes more complex and expensive.

Colleges basically try to get away with alternative products: huge lecture classes, teaching by adjuncts. But savvy students who have strong positions in the admissions market choose institutions that offer as close as possible to the real deal.

Even given these partial justifications, I would be quick to admit that the sector has a problem. Many students do not have deeply enriching experiences in college, if only because they are not prepared or motivated for the best aspects of higher education (seminars on Plato, real scientific work, service-learning). Even for students who do get a good education, the sticker price is awfully high, and neither the Baumol Effect nor financial aid discounts excuses it fully.

Part of the problem is that college is a positional good: you look better in the job market if you graduate from an institution that has a higher rank than others. Colleges that are selective tend to rise on most people’s lists (whether implicit lists or literal rankings like that of US News & World Report.) If the nation’s best students all decided to flood NoName State, its mean SAT scores would rise, its acceptance rate would plummet, and the value of its diploma would soar. But that’s not how the market actually works. Distinguished faculties, ancient campuses, and beautiful facilities are what draw competitive students. These are signals that other strong applicants will apply. Markers of prestige cost money, and once you have them, you can get away with charging high tuition because of the competitive advantage that your diploma will offer.

Because people believe that expensive diplomas offer competitive advantages, the system sustains itself. I think the bubble would burst if:

1. Prospective students decided en masse that prestigious degrees did not offer tangible benefits. There is some evidence that the benefits have been exaggerated, and if that news gets out, it could burst the bubble. On the other hand, families obtain non-economic advantages from prestige, like the opportunity to brag that their kids go to Stanford.
2. All the really smart kids decided that they didn’t care about prestige but only about learning. They would all have to decide this at once, because we learn from smart peers in college. As long as the most competitive applicants chose to attend the most prestigious and expensive schools, that is where the smartest peers –and best discussions, and hardest classes–are.
3. Lots of competitive applicants decided all at once to go to low-cost schools, in which case the prestige of those institutions would rise but the price of prestige would fall, at least temporarily. It’s hard to see this happening, because applicants can’t coordinate their decisions. Hence the most competitive ones apply to expensive and famous institutions.

Because each of these scenarios seems unlikely, I doubt the bubble will burst. But the costs of college are too high. That creates barriers to attendance and encourages harmful economies, such as exploiting adjuncts. The only way I can think of to cut the actual cost of higher education is to find valid alternatives to the formula stated in italics above. An example would be an elaborate computer-based simulation that was as valuable as time with a professor. That would address the Baumol Effect by bringing productivity gains to higher education.