(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.