July-August 2008

by Margaret A. Miller

Higher education must be among the most important intellectual and creative resources assembled to address an array of critical challenges confronting society. 
—Partnerships for Public Purposes: Engaging Higher Education in Societal Challenges of the 21st Century, National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education

This issue of Change features several articles about attending to what is arguably the chief product of all our efforts in higher education, student learning: the interview of George Mehaffy and David Shulenberger on the Voluntary System of Accountability, which includes learning measures; Judith Eaton’s description of best practices in tracking student achievement; and Richard Ekman on the use of the Collegiate Learning Assessment by a number of independent colleges. All of this is extremely important work, because it gives us the information we need to improve the effectiveness of what we do.

And all of it takes as the unit of analysis the individual college or university. But I would argue that we need to know not only how effective individual institutions are at advancing students’ skills and knowledge but what their collective effort adds up to for the larger society whose welfare depends increasingly on the intellectual capacities of its citizens. And we can’t do that by college by college, any more than the Centers for Disease Control could get a handle on public health, and the threats to it, by examining the successes and failures of one hospital at a time.

In a project I directed from 2002-2004 called the National Forum on College-Level Learning, which assessed learning at the state level in five states, we asked what we called the “educational capital” question: What do the state’s college-educated citizens collectively know and what can they do that furthers the social good? After all, the assumption that we contribute to the polity, as well as to the individual development of our students, is why the federal and state governments provide us with support and constitute the grounds on which we claim non-profit status.

And there are ominous signs that those grounds are becoming increasingly shaky. Congress is thinking of requiring wealthy colleges and universities to spend at least 5 percent of their endowments, and the Massachusetts legislature is considering taxing endowments over $1 billion. As reported by the Christian Science Monitor (May 19, 2008), Massachusetts Representative Kujawski says that his constituents “feel that these schools, with the amount of wealth they have, could enhance the areas [in which they reside].” So we would be well advised to demonstrate that society is better off for having college graduates in its midst because of the skills and knowledge they bring to bear on its problems.

But nationally, the little news we have about the abilities of the college educated isn’t encouraging. The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) showed only 31 percent of college graduates performing proficiently at prose tasks such as comparing the viewpoint in two editorials; only a quarter were able to decipher charts and graphs with any sophistication, and a mere 36 percent could competently compute and compare, for instance, the cost per ounce of food items. (These results are particularly depressing in that they represent significant declines from the 1992 national literacy assessment.)

And the findings of a 2006 survey of employers are consistent both with those results and with what employers have been telling us for a couple of decades: 63 percent of the respondents believed that “too many recent college graduates do not have the skills to be successful in today’s economy” (from the AAC&U’s LEAP Employer Survey). Employers’ concern is easy to understand. This issue is becoming more and more urgent in the global context, given the increases in college attainment rates in other countries and the lackluster performance of college-educated Americans on the 2001 International Assessment of Adult Literacy (we came in eleventh).

At the state level, despite all the assessment of student learning that has occurred over the past two-plus decades, there has been remarkably little attention paid to the educational capital question. This is due in part to the commitment most states have to campus-based assessment (if they haven’t turned all attention to assessment over to the accreditors). Absent at least some common instruments, collective information is impossible to generate—just as mortality statistics calculated differently from hospital to hospital would generate a lot of noise but little information about the general state of public health.

But in part I think the neglect of the educational capital question is due to political leaders’ thinking of higher education in much the same way as many college and university administrators do: as a set of fiefdoms that compete for territory and prestige, with little collective purpose. As the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education’s recent report, cited above, puts it, “State and federal governments have been ... inclined to take as an article of faith that higher education institutions will serve the public well-being though the pursuit of their own self-interests.” Utilitarian beliefs notwithstanding, neither in economic behavior nor in higher education does individuals’ pursuit of personal advantage necessarily add up to collective advantage.

But when some comparable information on learning is available and policymakers have the larger picture in view, some intriguing questions can be asked and answered. The final report on the Forum project (available at http://www.highereducation.org/reports/mu_learning/index.shtml), for instance, reveals performance gaps among different groups of students that show the nature of the challenge we face in educating all students to a high enough level—a challenge that will only intensify as student demographics shift in the coming decades. The report also reveals the disparities in each state’s preparation of teachers that are hidden when only pass rates are reported, since states use different teacher licensure exams—and even when they use a national test, their passing scores on the exams differ. When a 100 percent pass rate on a state’s licensing exam obscures what is actually a mediocre performance by its prospective teachers compared to those in other states, a problem suddenly springs to light that affects public health and welfare as much as an epidemic might do.

Other questions that a state’s policymakers might well have about the capacities of its college-educated citizens include how well they’re prepared as knowledge workers for the new economy, both absolutely and in comparison with other states with which it competes to attract high-tech businesses. They also might want to know what kinds of civic understanding and capacity for civic agency (see Harry Boyte’s article on this topic in the May/June 2008 issue of Change) those citizens are equipped with. Morevoer, do the state’s residents have the intellectual sophistication required to navigate their personal lives in an era when their future security depends increasingly on smart investment, health, and other choices they make today? Are all rather than a only a subset of residents prepared for the future, so that the gap that increasingly separates the upper and lower tiers of this society doesn’t continue to widen? And finally, can states imitate the practices of those that are doing the job better?

In short, the public good will be increasingly served as higher education as a whole produces more college graduates educated to a higher standard, just as it benefits from improvements in public health. And public trust and support will be generated when we can show that we do so.