Serving a Different Master: Assessing College Educational Quality for the Public

Consider the following institutions: Columbia University, Vassar College, Rutgers University, and City University of New York (CUNY) Lehman College. What do you know about the quality of the educational experience in these four institutions? When considering this question, perhaps you might think about what you have heard about these institutions from friends or the media. Reputation/prestige is one of the most widely used criteria for judging the quality of colleges and universities. Then you might consider available data, easily accessed via the internet. For example, you might turn to corporate websites, like US News and World Report’s “Best Colleges,” ranking (henceforth, US News) or you could also look at the federal government’s “College Scorecard,” but neither of these includes data on teaching, learning, and educational practices. There are arguably no publicly available data to answer the question about the quality of the education in these four institutions—or the quality of a college degree, nationally. By contrast, if you asked an administrator or a faculty member from the institution, they might describe many sources of data on educational quality driven by accreditation and accountability. They might tell you about the considerable resources and time devoted to collecting and reporting data. What is the disconnect between the dearth of data on college educational quality in the eyes of the public and the considerable amount of data collected within institutions? What data do the public currently see and what data do they need? How are the institutional data being used, if not for the public? While the assessment and accountability movements have been front and center for higher education institutions since the 1980s, public understanding of higher