Every chance I get I will attend and participate in the Future Trends Forum. Each week there is a guest or two on the forum to participate in a discussion about some specific topic in higher education. I encourage all of you to take a look.
On May 23, the guest was Stig Leschly with the Postsecondary Commission. The Postsecondary Commission is working to become DOE recognized and is primarily driven by the economic outcomes of students. After a look at the institutional mission, the Accreditation Standards start with five that are defined as “Value-added Earnings Outcomes”, four standards defined as “Absolute Earnings Outcomes”, and two standards defined as “Attainment Outcomes”. Once you get past these the accreditation standards become more familiar and focus on learning outcomes, curriculum, faculty, etc.
As I’m sure you can imagine, these early standards require copious amounts of data that may not be readily obtainable. As I remember the forum, the Postsecondary Commission is currently working with a couple of small college in Texas in a proof-of-concept stage of development while those institutions maintain their current accreditation. I asked about the data and the Postsecondary Commission is providing that to the institutions and they acknowledged that robust data-sharing agreements with state and federal agencies will be needed to make this model work.
Should it work? Should we be looking at a value-added approach to higher education? Well, that is what college is supposed to be. Get a degree and then go on to earn more money than you would have without it. However, a student’s choice of major is a significant contributing factor along with countless other factors. Did students learn to think? Did students learn to solve problems? Were students challenged to apply knowledge to novel situations or was the program built on a memorize-and-regurgitate platform? Over the course of a career, these skills will be at least as important as technical skills when it comes to income generation.
What do I think? I think this may be attractive for technical colleges offering quick certificates or short degrees that teach skills in high-wage, high-demand areas and less attractive for four-year liberal arts institutions. I also think back to the for-profit technical school debacle back in the day and think, yeah, maybe this could prevent the rise of a second round of for-profit buffoonery* as we explore where the coming political winds will blow us all.
*To be clear, I have nothing against high-quality for-profit institutions. It is the ones that over-promise and under-deliver that I refer to as practitioners of buffoonery.