Academically Adrift: Findings & Lessons for Improvement

It’s rare that a book from an academic press can ignite widespread debate much less gain national media attention from the likes of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR. But that’s exactly what’s been happening since the release of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. (Chicago University Press, 2011)

Written by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift shares the results of the Social Science Research Council’s Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) Longitudinal Project, which tracked 2,300 students at 24 universities over the course of four years. The study measured both the amount that students improved in terms of critical thinking and writing skills, in addition to how much they studied, read and wrote for their courses.

By now you’ve probably seen some of the numbers:

• Fifty percent of sophomores reported that they had not taken a single course the prior semester that required more than 20 pages of writing over the course of the semester;
• One-third did not take a single course the prior semester that required, on average, more than 40 pages of reading per week.
• Students reported studying on average only 12 hours per week during their sophomore year, one-third of which was spent studying with peers. Even more alarming, 37 percent dedicated five or fewer hours per week to studying alone.

As troubling as these findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators, these numbers will come as no surprise. Instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working, and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list.

So what can be done to improve academic rigor in the face of larger class sizes, shrinking budgets, and competing priorities?

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Magna Publications presents Academically Adrift: Findings & Lessons for Improvement
This seminar features the authors of Academically Adrift as they discuss core findings from the study as well as the possible implications of their research for improving undergraduate learning. The 60-minute seminar includes a Q&A session where participants posed questions to the presenters to get their thoughts on what academic leadership, faculty, and students can do to foster an institution-wide culture of learning.

By the end of the seminar, you will be able to:

• Identify the key findings of the study
• Understand the implications of the findings
• Consider steps that your campus can take to promote rigor

Who will benefit:
This seminar will be of interest to faculty members and academic administrators at all levels.

If you wish to share this seminar with others across your campus, consider ordering a Campus Access License. For an additional $100, a Campus Access License allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal web site for unlimited access by members of the campus community.

Order the CD/Transcript

New for 2011! A Discussion Guide for Facilitators.
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

For most institutions, change is inevitable. “External forces are putting on more pressure to change than internal pressures to stay the same,” says Kelly Edmonds, doctoral candidate in higher education research at the University of Calgary. She has identified a “second order change” beginning in higher education that will likely force a number of paradigm shifts in response to three main types of forces affecting the university. This second order change, while a painful process that brings about dramatic shifts in the way an organization operates, may herald the next generation of higher education practice as the academy shifts to serve a new kind of student, a new kind of economy, and new demands on those who have dedicated their lives to education.

Tension #1: Economic Forces
Everyone who works in higher education is aware that the academy is not insulated from economic pressures. Governmental support for higher education is dwindling, with the situation more dramatic in the U.S. than Canada, says Edmonds. This loss of traditional sources of income means that universities are exploring different models of balancing the budget. One potential response is a move to the “business model,” an idea that is gaining traction among an academic population that a few years ago would have recoiled at the idea that the provision of education has any similarities with the marketing of other goods and services. “The term [business model] is actually being used at the University of Calgary,” says Edmonds.

In addition, no discussion of economic forces would be complete without mentioning competition, and higher education is certainly seeing its share. Privately-owned, for-profit institutions have become very successful bringing traditional business practices, like an emphasis on customer service, to the table. Traditional universities are feeling the pressure to compete with these for-profits or lose a certain segment of their potential student population.

As a result, Edmond notes, universities are being asked to adapt to an entrepreneurial culture with a focus on market share, branding, and consumerism of students. “Universities are moving to commodify education; education is being sold as a product,” she says. While this may be a reasonable response to these pressures, some members of the university, particularly the faculty, are “feeling a loss,” Edmonds says. This sense of loss leads to another set of pressures that she characterizes as philosophical resistance.

Tension #2: Philosophical Resistance
Many of the objections that faculty might have to the growth of online learning are well known. Edmonds identifies several factors in play, such as questions of quality arising from the commodification of education and poor application of technology. Concerns about quality can also stem from a sense of loss of connection to students and the changes to the traditional role of faculty member as expert and lecturer, a model that nearly all of the current generations of faculty members would have experienced in their own career as students.

Many faculty prefer to use conventional pedagogical methods in their classroom. They have a vested interest in these methods, Edmonds finds, and there is a strong Western tradition of the transmission of knowledge from the experts to the learners that is altered in the more egalitarian online environment.

Finally, faculty may have concerns about job security. Many of the current generations of faculty may feel they are giving up some control of the curriculum to instructional designers, especially if these faculty members do not possess the skills to design an online course themselves. Along with this insecurity come concerns about the erosion of academic freedom, as the development of a course comes to require more of a team approach and less of the time-honored tradition of a professor alone in his or her office, consulting reference materials and creating a new course independently.

Tension #3: Political Challenges for Leaders
Edmonds likens changing a university to turning around a ship – a slow process that requires much careful maneuvering. Each of the tensions mentioned above can cause a political challenge for higher education leadership: global competition, competition from for-profits, competing budgets, academic structure and governance, lack of e-learning policies, academic freedom, and resistance by the faculty.

To address all of these concerns, universities will have to embrace this “second order change” that Edmonds identifies. This is a period of change during which the status quo is destabilized, beliefs are questioned, and the next move is unknown until the institution passes through the change and can “refreeze” in a new form.

Navigating this change is critical for higher education as a whole to move from incorporating online learning solely as a one-off program and into using its delivery and pedagogical methods across the academy. The institutions who can embrace the challenges of change may be pleased at the new paradigms open to them in the future.

Excerpted from Are You Giving Up Control of the Ship? Three Pressures You May Not be able to Resist, Distance Education Report, July 1, 2008.

There are two areas to consider when it comes to course scheduling: flexibility and student success, says Lane Glenn, vice president of academic affairs at Northern Essex Community College in Massachusetts. Glenn sees great potential for improving course scheduling practices to meet these two goals.

Flexibility

When it comes to course schedules, students’ main concern is whether a course is offered when they need it. If it is not available on campus when they need it, students have the option of taking it at another institution either in person or online (assuming the credits will transfer).

Part of the solution to meeting students’ scheduling needs involves using the enterprise resources planning system on campus to better anticipate which courses they will need. “We can generate, for example, three-year rolling enrollment reports and put them in the hands of department chairs and curriculum coordinators,” Glenn says, “so they’re not relying on partial information or misinformation, but actual statistical information to show the registration pattern from the day registration opened until that class filled.”

Glenn is working with the IT department to create what he calls “program progress reports”-essentially batch degree audits that will allow him to take a snapshot of all the students in a particular major to see which classes they have taken and which classes they need to take, and when.

Another way to meet scheduling needs is to offer different types of courses, such as online, hybrid, accelerated, or weekend. The particular type of flexible scheduling a program adopts will depend on the culture within the department, available resources, and, most important, the students’ pedagogical needs, Glenn says.

Student success

Offering different kinds of courses is not a simple matter of taking the content and dividing it in ways to fill an unusual time slot. Imagine converting a lecture-based course that normally meets three times a week to a block format that consists of a single four-hour session. The instructor might be a great lecturer, but it’s unlikely that he or she could engage students for hours at a time.

“There is a world of difference, or there should be a world of difference, between teaching a class that meets three times a week for fifty minutes, teaching that same class that meets once a week from eight until noon, teaching that class in an accelerated format that meets three or four days a week, or teaching it online,” Glenn says. “As we get better at offering these different formats, hopefully we get better at delivering the instruction in these formats.”

In courses that meet for three or four hours at a time, instructors can try strategies such as case studies and group projects that are not possible in classes that meet more frequently for less time. But then students don’t see each other for an entire week. “A week goes by and life intervenes, and it’s harder to build community that way,” Glenn says. “When students are seeing each other two, three, or four times a week, particularly if they are in a four-, six-, or eight-week accelerated format, the experience is a more intense one. You’re seeing these people every day, every two days, or every three days. You come to rely on them more. You communicate with them more. And what we know from surveys like the National Survey of Student Engagement or, in our case, the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, two of the most effective and powerful ways of determining students’ engagement and their potential for success is their level and quality of interaction with instructors and the level and quality of interaction with peers. It seems kind of obvious, but so many of our systems and practices don’t pay attention to that.”

Recent research indicates that an accelerated course schedule (more meetings per week for fewer weeks) can help undergraduate students, particularly those who are underprepared or who face other challenges. “Life is the biggest obstacle-transportation, work, kids,” Glenn says. “When you accelerate the course from fifteen weeks to twelve, eight, or six weeks, there’s less of a chance for life to get in the way of that course. It may seem counterintuitive to take someone working full time and make him or her come to class three or four times a week instead of once or twice, but underprepared undergraduates often perform better in an accelerated environment, largely because of the community-building, I think.”

Another crucial consideration in student success is counseling. When students have options, they need to make informed decisions about which course format is best for them. “Some institutions have been very successful at training their advisors to assess students’ abilities and to have that dialogue with students to genuinely discover what [each] student is prepared to do,” Glenn says. “We’re getting better at this in the online environment, and I think colleges that do a lot of online teaching have some kind of self-assessment on their websites that students can take to determine for themselves, or in conjunction with an advisor, if the online environment is right for them. We do need to get better at creating tools and having conversations with students to determine if an accelerated course is right for them or if an open-entry, open-exit, self-paced modularized curriculum is right for them.”

Resistance

Despite students’ need for flexibility and research that indicates the benefits of an accelerated schedule, there is still some resistance. Faculty members and students who are used to doing things a certain way might find a major scheduling change upsetting because of the adjustments they would need to make. Faculty would have to choose the instructional strategies that are most appropriate for the course format, which might require some professional development.

One way to overcome resistance is to recruit faculty members who are open to trying new course formats. This might mean hiring at a lower salary level to attract candidates who are likely to be younger and perhaps more familiar with new technologies and innovative instructional strategies, Glenn says.

Another obstacle is what Glenn calls “systems resistance”-lack of technological resources or lack of ability to use existing resources to provide information on guiding the course scheduling process. Glenn hopes to overcome this obstacle with the program progress reports.

Action research

Glenn recommends reading the literature on course scheduling, but he cautions that not all scheduling solutions will work at every institution. Because each institution has its own culture, he recommends experimenting to determine which scheduling techniques and course formats are most appropriate for the institution.

“Action research can help you decide as an institution what changes in course scheduling practices will be best for your institution,” he says. “You can always do the research and go out and read what others have done; that’s very important. It might give you ideas for where to start, but in terms of convincing others, you need to show some small wins along the way.”

At his previous institution, Oakland Community College, Glenn used action research to address the problems associated with students who enroll in courses late. “Talk about a scheduling problem,” he says. “We know from decades of research that students who start a class late are far less likely to finish the class or finish with a satisfactory grade. Some colleges have stopped late registration. That’s one step in the right direction, but over time you find people allowing students to drift into these classes anyway.”

Instead of allowing late registration, the college created the Right Start program, a group of classes that starts in the fourth week of the semester to accommodate students who enroll after the first day of regular classes. “The only way to get into these classes was to wait until the other classes had begun. We required these students to see a counselor and that they complete a one-credit student success course or a self-paced ten-module take-home tutorial, not because we thought these students were academically poor students. They are not necessarily academically challenged students,” Glenn says. “More often we find that they are life challenged. We spent a year offering classes this way and tracking these students in these courses to see if they did succeed at a higher rate compared to late starters in previous years. We found that, yes, in the small population we were working with, there seemed to be a 15 percent advantage gained in terms of student retention and grade success.”

Contact Lane Glenn at lglenn@necc.mass.edu.

To encourage faculty members to embrace leadership roles, Moore frames the concept of leadership to suit the academic environment, relying heavily on Ronald Heifetz’s concept of adaptive leadership, which states that a leader is someone who engages people to make progress on the challenges facing them. “When you look at it that way, the leader’s role is to orchestrate the learning experience, and then suddenly you have faculty who are interested because that’s what they do every day,” Moore says. “In the classroom, you may know what you want to accomplish. You know your learning goals for that day, but you have to go in and figure out who your students are, where they are, what they understand about what you say and what they don’t, and you’re constantly monitoring and adjusting so you can take another tack when the first one doesn’t quite work. I see academic leadership the same way. People ask me if I miss teaching, and I say, ‘No, I’m teaching all the time. I have a different group that I teach. I’m teaching faculty how to accomplish things instead of teaching students how to master a particular discipline.’ And I think seeing it that way makes faculty much more interested in doing it.”

As a dean, Moore finds it very useful to have faculty members apply their time and energy to a variety of adaptive challenges, such as assessment. “There’s a lot of resistance to the whole assessment movement. It challenges autonomy and respect for their positions and knowledge base. So how do you lead faculty to make this change? You can do it as an authority and say we’re not going to get accreditation if we don’t and we’re going to do this the top-down way, or you can start to talk about the real issue and the benefits of mobilizing people at different levels,” Moore says.

Faculty involvement in leading change also helps to overcome the limitations that leaders with formal authority have. “One of the interesting things about being a leader with authority-a dean or a provost-is that in some ways you’re constrained; you can’t focus too much on one issue. If I go in as a dean and just focus on assessment, then I’m neglecting a large area of my tasks,” Moore says.

In addition to providing appropriate focus on the pertinent issues, having a faculty member leading an initiative lends credibility among the faculty. “As a person in power, you can’t be pushing your people too hard, but you can let someone else push from the side,” Moore says.

Giving faculty the opportunity to lead also helps to develop the next group of leaders who may one day take on positions of formal authority.

“Faculty can learn to be leaders by being involved at all levels from an early stage of their careers,” says Mark Hofmann, associate dean of faculty at Skidmore College. “In my own background, I learned a great deal from serving on different committees-all-college committees, the promotion and tenure committee, the presidential search committee, and the dean search committee. That range of experience really taught me a lot about what the institution was all about, what leadership in the institution meant, and just seeing what occurred at all different levels.”

One of the difficulties for untenured faculty serving on committees and lending their leadership abilities beyond their scholarship and teaching is that this will inevitably distract them from the things that count most toward tenure. “I think the advice that we have given faculty has in a sense hurt [the institution]. A department chair will tell untenured faculty that they need to concentrate on teaching and research. That’s true. To a certain extent, that’s good advice, but it’s not necessarily good advice for the rest of the institution. I think this is something that is difficult to balance. To a certain extent we’re developing this culture for ourselves, and we’re hurting ourselves by doing it,” Hofmann says.

One solution to this dilemma is to encourage faculty members to serve on task forces of limited scope and duration. “I like the task force approach. It gets away from endless conversation,” Moore says.

The University of Portland recently revised its general education curriculum with the help of small task forces. “I’ve seen institutions where committees worked for five years, and the whole [general education revision] got shot down. There are horror stories out there. Ours went unanimously through senate and curriculum committee in two years by getting people to lead task forces. There was so much buy-in at each step of the way that it was actually much more efficient than if we had just put something together for people to shoot down,” Moore says.

Contact Marlene Moore at moore@up.edu and Mark Hofmann at mhofmann@skidmore.edu.

A very well-documented recent book (reference below) highlights these changes by describing three different kinds of faculty appointments. What these appointments are called at the local institution does vary a great deal, but virtually all colleges and universities employ faculty who teach in each of these categories.

The first and easiest to understand is the traditional tenure-track appointment. Because there has been usage::such[2,pronoun];School:such[2,pronoun]“>such an influx of new faculty entering higher education (primarily as retirement replacements), new tenure-track appointees have been surveyed and interviewed at length. Much is known about usage::they;School:their”>their experiences as beginners in the academic community. synonyms::take[1,verb];School:take[1,verb]“>Taken together, research indicates usage::that[4,pronoun];School:that[1,pronoun]“>that new tenure-track appointees are concerned about three aspects of usage::they;School:their”>their jobs: 1) the lack of comprehensive, clear and rational guidelines and procedures for the tenure process, 2) usage::they;School:their”>their sense of a lack of community at usage::they;School:their”>their institutions and usage::between[1,preposition];School:among”>among usage::they;School:their”>their colleagues, and 3) the difficulty of balancing the demands of usage::they;School:their”>their personal and professional lives. A significant number of new faculty are not finding these traditional appointments as attractive as synonyms::preceding;School:former”>former faculty did.

In 1978, 58 percent of all faculty were in tenure-track positions. Now, 32 percent of all full-time faculty have contract-renewable appointments and 46 percent of all faculty members teach part time. These full-time non-tenure-track positions increased by 88 percent between 1975 and 1998. Institutions use these more flexible positions in a variety of ways. In some fields and professional programs they are used to hire experts who have lots of experience but may not have the academic qualifications for a tenure-track position. Some institutions have responded to concerns about the number of part-time teachers by converting formerly part-time positions into full-time jobs.

For usage::some[3,adverb];School:some[3,adverb]“>some professionals, this kind of appointment represents a viable career alternative. However, the ways usage::that[4,pronoun];School:that[1,pronoun]“>that faculty are treated in these positions depends very much on the institution. In usage::most[5,adverb];School:most[2,adverb]“>most places, salaries are lower usage::than[2,preposition];Dictionary:than[2,preposition]“>than for those holding tenure-track appointments and usage::learn;School:teach”>teaching loads are heavier. But at usage::some[3,adverb];School:some[3,adverb]“>some institutions, these positions are permanent (with multi-year synonyms::contract[2,verb];School:contract[2,verb]“>contracts), promotions are possible, and full fringe benefits accompany the positions. Faculty holding these positions usage::can[1,verb];School:may”>may have voting privileges and be eligible for professional development opportunities. In other places, faculty in these positions are marginalized by both the institution and usage::they;School:their”>their faculty colleagues.

Finally, institutions appoint usage::some[3,adverb];School:some[3,adverb]“>some faculty to fixed-term positions. Here the work is mostly part-time, for a specific time synonyms::period[1,noun];School:period[1,noun]“>period, usage::like[7,conjunction];School:like[7,conjunction]“>like a semester or year, and these synonyms::contract[2,verb];School:contract[2,verb]“>contracts come with no guarantee of renewal. The percentage of faculty in these positions depends both on the type of institution and the academic discipline. Thirty-seven percent of faculty with fixed-term synonyms::contract[2,verb];School:contract[2,verb]“>contracts usage::learn;School:teach”>teach usage::only[2,adverb];School:only[2,adverb]“>only usage::one[3,pronoun];School:one[2,pronoun]“>one course, although 16 percent usage::learn;School:teach”>teach more usage::than[2,preposition];Dictionary:than[2,preposition]“>than three classes. usage::most[5,adverb];School:most[2,adverb]“>Most receive usage::less[1,adjective];School:less[1,adjective]“>less usage::than[2,preposition];Dictionary:than[2,preposition]“>than $3,000 usage::per[1,preposition];School:per”>per course and no benefits for usage::they;School:their”>their usage::learn;School:teach”>teaching services. usage::most[5,adverb];School:most[2,adverb]“>Most usage::learn;School:teach”>teach with virtually no institutional support. There is little or no office space, equipment, or support services available to them. There are few professional development opportunities provided. Seventy-usage::one[3,pronoun];School:one[2,pronoun]“>one percent of part-timers do have jobs outside academe, and usage::they;School:their”>their college usage::learn;School:teach”>teaching, on average, provides about 27 percent of usage::they;School:their”>their total income.

Our goal here is to provide information. Clearly, there are political issues relevant to each type of appointment. But regardless of your position and view of other kinds of appointments, it is wise to have the larger picture and to understand (especially for those of us who’ve been around usage::awhile;School:awhile”>awhile) that faculty appointments are not all the same, not synonyms::same[1,adjective];School:equal[1,adjective]“>equal and not usage::like[7,conjunction];School:like[7,conjunction]“>like they used to be.

Ed.’s note: The book below is a great reference on the changing nature of faculty work. It covers all aspects of academic work (not just the part of our jobs that relates to teaching) and ends with a compelling list of recommendations for coping with these many and significant changes.

Reference: Gappa, J. M., Austin, A. E., and Trice, A. G. Rethinking Faculty Work: Higher Education’s Strategic Imperative. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.

The replies from the academic affairs and student affairs respondents might be summarized with one big “Yes, but …” But what? While some campuses are apparently making progress in building bridges between these two organizational units, the impediments cited fall into three main categories: (1) lack of communication, willful or not, (2) local politics, with a power imbalance that favors academic affairs, and (3) faculty indifference to student development because of lack of incentives.

While the survey does not account for institutional types, a fair guess here is that private institutions and elite publics that are heavily dependent on tuition for funding (but in some cases well endowed with scholarship dollars) are more motivated to ensure that academic affairs and student affairs work hand-in-glove in recruiting, nurturing, retaining, and graduating students, with follow-ups on career placement, student satisfaction surveys, and alumni/donor tie-ins. Larger public comprehensive institutions, on the other hand, are perhaps less likely to have the motivation, resources, and inclination to embrace bridge building in light of burgeoning enrollments, increasing pressure for research productivity and service, and such academic initiatives as outcomes assessment to satisfy regional accreditation requirements (the cause du jour). Community colleges and two-year private schools are perhaps on both sides of the aisle.

Sweeping generalizations, to be sure. My own take, however, is that we are witnessing at work the old adage that “where you stand depends on where you sit.” Presidents would like to think that institutionally we are “all in this together”-and are in a position, with leadership from provosts and academic deans, to set the tone and the imperative for cohesive bridge building between academic affairs and student affairs. Student affairs would like to think that in selling a “caring faculty” in the recruitment process and delivering a good crop of students ready for a productive college life in the classroom (as well as out), it has played a part that surely will be acknowledged, indeed appreciated, by academic affairs in general and faculty in particular. Some faculty, however, would like to think that, with heavy teaching workloads and heightened research and service expectations for tenure and promotion, extracurricular nourishing is “not my job.” The flashpoint is advising, especially career advising, where many faculty see little reason to invest time in an essentially unrewarded enterprise-many, but by no means all.

I began this rumination with a title asking whether the college student is a “customer” deserving consumer treatment and satisfaction. How this question is answered is a good barometer of how close-or how distant-a campus “connect” there is between academic affairs and student affairs. Ask that question and watch the electricity spark up and down the faculty lines, arcing and flattening in telling ways indeed. Can student affairs and academic affairs be brought closer together? Should they? Yes, but … On many campuses, it seems, there is still much work to do.

John N. McDaniel is dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Middle Tennessee State University. He can be contacted at mcdaniel@mtsu.edu.

This movement has created a significant amount of controversy, with strong proponents on both sides of the issue. Many argue that it is essential for colleges and universities to embrace the standards movement and to verify their educational value (which now comes at what may seem an extraordinary cost to the public) by way of comprehensive and sophisticated assessment systems. In the public school sector, this is often announced to the public by so-called “report cards” for schools, required by the sweeping federal legislation known as No Child Left Behind.

In higher education, we are now finding similar reform movements accompanied by increasing demand for quantitative proof (or at least some evidence) to justify the high cost of a college education. Some argue that this has now become the primary responsibility of accrediting agencies-not only regional accrediting bodies but also the myriad of specialty accreditations for an extensive array of professional and disciplinary curricula. This alphabet soup of accrediting agencies includes such formidable bodies as NASAD (art), NASM (music), NLNAC (nursing), NCATE (education), FIDER (interior design), and AACSB (business), to mention but a few. These agencies have done much in recent years to base accreditation processes and decisions on “outcomes” rather than “inputs.” The major concept here is that a college and its programs should be measured not by the qualifications of its faculty, the claims made in catalogs or on syllabi, or the library and other resources in the institution, but rather by student performance in both qualitative and quantitative measures of achievement.

For institutions of higher learning, the consequence of this paradigm shift has been the creation of a wide range of assessment procedures-many of them emphasizing the quantitative side of the equation-to provide these agencies with the outcome evidence required to show that the accreditation standards have been met. Some argue that such measures are essential to convince a skeptical public that there is value in the educational commodity for which they are paying a premium. Others point out that the accrediting agencies are serving a purpose that they are uniquely qualified to provide and that may well stem the tide of heavy-handed governmental impositions of accountability.

Questions

These arguments may indeed be true. Nonetheless, it seems to me appropriate for educational leaders to reflect on a number of questions that follow from this now reigning concept of accountability and accreditation:

1. Are the premises of the accountability movement in higher education justified? This is to say that there may be reason to question the notion that outcomes should replace inputs, that quantitative score keeping is the best way to determine the value of educational services, that the public is truly skeptical of the utility of investment in a college education, and that government is ready to leap into the breach if accrediting agencies do not save the day. This is also to question the premise that standards established by external agencies-which are granted the authority to close or sanction programs or entire institutions-should guide (or even control) the mission, policy, and curriculum of higher education. Are these premises in fact true and compelling?
2. Are the requirements for assessment-and the vast bureaucratic mechanisms required to generate the data-worth the cost and effort? This question should be considered within the context of any individual institution of higher learning, but there is reason to contend that the scarce resources of an institution might better serve the mission of the institution in some other activity or enterprise. To answer this question it would be necessary to calculate the cost of personnel, hardware, software, committee structures, report generation, etc., and determine if the cost justifies the commitment and resources allocated. However, as long as accrediting agencies have the power to demand such outcome evidence, institutions may have no alternative. Are there any possible alternatives?
3. In the long run, does this kind of outcomes-based accountability lead to improvements in educational institutions? Accrediting agencies typically go beyond merely requiring the collection and reporting of data to insist that institutions aggregate, disaggregate, and analyze data and from that process determine specific improvements that should be made to all aspects of the institution’s operation. Such processes must be continuous and a part of assessment reports. Are these requirements leading to the most important and desirable improvements in the institution? For example, would more subjective and qualitative measures result in harder-to-validate but better institutions?

Conclusion

As I mentioned, this is not a rant but rather a plea for institutions to take opportunities for reflection on the accreditation processes that presumably ensure institutional effectiveness. As ingrained as the standards movement has become, with its concomitant requirement for comprehensive assessment systems to measure outcomes, it would nonetheless be a mistake for academic leaders to merely assume that such processes and activities ensure a better institution. What is the most appropriate relationship between internal and external locus of control when it comes to higher education policy decisions? There are points at which assessment can become a mania and bureaucratic processes become pathological. We may simply go through the motions to produce results that bypass the best thought and evaluation required for truly effective education. Some academic leaders are rightly concerned that the demands of “outcomes accountability” may undermine rather than enhance the intellectual joy and creativity of the college classroom, establishing a “tail wagging the dog” approach to education that may not be in the best interest of students or faculty. Let us, then, take time to pause and reflect-and then determine platforms and positions that make the most sense for higher education.

What do you think? Send your comments to partingshot@magnapubs.com

Thomas R. McDaniel is a professor of education, senior vice president, and acting dean of graduate studies at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C. Contact him at Tom.McDaniel@Converse.edu.