The Dish has been considering the topic of college assessments and government rankings of universities. It happens that I am right now writing my dissertation on the Collegiate Learning Assessment and its successor, the Collegiate Learning Assessment+, one of the major competitors in the effort to establish a common test of college student learning. It also happens that I owe 25 pages of that dissertation to my advisor tomorrow morning, so I can’t write at length about this topic right now. Let me say in general that I have a complex relationship to the subject of my study. As far as these tests goes, I think the CLA is a good one, and the Council for Aid to Education that runs it is mostly on the side of the angels. I also think that this type of assessment is necessary, especially given the threat the online-only education represents to the traditional university. I don’t think that online-only education actually works, and we have to prove it, and tests like the CLA can help. But I also think that everyone involved has to have a skeptical, nuanced understanding of the limitations of these tests, and I’m afraid I have no faith that administrators, politicians, or parents will have that kind of skepticism or nuance. It’s a long conversation.

The Dish highlights this email from an engineering professor:

I’m an engineering professor. I have indeed seen colleges do unwise things with funds. I am a little bit concerned, though, about university ranking systems because they can drive unintended consequences. The proliferation of fancy sports facilities, for example, was in some measure a response to the US News rankings. Universities compete for students. Those that are highly ranked get more and better students, and they can justify higher tuition. If state support is going to disappear (as it pretty much has already in some states), we have to expect universities to market themselves and rankings to drive the marketing. I cannot predict how exactly, but I know this will not end well.

I wrote a piece awhile back about the insane opulence, and equally insane expense, of Purdue’s new gym. It’s in keeping with the terribly costly physical expansion that has happened at colleges the country over. It’s the Gyms, Dorms, and Dining Halls school of recruiting top students to your college. It’s a truly misguided waste of resources from an educational standpoint, and a massive mistake, but it’s also perfectly rational from the standpoint of administrators trying to attract the most competitive students: these things work. Having the best faculty doesn’t work. Having a great graduation rate doesn’t work. Placing lots of students in jobs doesn’t work. What works is the “Club Med plus classes” approach. I have a lot of friends in the academy, in many different schools and positions, and what my admissions officer friends tell me is that internal surveys and research find again and again that students on visits comment on those facilities — gyms, dorms, and dining halls — more than any other aspect.

And that’s just a terrible, destructive thing for our universities. Look, I don’t blame these kids that much. When you’re 17, 18, 19 years old, it’s really hard to balance the appeal of instant gratification and fancy architecture against the subtler, long-term importance of graduating, graduating quickly, graduating without a lot of debt, and graduating with a sought-after skill set. But the parents… I don’t know why the parents aren’t doing more to push their kids away from the fancy gyms and towards the stripped-down, lean, and efficient schools. Ultimately, though, only the colleges can say no to the Gyms, Dorms, and Dining Halls competition. They have to say to themselves: we will not run that race. They have to say no.

Unfortunately, it’s hard for colleges to say no, because the US News and World Reports rankings are heavily influenced by how many students accept a college’s offer of admission, and by exit surveys that ask students to rate their overall experience, including facilities and “quality of life” measures [redacted– see below]. The flat reality is that those rankings produce outcomes more oriented towards vague and self-fulfilling notions of prestige, and to the gee-whiz factor of fancy dorms and sushi chefs in the dining halls, than they are towards actual education. And despite the mountains of compelling arguments against those rankings, the kids actually pay attention to them. Way, way too much attention. Which is why the US News and World Reports rankings are one of the most the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things to ever happen to American college.

(Seriously: die in a fire, US News and World Reports  rankings.)

This brings up a topic that I have been loathe to discuss, because it seems so much like victim blaming. But I think that, if our discussion of student loan debt and the cost of college is to be useful, we have to start to interrogate how undergraduates themselves contribute to these problems. (I guess you can say that this isn’t victim blaming but future victim blaming.) Clearly, these students are part of a larger system that has failed many of them and many of the people like them, and ultimately accountability resides with the whole system. But it’s remarkable how much pushback I get from the very students who risk being saddled with huge student loan debt in their near future. When I wrote that piece about Purdue’s gym, I got praise and encouragement from professors, from administrators, and even from Purdue president Mitch Daniels himself. The people who didn’t like it were Purdue undergrads. I got quite a few nasty emails when that piece came out, from undergrads. The general sentiment was to ask, so you think we don’t deserve a good gym? I simply responded that it seemed sensible to me to build, say, a $15 million gym and save the $75 million to keep tuition down, maybe build a new English building to replace our current crumbling monstrosity. There was a total disconnect from the fact that a $90 million gym represents a huge opportunity cost, one that ultimately, they pay for, even if the gym was funded largely by outside funding. Similarly, I once wrote a letter to the editor of the Purdue Exponent, responding to a piece where students were quoted talking about how the came to Purdue for an experience and not just for an education. I counseled Purdue students that  viewing college as an experience would contribute directly to a longer time to graduate, and thus more debt, and undermine their educational strengths that they will need in a brutal job market. I got some praise from profs and fellow grad students, but undergrads sent me hate mail in response, and an undergrad wrote a letter to the Exponent mocking me for being a grad student.

These kids will, I’m sorry to say, end up paying for these attitudes, with student loan debt and the crushing job market for recent graduates. I don’t want that for them, and again I don’t place most of the blame on them. But I think changing the landscape will have to entail recognizing that, as much as they fail their duty in doing so, colleges are looking at students as customers, in the typical neoliberal style, and they are responding to what the customers want. We have to have the guts to say no, and the media has to help us say no so that parents and students can understand why we say no.

You should really check out my piece on that gym. Read it, and then let this squash your mind grapes: a friend of mine, when teaching class, gave his students a writing assignment. He asked them to tell him what they would do if they were given a $1 million grant to improve Purdue. How would that money best be spent? With that $90 million gleaming fitness palace having just opened, over a quarter of his  students said they would put it towards building another new gym. Seems they think it gets a little too crowded in the afternoons.

Update: A reader helpfully writes in and points out that the US News and World Reports criteria have changed. You can find them here.