(If you’re coming in to the middle of this, please have a look here first.)

Andrew Careaga over at Higher Ed Marketing weighs in with some coverage of the Margaret Spelling’s speech. He uses a poignant quote from the Chronicle article:

At times during the interview, Ms. Spellings seemed exasperated by the response of higher-education officials to the report’s recommendations. She expressed disappointment at private colleges for opposing the student-tracking database. She mentioned several times how “expensive” colleges are, particularly private ones like Davidson College, which her daughter attends.

Maybe those two statements weren’t meant to relate to one another, but it is unclear to me how this student database will lower college tuition costs. Do they think that creating the Big Brother of all college guides will make college marketing moot? If so, then she underestimates the willingness of (what will become) B and C-list colleges to just roll over and die in the face of their dirty laundry getting picked through and aired by a nosy federal government.

Let’s think about the proposed tracking database and the publicly-displayed analysis drawn from it. How will a successful college experience be measured and by whose criteria? Are we talking about a standardized ABC grading system / 4-point GPA structure? What about those institutions that take an alternative approach to grading or otherwise work within a more rare system designed around their unique organization? Are standardized, government-mandated tests going to be extended into the college level now? Something like a mandatory GED? Because all those standardized tests have just worked great in the public schools so far.

Assuming that colleges are graded on retention and grades: If the only way to get a good ranking with the government’s Big Brother College Guide (BBCG) is to assign students good grades and keep them from leaving, don’t you think colleges will start doing just that without regard to a student’s actual needs or genuine performance? As a faculty member, imagine what would happen if every time you flunked a student the decision had to go through some sort of heavily biased review because of the dire effect it could have on the school’s ranking in the BBCG. If retention has a sizable effect on BBCG rankings, then what sorts of Disneyland colleges are going to crop up to keep kids from transferring out? It sounds to me as if college administrators would become mired in a painful tug of war between real academic credibility and the kind of token bullshit that the government frequently asks for as proof of academic performance.

I am aghast at the statement made about the BBCG containing data on the salaries of graduates (aside form the possible giggles at the expense of the Ivy League at how many of their graduates go on to be purely average…). I went to college for the education and the experience, not for some pie-in-the-sky vision of becoming a CEO. If I wanted money I’d have gone to a tech school or an MBA program, not a liberal arts college. To all the clueless bureaucrats trying to screw over my child’s chance at a decent college experience: life isn’t just about money. Get a freaking clue. The American dream is changing. It’s about a real pursuit of happiness now, not just happiness for the moneyed few. Schools exist to meet many different needs and expectations–this is what makes college so much nicer than the one-size-fits-all public school curriculum. Many students are there simply because understanding the world around them and learning to think critically helps them live responsible, happy lives.

One last thing to Spellings: I paid (am paying) for my college education, not my parents, so stop addressing all of this to parents. When my kid is old enough, it will be his choice where to go to school and what to do with his life. I’m not going to login to the BBCG, do a combine search on Salary Outcomes / Academic Performance, and make him apply to the top 10 results for that year. If that’s what you want to do with your kid, then that’s your (misguided) business, but don’t you build a system that assumes that parents are the primary decision makers.

I simply fail to see how any of this equals lower tuition costs. If this is Margaret Spellings’ “dream of college,” then I’m ready to wake up now please. Give me a cup of coffee, some toast, and college the way it is.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 1:20 am and is filed under Higher Education. It has been viewed 2555 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!