When members of a federal commission consider implementing standardized testing at colleges and universities to measure student learning, we begin to wonder whether they remember the point of whatever higher education they had. Not only would the introduction of standardized testing for universities run counter to the basic purpose of higher education, it would almost certainly distract attention from (and fail to fix) the deep-rooted problems in American schooling.
The issues that most concern a Bush-appointed commission on higher education — a lack of writing, critical thinking and problem-solving skills in recent graduates — are not college-level problems. Those deficiencies are born at (or before) the high school level, part of the legacy of a public education system encouraged to pass failing students and lower standards for want of resources. Testing at the college level couldn’t discern between what students learned in high school or college, producing results that would effectively punish colleges for the inadequacies of students’ previous education.
Even if there was a way to single out college learning, no standardized test could encompass all of the different missions, philosophies and methods of the whole spectrum of public and private universities, liberal arts colleges, religious academies and other institutions that make up American higher education.
How is a bioengineering student at UCSD going to compare to a student at one-of-a-kind St. John’s College in New Mexico, where the curriculum is based entirely on the great books of Western civilization? Indeed, an attempt to compare them — even on some so-called “basics” — would blindly negate the vastly different pursuits of the two students, whose future goals may be worlds apart. A standardized test would be useless in comparing institutions whose missions are anything but standardized.
And unlike testing of public high schools, the government couldn’t directly punish failing institutions. It would have to resort to refusing them accreditation or denying their students federal aid. As it currently stands, universities compete with each other for the best students. There’s simply no evidence that the free market does not already eliminate institutions that fail to meet the expectations of students, even if only through the rise and fall of reputations, quality of life indexes and research dollars. Choosing a college is not like choosing a digital camera, where a features-to-cost evaluation makes certain choices empirically wiser than others. The perceived potential for learning is a central factor, but so are such elusive qualities as geographic location, student life opportunities and the campus environment. Moreover, the real benefits of a college education — like professional networking and personal growth — go far beyond classroom lessons.
Evaluating a college education through the standardized testing of a few capacities — all of which should have been mastered in high school — could amount to an assault on the very foundation of the American higher education system. Critics are calling on each institution of higher learning to specify exactly what it is that students should get for their money, but the difficulty of aggregating the whole spectrum of academic experiences makes that nearly impossible. With basic reasoning and communication skills already well developed, students should be able to pursue the college education they feel will be most beneficial to them. Institutions should be free to design innovative and rigorous curricula without the artificial requirements of a standard test rearranging priorities from the outside.
Most importantly, lawmakers and politicians need to recognize that the deficiencies of American students most certainly do not begin in college.
A real solution to the problem of unskilled graduates needs to begin where the lacking skills were first supposed to be introduced — American K-12 schools.
