Dartblog

The issue of evaluating the results of educational effort seems to be du jour, and not just at Jim Kim’s Dartmouth. This season’s issue of Democracy — A Journal of Ideas contains a thought-provoking article on the need to measure the success — or lack thereof — of the work that insitutions of higher learning actually do. The piece, entitled That Old College Lie, was written by Kevin Carey, policy director of Education Sector, a Washington, D.C. think tank. An excerpt:

But the biggest culprit [in evaluating the quality of acadmic institutions] is the lack of objective, publicly available information about how well colleges teach and how much college students learn. Nobody knows which colleges really do the best job of taking the students they enroll and helping them learn over the course of four years. After decades of inaction, some recent efforts have been undertaken to collect that information: It now exists, but colleges and their powerful (and virtually unknown) lobbies will not permit the public to see it. As a result, colleges are far less focused on student learning than they should be, and consumers haven’t a clue what to do and have come to believe, mistakenly, that the most expensive colleges are also the best.

I get dizzy thinking of the potential if Dartmouth commits itself to leading the way in this area. President Kim may be busy right now putting out the financial fire, but he is also finding the time to articulate themes that could have an influence far beyond Hanover.