Better data on student achievement are needed to improve higher education

Trusteeship magazine
Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges
November/December 2006

Opponents of the Spellings Commission’s proposal for a student database concentrate their criticism on a threat to student privacy, but they downplay the need to bring greater accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness to higher education. Although the imperative to guarantee confidentiality is paramount, we should note what educators in other countries are doing with regard to collecting student information and assessing outcomes. Educators and administrators abroad are hard at work collecting such data—countries that have designs on matching, and ultimately surpassing, America as the home of the world’s best higher education system.

Consider the 45 nations that have thus far signed onto the Bologna Accord, the far-ranging educational reform movement in Europe that will, by 2010, establish the foundations for a common information system among virtually every country stretching from Russia to Ireland, and from Turkey to Norway. Each of these nations has agreed to adopt a common system of credit points so that the progress of every single student will be captured and stored in a massive, linked database system. One purpose is to facilitate the easy transfer of students among the hundreds of universities in the Bologna consortium. It also will inform educators across Europe about where they are doing a good job in retaining and graduating students and where they might wisely redirect their resources in order to improve success rates.

The challenge posed by these European reforms should not prompt us to over-react. Nor should the increases in the number of graduates from universities in China and India panic us into radically altering our system or into sacrificing quality. Quite the contrary. We Americans have developed a dynamic, flexible, and enormously productive approach to educating young adults. Just look at the recent spate of Nobel laureates to emerge from American research universities. No initiative to track student progress should be allowed to threaten that creativity or limit the freedom of our institutions to fulfill their missions in the way they deem best. Nevertheless, to ignore the potential benefits from knowing more about student outcomes is to leave untapped a major resource that could make our institutions even better.

Privacy concerns are understandable, particularly when politicians have demonstrated a willingness to overlook our most basic liberties in their sometimes ham-fisted efforts to safeguard national security. Yet the solution is not to squander an opportunity to gather much-needed data on our sector but rather to work to establish (or to be more precise, to restore) checks and balances within our political and judicial systems. The question is whether to act now to ensure that we have sufficient information to fulfill our missions or to await the day when our constitutional guarantees of privacy are again respected.

Those objecting to the student database have not explained how the proposal represents a dramatic departure from existing federal data-collection projects. Most notable among them is FAFSA—the Free Application for Federal Student Aid—which requires each applicant to provide her or his Social Security number as well as information on family income and assets. Moreover, young men in this country for decades have been required to register their whereabouts with the Selective Service System.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the government can never be trusted not to abuse information about student progress, how might a national database be structured to provide greater assurances that privacy would not be violated? Many states and private consortia have for years accumulated exactly the kind of data the Spellings Commission foresees for the federal student database. The drawback of these efforts thus far has been their lack of comprehensiveness. Voluntary reporting never can achieve the needed level of completeness.

Nevertheless, these efforts do form a base from which a national system might grow. If the associations that have voiced mistrust were to work creatively and collaboratively, a new national database might be executed in a manner more to their liking— and might even obviate the need for federal intervention.

With national five-year graduation rates bouncing along at the 50 percent mark, it seems clear that students are falling through the cracks of our college and university system. Yet we are doing remarkably little to understand the reasons for our failures.

Thomas J. Hochstettler is president of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon