Circularity in Higher Ed

One of the major problems with colleges today is that there are no exogenous sources of feedback. Businesses have customers who stop buying products with a decline in quality. Politicians can get voted out of office. NBA teams lose games to better competition. In other words, there is some external standard of quality that gives feedback to the organization such that they can make changes. This doesn’t exist in higher education because the quality of an institution is based on a circularity that goes like this: The best people attend a great institution because it is a great institution and it’s a great institution because the best people attend it. The prestige attracts great students and great students mean prestige. What if the university is not offering a good “product” (education)? It doesn’t matter because it still graduates the best students because it attracted the best students. Reform of higher ed., then, depends upon breaking this circularity and introducing some external standard of quality—it couldn’t be a test of just inputs (e.g., an “exit exam” or “bar passage rate” because better universities get better students who are more likely to score higher regardless of what they actually learned at the university). It would have to be a test of outputs—measuring change over the course of the education. Whoever is up to the task of developing an entrance/exit exam that can accurately measure what we hope colleges are giving their students will be doing the world a great service. This would discipline and reform higher education immediately. If we saw that Chico state produced a higher increase in critical thinking, creativity, and knowledge than did Harvard, then it would quickly displace Harvard as offering the better educational “product.” WE would see the processes happening in higher ed that we constantly see in business or sports, where the top firms of teams don’t stay there very long as they are disrupted by new, innovative entrants. We haven’t seen this disruption of education because there is no external standard of quality for disruptors to achieve, there is only a circular one (“great universities attract great students which makes them great universities”).