How Can We Boost Performance at Colleges and Universities?

Institutions of higher education have long esaped scrutiny because of fears that any form of outside evaluation would infringe on academic freedom. Universities have also benefited from a post-war consensus on the importance of higher education to science, industry and society.

But that consensus is crumbling, and that is a disturbing trend. The absence of scrutiny has contributed to that erosion in support for higher education. Many residents of Washington are skeptical as to whether tax money that goes to higher education is always efficiently allocated.

Some of the skepticism is no longer justified. Increasingly, professors are being forced to spend time in the classroom. And there is pressure on them to teach larger classes. Even so, our institutions of higher education are notoriously poor at allocating resources, and that is contributing to the steady decline in support for education.

That’s unfortunate because colleges and universities are clearly a critical pillar of our society, and their weakness could have disastrous consequences for our state and economy. While we in the Seattle area have one of the highest proportions of college educated populations in the country, we are at the bottom rung when it comes to graduating students from four-year colleges.

Today we import much of our educated workforce. But if 67 percent of all jobs in 2018 will require a post secondary education, as Tim Burgess, Seattle City Council member noted at a Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce leadership forum this week, and only 19 percent of our 9th graders ever get that post secondary education, what jobs will the other 80 percent of our students get?

One requirement, clearly, is better funding for higher education. But to get public support for that higher funding may have to come in tandem with measures to assure the public that the money is well spent.

There are examples of states that have begun this difficult task. Today, the Wall Stree Journal has an excellent story on a 265-page spreadsheet release by the chancellor of the Texas A&M University system that offers a kind of profit-and-loss statement for each faculty member that weights each instructor’s salary against students taught.

That’s a pretty crude measure. It doesn’t take into account research of teaching quality. Another approach being taken by Washington State’s community college system is to measure the effectiveness of entire institutions. Speaking at the same leadership forum this week, Charlie Earl, executive director of the Washington state Board for Community and Technical Colleges, described the system his group is using to evaluate and provide budget to community colleges based on performance rather than on how much they spend. The 34 community colleges, for example, he believes, should get credit for high school students they train through Running Start programs and the 30,000 full-time equivalent students they train through online offerings. They should also get credit for all the remedial math and English they have to teach their students because of the large number of immigrant populations and because of the failure of our high schools.

Earl says community colleges were all evaluated based on a range of measures including the performance of their students on achievement tests and their ability to pass a certain number of courses in a given time. The baseline was established three years ago. The colleges have been evaluated every year since. The colleges that perform better on this point system are rewarded by receiving a higher budget. After just one year, Earl says, the colleges, on average, improved by 16 percent in the point system. In the second year they improved by 11 percent. Earl says more thorough evaluation is required to show just how the colleges made those improvements. But the system shifts the conversation, he says, less to costs and more to how to improve performance.

A similar approach could be used for the states universities, though clearly it would be more important, and tougher, to use metrics on such issues as quality of research and teaching.

On most measures, however, it could be argued that Washington State University, which recently made the tough choices to eliminate some areas of study in which it did not have a comparative advantage, is doing a better job. One reason, of course, is that the UW, while struggling with capacity constraints, has begun accepting more students than it can handle. That may help with budget cuts, but it means classes are filled to capacity. Students can’t get the courses they need to graduate and so their graduation is delayed. UW needs incentives to make the right decisions for students. There also need to be incentives to cut back on areas of study for which there is little demand. In turn, colleges have to be given the freedom to expand areas like nursing, computer science and engineering for which demand for outstrips the supply of students.