This weekend, the US Department of Education released its significantly updated and redesigned College Scorecard. The website allows users to search an expanded data set on colleges and universities, and they receive search results in streamlined texts and easy to read graphics.
The new College Scorecard will replace President Obama’s previously announced goal of rating colleges, a goal that the administration abandoned after facing significant opposition from higher education organizations and institutions. Yet, even in the moments following the release of this data (which occurred very early Saturday morning), it has become clear that many will be using this data set to accomplish just that: rate and rank colleges.
Saturday morning, my twitter stream exploded with responses from higher education researchers and policy groups who had been mining the data to create comparisons across institutions in everything from students receiving financial aid to graduation rates to alumni earnings. By Monday, this interest had extended even to local media, with Rachel Barnhart (ROC City News) and Jim Goodman (Democrat and Chronicle) covering the salaries earned by the graduates of Rochester Area Colleges. And, this week, in an essay for Inside Higher Ed, SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher praised the data release, writing, “it’s not a moment too soon for colleges and universities across the nation to be held to a standard of transparency and accountability.”
I, like others, have some concerns about how the data in the College Scorecard is presented and assumptions that are made. For example, graduation and income rates are presented without the context of students’ socio-economic status. Importantly for community colleges, the impact of our successful transfer students on the graduation rates of four-year colleges and universities is invisible in the presentation, leaving a substantial portion of our mission out of the Scorecard equation. However, in the end, these concerns are moot: the genie is out of the bottle. Higher education data is now more accessible than ever before, and there is no going back to refine presentation or assumptions. This Scorecard will be used—by everyone from parents to students to funders to politicians--to judge how well colleges and universities are serving students.
In many ways, the College Scorecard is only the latest manifestation of changes occurring in higher education and in how the work we do is perceived and assessed. The Chancellor is correct in observing that we are all being held to unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability. Two topics I mentioned on All College Day, the new SUNY Excels performance improvement system and the proposed changes to Middle State Commission on Higher Education accreditation processes, align directly with these amplified expectations. I encourage you to spend some time reviewing the College Scorecard and thinking about the implications of the information presented for MCC and all colleges and universities. What are your thoughts? Share them in the comments on the blog or send me a note.
Anne M. Kress
President
09/16/2015 |