By Lee Gardner
As policy makers demand more accountability from higher education, a group of higher-education leaders has been conducting an ambitious experiment in turning existing data into a set of five college-performance gauges that might make sense, and make good policy.
Over the past two years, the Voluntary Institutional Metrics Project has brought together the presidents of 18 institutions, including huge state universities, for-profit companies, and community colleges, to consider ways to develop measures that would give government officials a more accurate and nuanced understanding of how colleges and universities are doing.
A report released on Wednesday details the project’s progress toward establishing the five new metrics, which would measure repayment and default rates on student loans, students’ progress and program-completion rates, institutional cost per degree, employment outcomes for graduates, and learning outcomes at the program level, as measured by data like “core skills” evaluations and professional qualifying examinations.
College leaders already stagger under a data-reporting burden, but they also grouse about the one-size-fits-all statistical measures that sometimes result.
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