Broken Ranks.

• Author: GRAHAM, AMY
• Position: College education, United States

U.S. News' college rankings measure everything but what matters. And most universities don't seem to mind.

KAREN GENTEMANN HARDLY LOOKS like a revolutionary. She's a middle-aged bureaucrat who wears light-blue suits and works out of a second-floor office of a drab brownish building at George Mason University in the bland expanse of suburban Fairfax, Virginia.

Nor does Karen Gentemann act like a revolutionary. She's friendly, warm, and matter-of-fact. But she has a revolutionary idea: Colleges should publicly tell people how much learning is achieved on campus. They should do their best to measure it; then they should post the information online. She's got a file cabinet brimming with manila folders from which it only takes her a second to extract the one that shows the best statistical analysis available on how well her school educates students. This may not seem so subversive, but it is. All over the country, administrators like Gentemann have similar manila folders; they just keep them padlocked in basement safes, forever beyond the reach of students, parents, or reporters.

Over the last few years, America's views on education have hearteningly shifted. Politicians, voters, and many educators have come to a rough agreement that improving schools must involve measuring how much students learn and holding schools accountable for those students who fail. As part of the reform effort, schools need to publicly report data about their performance so parents can make informed decisions about where to live and where to educate their children.

Remarkably, higher education in America remains almost completely insulated from the impact of this movement. Log onto almost any college Web site and you'll see the same beautiful students talking about their beautiful campuses and how much they learn. But there are no numbers, no studies, no objective measurements. In a Washington Monthly survey of 50 randomly selected research-university Web sites, only 12 percent clearly posted the six-year graduation rate, the most basic statistical measure of effectiveness. Even fewer offered information about student satisfaction with teaching.

Without solid information on what they will learn, students must make choices based on geography, particular programs, or reputation. As Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, has noted: "Competition succeeds only to the extent that customers, judges, or other trusted sources can define success in some legitimate way in order to establish a standard and reward those who best achieve it. In education, at least at the university level, this ability is lacking."

Colleges don't put out good information for several reasons. First, it's hard to measure learning and a college's contribution to it. You can't just run simple tests upon a student's arrival and departure. Grade-school and high-school students also have fairly standard curricula: Everybody studies Thomas Jefferson and equilateral triangles. But college students travel vastly different roads; some pore over Chaucer for four years, others study astronomy.

Second, for at least half a century academia has eagerly offered precise and quantitative evaluations of everything but itself. College administrators scorn outside accountability and standards and prefer making decisions in the faculty club. In 1997, less than 10 percent of the member schools of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (the regional accreditation agency for over 200 colleges and universities in New England) reported assessing student learning and using the results to improve teaching.

Third, and most important, it would embarrass many colleges and universities to admit just what happens on campus and how little attention they pay to students.(*) As the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates noted in 1999, undergraduates at research universities, where a large majority of American students undertake their higher education, "... are the second-class citizens who are allowed to pay taxes but are barred from voting, the guests at the banquet who pay their share of the tab, but are given the leftovers."

Worse, the problem will take years to change because graduate programs have long produced individuals expert in their discipline but awkward in the classroom. Moreover, promotion and tenure procedures on most campuses provide slim rewards for good teaching; professors are often released from teaching in order to focus on research, but it almost never works the other way around. An academic joke describes a traveler in first-century Judea seeing a figure on a cross, dying in agony with innumerable sobbing worshippers at his feet. "Who's that?" asks the traveler. "The greatest of teachers. A man who changed so many lives." "Then why are they crucifying him? "Didn't publish."

Fortunately, there's a movement underway to change this lack of accountability and the educational neglect it helps foster, led by a few noble administrators like Gentemann. Thank goodness. Just as too many American...