Do Colleges Need a Consumer's Report Card?

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/do-colleges-need-a-consumers-report-card/251068/



The government requires that every tire have its tread life, temperature, and traction rating molded into its sidewall. It even makes every package of taco-flavored Doritos tell you the percentage of the FDA recommended daily allowance of vitamin A to zinc is in each ounce. Yet colleges are required to post nada on their websites, even though, in our era of plummeting housing prices, a degree may be our life's most expensive (and important?) purchase.

Should each college be required to post--one-click from its homepage--externally audited consumer information for prospective students? The data might include: the percentage of freshmen that graduate in four years, the progress they make in reading and critical thinking, the employment rate and earnings for recent graduates by degree, and (as the Occupiers would approve) the actual four-year cost of school, including cash and loan financial aid, broken down by family income and assets.

On the other hand, prospective students and families are already buried in information about colleges. They have independently written college guides, and more statistics, facts, and opinions are a mere Google-search away. Is mandating a college report card just one more governmental intrusion that will, like privacy disclosure laws, create a mountain of paper and bureaucrats scrambling to fulfill the requirement while improving few students' lives?

That's this week's Working it Out question: Should each college be required to prominently post a consumer's "report card" on its website? You can vote and comment, and as usual, my editor, Derek Thompson, will post your most trenchant and amusing contributions. Next Monday, unless you change my mind, my column will argue that higher education is America's most overrated product and that mandating a report card is the most potent way to help colleges become the national treasure they claim to be.



*** i strongly disagree w/ the author at the end -- but i kind of like the idea of a consumer report card.

[hedgehog]

1. I'd add median years taken to graduate!

[Proud Public Servant]

2. All of this information

Is readily available, either on college websites or by asking admissions offices (I speak as the father of a college student). I would suggest that anyone who wants to go to college cannot find this easily-available info probably isn't ready for higher education.

[KansDem]

3. I'd add percentage of those who find employment in their major after graduation.

That would help in making a decision...

[SheilaT]

4. That's the information

that should be very well and widely disseminated. It might slow down just a few students from a major that has essentially no jobs for its degree holders.

Most students make little or no effort to contact the placement/career office (it goes by different names everywhere) to learn just such vital information. Or, a young person will decide that some particular job sounds really cool but does nothing to find out just how people get those jobs.

I have a friend in another state whose twenty-year old college daughter wants to do event planning. I told the friend to tell the daughter to visit some places (like hotels and convention centers) where those kinds of things take place and actually talk to the people who do event planning, and try to find out just how people get those jobs. It's called information interviewing and can be very useful.

Maybe in high school, as part of the practical curriculum which should include things like how to write checks, what the real cost of a mortgage is, how to buy a new car, how to buy a used car, and so on, researching jobs should be another part. Kids should do some of that stuff in freshman year, and an entire semester senior year. Make sure they leave high school with some clue as to what the real world is like out there.

The other huge enormous reality that most parents forget or maybe never really knew, is that the majority of students change majors which is why so many of them take a lot longer to complete school than in the 50's or 60's.

[NJCher]

5. NJ has a law

These items have to be posted at the web site. I think it's a category under the "Admissions" tab.


Cher