The National Governors’ Association’s Center for Best Practices published an issue brief earlier this week titled “Measuring Student Achievement at Postsecondary Institutions.” The brief raises some important points about higher education accountability systems:

• The brief takes policymakers to task for relying too heavily on graduation rate calculations that examine only first-time, full-time fall cohorts.  If we assume that all students start in the fall as full-time students, the measure works.  But more than half of all community college students, for example, do not meet these criteria.
• The brief criticizes policymakers for not taking “inputs” (e.g., numbers of disadvantaged students being served) into consideration when evaluating an institution’s success in graduating students.  To paraphrase (rather loosely) former Texas Governor Ann Richards, it’s not too hard to score a home run when you were born on third base; not so for those less fortunate.
• The brief suggests that policymakers should place greater emphasis on remediation milestones because most students, particularly at the community college level, need it and because so few students who need it succeed in college.
• The brief suggests that policymakers should gather data on whether students actually put their degrees to work by obtaining jobs in their fields of study or jobs that require the most recently attained credential.

It’s amazing that someone has to write a report making these points.  All are obvious and well known.

Several weeks ago The Chronicle of Higher Education published a student essay deserving of some attention by those who profess to be interested in student access issues.  The essay describes a first-generation college student’s feelings of social exclusion and rang so true that it was painful to read.

Some quotations worthy of reflection:

• “I’ve never traveled out of the mid-Atlantic region, the latest issues of The New Yorker and Harper’s have never appeared on my family’s coffee table, and before arriving on the campus, I thought every working person got paid by the hour.”  College access professionals need to understand that, even under the best of circumstances, students from poor socio-economic backgrounds have not had the quality or quantity of enrichment opportunities of their upper and middle class classmates.
• “As a high-school senior trying to decide where to attend college, I felt besieged by information.”  College access professionals need to appreciate that there is ample, indeed overwhelming, information available to poor students about college selection, admissions, and financial aid.  What is missing is quality counseling to help poor students put all of this information into context.  Such counseling can be provided effectively only by a professional counselor or peer, not through a website or brochure.
• “I don’t want to alienate myself by letting my college friends know that I’m not well traveled and don’t understand their references, so I act as if I were in the know, hoping they won’t suspect that I’m from a different class.  This ‘cultural passing’ gives me a feeling of accomplishment but also leaves me dejected, knowing that I am still an outsider.”  College access professionals need to understand that many such students try hard to hide their otherness and are reluctant to seek support.
• “There were undoubtedly other working-class students on the campus, who could have provided me with the support I needed, but I couldn’t find them.”  Most campuses have African-American groups, religious groups, LGBT groups, etc., but no groups for poor students.  Poor students could benefit from a support group.

Last month Times Higher Education (THE) published its rankings of the 200 best universities internationally.  Ever inundated with U.S. News rankings, many Americans are unaware of the international rankings.

Several observations about THE rankings:

• They favor British institutions with four of the top ten institutions located in the United Kingdom, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the source of the rankings.
• They favor research universities.  Of the 54 American institutions on the list, all are research universities and none is a small liberal arts college.
• They favor institutions with significant numbers of faculty from other countries, something that, in my humble opinion, helped my education not one jot as I struggled to understand what many of them were saying.

The interesting news this year: the slip in American universities’ rankings.  The drop is due in part to major international investment in building first-class research universities, particularly in Asia.  Some experts predict the downward trend will continue, in part because the United States will have less money to invest in higher education as it struggles to pay down its mounting debt.

Needless to say, no West Virginia institution made the international 200.