Highlight Your Education

It is hard to tell who the intended audience is for this anthology. Although it is written by a bunch of highly placed HE policy wonks nearing retirement, a clear picture of ‘accountability in higher education’ fails to emerge after reading it. This is probably due to the fact that the theoretical construct used throughout to bring coherence to the balkanization of higher education (the “Accountability Triangle” whose vertices are the public, the academic, and the needs of the market) lacks substance.

The problem is how to reconcile this approach with the long and complex history of HE institutions in this country, their accreditation, the politics of student assessment, rising expectations, skyrocketing tuition costs and federal funding, and whatever else it is that makes understanding higher education so difficult. The Accountability Triangle doesn’t come close to helping us.

The historical and cultural context is arguably far more complex, and this, it seems to me, constitutes the book’s greatest weakness. Rather than understanding the dynamics of credential inflation spiral that keeps accelerating (Randall Collins jokes that some day soon you will be required to have a Ph.D. in physics just to flip burgers), and the Weberian nightmare of “McDonaldization of higher education,” the rhetorical structures that undergird the construct of HE — and the debates about education generally — go unrecognized and unnoticed. These weaknesses are particularly evident in the discussion of standardized testing and mass student assessment, all of which are strangely divorced from the explosion of knowledge we know as the sociology of education.

The result, as one could imagine, is something that is probably as far from the classroom (…) as you can get.

Due to its bias toward 4 year and graduate institutions, and its relative neglect of 2 year and vocational colleges, which serve disproportionately larger constituencies, the overview of HE is subtly distorted by the book. In addition, it is astonishing that, at this late date, there is no mention of the “achievement gap” among minorities that is so glaringly apparent at the local level. I guess the news of the shameful carnage on the ground, especially here in the South, hasn’t yet reached the authors high up in their Ivory Towers.

There are, as well, some small errors: federally guaranteed student loans and grants now amount to greater than $70 billion, not $60 billion each year [cf. WSJ, Aug 1, 2005, A9], and the gatekeeping role of accrediting agencies solidified with the institutional “reliability” provisions of the Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1952, and not the earlier G.I. Bill.

On the other hand, the book does describe the alphabet soup of programs, standardized tests, student and alumni surveys, and institutional studies that have been conducted, and the approaches and policy decisions that spawned them. There is background information and brief explanations of the myriad options available to the enterprising bureaucratic or HE administration official that wants to make a name for himself or herself. But the fact that the book is stuffed from beginning to end with acronyms, generally known only to the experts, it not in itself a good thing. It may even be an indication of the need to scrap the whole thing and start from scratch.

To the good, there are substantial bibliographic resources to these content areas (pages 325-347), and the index is quite well done. But on the whole, the book arrives at very few firm conclusions (that are not somehow mired in educator rhetoric), and it advocates very little, leaving this reader to conclude that things must be worse than they seem.

Rating: 1 / 5