Morty and former Williams Economics Professor Mike McPherson on defining college success.

“What college success means depends so much on what [kind of] college you’re talking about and what students you’re talking about,” said McPherson, who is president of the Spencer Foundation and former president of Macalester College. He suggested that the best measures for college success would be specific but tailored to individual institutions. What that means, precisely, “each one can answer that question for themselves,” he said.

The panel was conspicuously divided into two halves: on one side sat McPherson and Schapiro, the president of Williams College; on the other were two representatives of public institutions whose students are much more likely to come from disadvantaged backgrounds and rely on financial aid. Williams, the moderator, didn’t hesitate to point out that the administrators from Miami-Dade and the University of Maryland seemed more willing to embrace strict accountability measures and the data collection that approach requires.

Schapiro, also an economist, suggested that there might be “some appetite” among faculty for more in-house accountability measures, but explained that much of the resistance stems from a fear that increased empiricism could lead to a one-size-fits-all testing regime — like a No Child Left Behind for higher education.

He stressed the need to more rigorously link what colleges do to their students’ professional and other outcomes after they graduate. Otherwise, it’s impossible to tell which teaching methods work and which don’t. Schapiro brought up a hypothetical proposal to compare students’ incoming SAT scores with outgoing GRE scores to determine whether they improved (and presumably correlate those scores to majors and other factors during the college experience).

“I would do that, but then again, I’m an empirical economist,” he said. Professors in the English department, he imagined, would view it as “heresy.”

When colleges experiment with different ways to teach critical thinking skills, as Williams does, Schapiro said, it should be seen as necessary to then empirically test what worked the best. Higher education is “horribly bad at this,” McPherson said — to take one example, colleges tinker with class sizes all the time — but they “never, ever look at the results.”

“Even at Williams, there’s not as much of an appetite as there should be,” Schapiro said.

Well, isn’t it (part of) the president’s job to generate that appetite?

Now, to be fair, Morty is already at the 99th percentile of all college presidents in terms of his willingness to measure Williams performance, so I shouldn’t be too critical. And, to be fair to my English professor friends (Hello Katie Kent ‘88!), any measurement plan that uses a tool like the GRE is likely to fail, both because improving standardized test scores is not the purpose of a Williams education and because any such improvement is likely too small to notice.

Instead, my point is that there is an obvious policy change that would a) Allow fair-minded observers to see the causal effect of a Williams education on student achievement and b) Not force Williams professors to do much if anything differently. That change is the public display of student work. Put on the web all the papers that a student writes as a freshman for ENGL 101 and all those she writes as a senior for ENGL 401. If the Williams English Department is doing its job, the latter papers will be much better than the former.

There are, of course, all sorts of difficult issues to consider in any plan which makes student work public (as well as her professor’s comments but not grades). Perhaps freshmen should be exempt. Perhaps students should be allowed to opt-out from the requirement for one class per semester. Applying the requirement to non-paper-writing classes is difficult. And so on.

But the central principal is obvious: Being a part of an academic community requires public participation in the scholarly conversation. Making papers public will increase the quality of work done at Williams. Making the comments (but not the grades) public will have a similar effect. All the good reasons for making senior theses public apply in the context of other classes as well. (See Tim Burke for a related re-imagining of a liberal arts education.)

Assume for a moment that Morty agreed. What should he do? Best next step is to recruit some faculty to try out the experiment. (All the projects done by students in my Winter Study will be posted to the web, along with my comments.) See how it goes. I bet that someone like Joe Cruz would be willing to try it out in philosophy. Perhaps the whole thing will be a disaster. More likely, I think, is that other professors would be impressed with how making academic work public both improved the quality of that work and made it easier for everyone to see the progress that students make.

[Side note: Just noticed that the ENGL department no longer has a 101 (common introductory course for all students) or 401 (common senior capstone course). This is another sign of the Decline of the West, but save that for a separate rant. Just substitute 100-level and 400-level in the above.]


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