What Is a High-Quality College Education?

Questions of cost, affordability, and value in higher education are an evergreen topic in the halls of Congress and in newspapers across the country. Though these talks sometimes bring up phrases like value, which implies a notion of not just cost but also what someone gets in return, most of these discussions are really about nothing more than price and debt. What those investments are buying—the quality of the degree or certificate sought—becomes little more than a throwaway concept. It’s a way of noting that students should get access to high-quality credentials, then punting on the details.

It’s understandable why referring to college quality in public policy debates is not a fleshed out concept. There’s almost no way to think about the quality of a degree without at some point touching on the work that goes on inside the classroom. While curricula, teaching practices, and human capital are common topics in K-12 circles, federal higher education policy has barely budged past questions of finances to consider whether or not students even finish. If done poorly, moving higher education policy to a place similar to K-12 would likely change the tenor of policy discussions, scaring away colleges that are onboard with the need for greater completion to a more hands-off stance wary of meddling.

Quality is also not a real concept in policy circles because there is no consensus on what we actually mean by the term. The discussion over higher education quality isn’t even at the point where it can debate the best assessment models, whether value-add at some level is fair, or any of the more technical debates that occur at K-12. Rather, there’s not even consensus about what we should even be considering. And until we can even get a better sense of what quality entails, there’s no way to move toward a more fruitful discussion.

The word quality in the higher education context is frequently understood as a synonym for learning. It’s not an unreasonable assumption, since the major purpose of enrolling in postsecondary education is to learn more knowledge and skills. But that still leaves two major unanswered questions. First, to what extent should our consideration of quality learning rest upon specific content knowledge versus generally applicable skills? And second, should we consider absolute or relative measures of quality?

Quality is not a real concept in policy circles because there is no consensus on what we actually mean by the term.

Many liberal arts courses play a very clever trick on undergraduates. While students spend a lot of time working to accrue content knowledge that is likely to be quickly forgotten, what they are actually doing is acquiring longer lasting and valuable skills. These are things like how to write well, critical thinking, analyzing sources, etc., rather than specific content knowledge.

In other cases, content matters more. Medical programs of any level will require specific knowledge of anatomy, biology, and a host of other things. As will disciplines like computer science, economics, and foreign languages. And shorter-term vocational programs in particular may place a greater emphasis on straight content over higher-order skills.

The balance of content versus skills creates challenges for thinking about assessing quality. It’s very hard to conduct content assessment across all disciplines. While there is certainly some foundational content knowledge that would be in common across many students, one would expect that a graduate from a history program leaves school with a different base of learning than someone who majored in physics. Measuring quality at a more granular unit is by no means a bad thing (and a topic that will be addressed in a later post) but it does have implications for drawing broader conclusions. Focusing only on skills is more amenable to looking at results across a college, but may be a less successful judge of quality for students who are in fields where developing foundational content concepts is necessary for future progression. This suggests that the best balance for what we mean by learning is probably a mixture of skills with some consideration of content, with the mixture skewing more toward the former than the latter as one looks at results in less granular fashion.

Setting aside for the moment the question of how you ascertain the level of learning, once you have it measured in some manner, you have to make some judgment about whether that level represents high-quality results. This is not as easy as it seems. For example, if quality learning just means exceeding some kind of stated benchmark, then results could simply be a reflection of nothing more than the entering ability of students. In such a system, a program where entering students actually decline from extremely high levels could be seen as a quality offering while a program where students start at an extremely low level of initial learning but leave at a slightly above-average point could seem low quality.

Levels of learning that indicate quality thus need absolute and relative considerations. It makes sense to set an absolute level above which something should be considered high quality. This does run into the problem of allowing an institution or program to seem good based only on the students it enrolls, but it also allows those programs to still fare well even though they don’t potentially have much room to add value. But there also needs to be some consideration for performance of exiting students compared to entering ones. A college that enrolls huge numbers of students with minimal academic preparation but still gets them to an average or above-average level should be acknowledge for doing yeoman’s work. But there’s one caveat—the ending point should still be above some minimum absolute level of results.

Should quality include more than just learning? For example, imagine a program where out of 100 students only one graduates. But that one student demonstrates incredible amounts of knowledge and learning. Is that a high quality program?

The question of whether completion plays a role in quality requires resolving inherent tensions in the rhetoric around postsecondary education. On the one hand, discussions around quality in the academy focus on the desire of learning for learning’s sake. But we also know that people pursue higher education to make a better life for themselves. And there’s no way to discuss this concept of advancement or social mobility without incorporating an economic element. If it could exist solely in a vacuum, then perhaps just a straight measurement of learning is sufficient for thinking about quality. Yet functionally no one approaches postsecondary education with that mindset. This doesn’t mean going to college is a solely mercenary activity—people after all constantly make decisions that balance greater income for other forms of satisfaction—but we should not pretend that a dropout or graduate who learned a lot but cannot turn that knowledge into anything meaningful at all after leaving school has received a high-quality education.

If we care about completion, should we care about cost too? As mentioned at the top, considering the price charged for the education inevitably moves the discussion toward value and away from quality, since that is a combination of what you got out of something versus what you paid for it. So while cost is important, it does not make sense to think about with a strict definition of quality.

What about factors beyond learning and completion? Abstract discussions of high-quality higher education often talk about generating inquisitive minds, instilling a desire for learning, and things like that. All of those are wonderful, but it’s fair to ask whether that’s a reasonable standard to apply to things beyond a liberal arts degree. For example, students in shorter-term vocational programs could probably be perfectly happy with their program even if it does not do that, since they may have more tailored aims. Greater civic participation in the form of voting, volunteering, charitable giving, and other activities is also a commonly raised benefit of higher education. While these are all great things and could indicate desired traits like curiosity, they could also be a function of having greater leisure time that comes with better paying jobs. None of these things are inherently bad, but they require tailoring what we consider to be quality based upon the type of program and college and moving away from a broadly applicable definition.

Regardless of the type of program or institution considered, learning has to be the bedrock of quality.

So far this post has focused on the parts of education that involve only the individual student—what did they learn and did they finish. But education is not a solo activity. There’s also the matter of who does the teaching. Higher education today has a lot of clear assumptions in terms of how instructors affect quality. We assume that a tenured professor is better than an adjunct and that some form of engaging face-to-face experience (either by itself or with a computer-based part) may be the best way for most students to learn. But just because these characteristics may generally associate with what seems to be better learning does not mean they are required conditions for it. So making judgments about who is doing the teaching is likely to predispose the concept of quality too much toward a specific model.

Creating a definition of quality

Constructing a broad definition of college quality means finding something that works for both what a student entering a residential four-year college as well as someone at a nine-month cosmetology program. But regardless of the type of program or institution considered, learning has to be the bedrock of quality. How it should be measured or gauged absolutely should vary, but it needs to marry some looking at skills and some at content, with the balance adjusted to reflect the aims of the program. Learning should also consider both absolute performance and relative change of students while enrolled. Quality cannot be solely about learning though. It also needs to at least consider completion to acknowledge that learning cannot occur at the expense of waves of dropouts.

Basing a definition upon these two concepts provides a strong foundation with a lot of flexibility. It allows for different models of instruction, teachers, program goals, and potential spillover benefits. But it also still leaves a lot of unfilled questions about how we should actually measure learning, who should be doing the measurement, and how granular should such efforts go? These are all issues we will keep considering over the next few weeks and months.