The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, an independent, non-profit organization, is working with the National Forum to develop a method for measuring each state's "educational capital."
The desire to measure college graduates' ability to solve problems, communicate effectively and think critically has existed for many years, yet progress finally is being made according to Margaret Miller, director of the National Forum and a professor in the Education School.
"What happened is that employers have been saying for a long time they weren't quite sure what a college degree warranted, or what skills they would bring into the workplace," Miller said. "So there has been, for about 20 years now, a good deal of attention to this question which led to an assessment movement in higher education."
Education Dean David Breneman said the difficult part of the task is deciding what methods of assessment will be used.
"This business of defining and trying to understand what you're trying to get at with student learning, those are very tough topics because higher education is so diverse and has so many different fields and purposes," Breneman said.
The assessment effort ties into the Center's biennial report card, "Measuring Up," which grades each state on its higher education system. The last aspect of the report is "Learning," for which each state historically has received an "incomplete" due to a lack of data, Breneman said.
According to the National Forum's Web site, the "Learning" category of the report will focus on three different themes including abilities of the college-educated population, the performance of college graduates, and institutional contributions to educational capital as measured by the proportion of the state's college graduates ready for advanced practice in the form of professional licensure or graduate study.
This information would be gathered through a combination of exams that college graduates commonly take and some specially-administered exams.
Collecting this data would allow states to see their strengths and weaknesses in their institutions. The data also could be used to analyze how well each state prepared teachers and to track racial and ethnic gaps in performance, Miller said.
According to its Web site, the National Forum on College-Level Learning conducted a pilot study in which it compiled information for the learning category from five states: Illinois, Kentucky, Nevada, Oklahoma and South Carolina.
Miller said the main problem encountered by the pilot study was a lack of student motivation to participate, but she said she believes the obstacle can be overcome by offering payment to students who participate.
The pilot study did show that extending this approach to other states would be feasible.
Breneman said this movement toward assessing higher education is controversial because student learning has been evaluated solely by faculty members for so many years.
Ira Herbst, professor and chair of the Mathematics department, said he felt developing a test that could measure the skills a student learned in college would be extremely difficult.
"I feel that there would be a danger that such a test would be thought to be measuring something that it isn't," Herbst said.
Despite such views, there is still a call to increase the accountability of higher education institutions, Breneman said.
Miller said she views the assessment as higher education's answer to No Child Left Behind.
"I think it's a very exciting project," Miller said. "It can be done and it can be done in a way that gives you useful information, and I think it's worth doing"
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