editoridly /peaking
College Education: What are We About? It seems nowadays like everyone has something to say about higher education. Currently, one of the major issues in this area is that of assessment of higher education. Implicit in the current debate on assessment is the question of the purpose of higher education. If one admits to a need or desire to assess the process of higher education, the question of purpose become an obviously important one. If education is a process, what do we expect to produce by that process? How close did we get to our expectations? How can we improve the process to get closer to the ideal of our expectations? Answering these kinds of questions, produces a line of reasoning which in effect defines the purpose of higher education. Presently the lines seem to he drawn between positions that, at the extremes, can be broadly described as pragmatic or idealistic. The pragmatic view incorporates the relatively new idea that higher education lays claim to a certain proportion of society's resources and logically society requires some kind of statement of the return on its investment. Those who hold this view seem generally to he interested in measuring the value added to the individual by the educational process. Most of those who favor this position also tend to emphasize quantifiable knowledge that can be measured hy student performance on nationally standardized tests. By testing students before, during, and a t the end of their college careers, an institution can discover its educational strengths and weaknesses through "outcomes evaluation" and measure how much has been added to each student's store of knowledge by the educational process. This point of view seems to be prevalent in the report entitled "Time for Results: The Governor's 1991 Report on Education", which has been discussed earlier on this page. The measurable-value-added point of view produces graduates who are optimally fit for a job. They are graduates of, for example, geology and petroleum engineering programs who had been superbly trained to deal with the production prohlems of the West Texas oil fields. Unfortunately, they can do little else. The other view of education-which some call the idealis-
tic point of view-holds that college is a place where students go to learn to appreciate their heritage-both cultural and scientific-where they hone their skills in critical thinking and communication, transferring themselves from selfcentered individuals to persons who will develop into caring members of society. Bloom has taught us that processes that are described by words like "appreciation" are not easy to assess. Thus, outputs for this kind of education are not easily quantified; indeed little is known about how to do this kind of assessment. The idealistic point of view is that education should provide skills that transcend specific jobs and that can be usefully applied in virtually any occupation. In one, perhaps perverse, sense such skills are pragmatically more important than the conventional suhject-oriented skills, for example, those deemed to be important for success in the oilboom economy. From the idealistic point of view, higher education is seen as an end in itself; its purpose is to make one better (another condition difficult to measure), not necessarily richer. For some people richer means better, but for many people better means more nebulous things that are, somehow, more important in the long run. The two extreme views of higher education, interestingly enough, have the common thread of the development of an individual. Both are concerned with content and the cognitive aspects of learning. They differ in what they stress in the assessment ~rocedure.Knowledee. in the Bloom sense. is most ensily assessed, whereas thuse elements of education in which the idealists find interest are !,irrualls im~ossibleto assess. With regard to the latter, one can assess the desired outcome-are the graduates successful (whatever that means)-at a point in time where it's virtually impossible to change the system if the assessment finds the process wanting. Thus, the real danger in the current interest in assessment is the superficial logic that produces a "need to know" that draws us to the reliably easy process of measuring the accumulation of knowledge in the Bloom sense. Under such conditions, the assessment process will certainly produce JJL results-but to what end.
Volume 64
Number 2
February 1987
95
