Proof of education

We are sending too many kids to college who don’t want to be there and don’t have the aptitude or interest to do the work that a genuine college education requires.

But with colleges across the country struggling to survive as the higher-education bubble bursts, standards get lowered and grades inflated to attract and then “retain” students wherever they can find them and however poorly prepared.

We have become a society that insists that everyone go to college, even if college isn’t for everyone. And the pernicious belief that anyone who doesn’t go is a failure just so happens to serve the financial interests of colleges desperate for students.

It would be no exaggeration to say that many, probably most, of those currently sitting in college classrooms across the land could almost certainly find something better to do with their time and (minimal) effort and their (parents’) money, but there they sit nonetheless, trying to make sense of these Plato and Aristotle guys.

The inevitable result of it all is the progressive devaluing of the college diploma, in the sense of no longer guaranteeing that the recipient is anything resembling an educated person.

When we send just about everyone to college, it ceases to be college, and the diplomas colleges hand out become merely indicators of a willingness to take on college loan debt that might never be paid off and suffer through four (or five, or six) years of desultory pretense, as in pretend to educate and pretend to become educated.

So how to restore confidence in the college degrees that so often these days aren’t worth the paper they are printed on but cost an increasingly absurd amount of money to acquire?

A useful first step was recently suggested by Shannon Watkins, writing for the indispensable Martin Center for Academic Renewal: Require all graduates to take a college “exit exam.”

As Watkins puts it, “Although there are variations of exit exams that have been used, the main idea is to measure how well students learned while in college and make those results public.”

Watkins cites the research of economist Richard Vedder, who has proposed a “National College Exit Examination” which would consist “of a largely essay-based 90-minute examination of critical-reasoning and writing skills” coupled with a twohour multiple-choice component that would “examine the student’s basic knowledge of a variety of disciplines — things every college graduate should know.”

The advantages of such an exam would extend to multiple parties.

For students, there would be an opportunity to differentiate genuinely earned GPAs from the imposter alternatives (thereby rectifying the harm done to the best students by grade inflation). An impressive exit score on the resume would make them stand out, and a lack of one make them stand out in a different way.

For employers, there would be a more reliable indicator that diplomas actually meant something and that at least some of those receiving them possessed the knowledge and critical reasoning and communication skills that make for useful employees.

Third, for the schools (there still are some) that still try to do things the right way and deliver a quality education, exit exam scores could be pointed to as evidence of their success.

As the Darwinian competition for survival among brick-and-mortar colleges intensifies, such scores could become crucial selling points, rewarding the good schools and punishing the diploma mills that hand out the equivalent of mail-order degrees to graduates who can’t write a literate sentence and can’t comprehend anything longer than a tweet.

Finally, for the parents of prospective students, there would be a convenient and reliable means of judging whether the tens of thousands of dollars they are being asked to fork over for their kids’ education will be remotely worth it. Campus visits could be scheduled with schools that posted high exit scores, those that had low or none could be crossed off their lists.

The thought even occurs in all this that exit-exam scores could be a useful means of discouraging the woke ideological indoctrination now masquerading as education on so many of our college campuses — four years as a student constitutes something of a zero-sum game, with the more woke nonsense taught, the less time for professors to teach and for students to learn real subjects.

Schools that wasted their students’ time on indoctrination would presumably produce students who performed poorly on exit exams, perhaps even to the extent of providing a barometer of the extent to which indoctrination was being substituted for education in such places.

Yes, the most selective colleges (those who have the best prepared entering students) would likely have higher institutional exit test scores, but that could be adjusted for to determine how much value was actually added by their college experience.

And it would be necessary for colleges to pool resources and create a national grading infrastructure (we wouldn’t, after all, want the schools that already inflate grades doing the exit-exam grading, particularly when it threatens to expose their rackets).

But these are merely logistical quibbles.

The missing element in contemporary higher education is accountability. Finding out what students are actually learning would help restore some of it.