A Real Measure of Higher Ed Success

A Real Measure of Higher Ed Success

 

A new index will help discover how well prepared graduates are for adult life.

 

By Jim Clifton And Mitch Daniels in the Wall Street Journal

·  Biography

The American higher education system is the world's best. Yet even this great system, which is a magnet for the brightest and most motivated students from around the world, is facing hard, unprecedented questions: Are too many young people going to college? Are they learning anything meaningful while they are there? Can whatever they are learning possibly be worth the escalating costs they are paying, or the soaring debt they are incurring?

Gallup's hundreds of business clients report that many, if not most, college diplomas don't tell them much about graduates' readiness for productive work. Average grades have been inflated, and just about every business leader knows it. Degrees are increasingly awarded in subjects of questionable academic—let alone market—value. Many employers today see a diploma as something that shows a student had the brains to be admitted to college and maybe the discipline to finish. But they sure don't see those pieces of paper as proof that a graduate is remotely prepared for workplace performance or leadership.

Meanwhile, there are no adequate tools to help either employers or college-bound students judge the relative value of any institution. As for those famous "ratings," we call them useless, but they're worse than that. They give universities an incentive to engage in counterproductive behavior, like raising spending and lowering rigor, without telling employers anything about the likely performance of graduates.

The world has finally begun to demand that higher education be held to standards applied in business and everywhere else in life. So Gallup, Purdue University and the Lumina Foundation (a private foundation focused solely on increasing success in U.S. higher education) have combined to devise a new measure that provides rigorous data about the overall success—at work and in life generally—of America's college graduates.

Beginning in 2014, the new Gallup-Purdue Index will measure not only material success, asking college graduates such things as: Are you employed? How much do you earn? It will also measure those critical qualities that Gallup finds employers truly value and are predictive of work success: a person's workplace engagement and well-being.

These qualities can be measured reliably through survey questions such as: "In the last seven days, I have felt active and productive every day," and "I like what I do each day," and "The mission and purpose of my organization makes me feel my job is important." Survey takers will also be asked to respond to items such as "In the last 12 months, I have received recognition for helping to improve the city or area where I live," and "I feel proud to be a [university name] alum," and "I would recommend [name of university] to a friend or colleague."

Gallup has found in the past that employees who are "thriving" in their well-being have one-third of the health-care cost burden to their employer compared with those who are "struggling." And "engaged" employees drive more profit, revenue and productivity while having fewer absent days.

Over the next few months, the first annual national benchmark survey of graduates will be conducted by Gallup. Meanwhile, Purdue will be the first school to contract for a simultaneous sampling of its own graduates, to determine how they are faring in life and at work compared with these national norms. Any and all universities interested in answering this call are invited to join us in forming a national research collaborative—of higher education and by higher education—to refine and improve the Index. This effort won't be about ranking. It will serve as a noncompetitive collaboration and benchmarking toward continual quality, process and program improvement.

At Purdue, we believe—at least based on the sketchy and largely anecdotal indicators currently available—that our graduates do unusually well in their adult lives. But we want to know with certainty, through the only evidence our engineering, scientific or social-scientific researchers accept as valid: rigorous, statistically significant data. We expect our Boilermakers to compare excellently to their peers. But if we are surprised by negative findings, that will serve to tell us how, and by how much, we need to improve.

Students and their parents deserve to know whether a college they are considering has a trustworthy track record of developing successful, engaged, and fulfilled graduates. Businesses and other employers are eager for better tools that tell them at which schools their recruiting is most likely to yield top new employees. The Gallup-Purdue Index aims to help answer these questions that are vital to the future of businesses in America, and to whether the country prospers or goes flat broke in the coming decades.

This new tool will not fill the entire gap in higher-education accountability. For instance, it will be equally important for colleges to measure and report the extent to which students are learning and growing during their higher education years, whatever level of ability, content knowledge and critical thinking skills they arrived with.

Yet the Gallup-Purdue Index is a way we can benchmark and improve outcomes as measured not just by grades or graduation rates, but by real success in life. The index will let us know with certainty that we are doing what is right for our students and their futures.

Mr. Clifton is chairman and CEO of Gallup. Mr. Daniels is president of Purdue University.