When John B. Simpson, president of the State University of New York at Buffalo, compares the campus over which he presides to its public-university peers, the contrast can be unflattering. Buildings and laboratories need upgrading. Richer, more prestigious institutions—the Berkeleys and Michigans of the world—have a leg up in attracting renowned scholars and big-ticket federal grants. The surrounding environs in upstate New York are economically depressed.

So President Simpson has been arguing for more public support—and, controversially, the ability to regularly raise tuition. As the current recession eats away at endowments and chokes off state revenue streams, he will surely not be alone.

Yet even as the SUNY system lurches toward financial crisis, it has squandered a golden opportunity to make its case to the taxpayers and their elected representatives, to demonstrate success in doing what the majority of those people care most about: helping students learn. By refusing to provide public, comparable measures of student-learning results, New York's great public-university system has sown the seeds of long-term marginalization. In that, too, it has plenty of company nationwide.

Back in 2003, the landscape was different. The economy was on an upswing, and the SUNY trustees had just passed a resolution calling for an ambitious, universitywide plan to develop common measures of how well undergraduate students were reaching general-education goals. The measures were to focus on actual student learning "at two different points in time so as to permit the determination of the growth in learning that has occurred ('value added')." The results were to be "regularly and publicly" reported.

Those should be obvious—even pedestrian—requirements. While undergraduates major in hugely divergent fields, they should all acquire certain common abilities, including skills in communication, critical thinking, and analytical reasoning, along with a core of shared knowledge. There are many well-established ways to accurately measure such things, along with learning within the disciplines, particularly when the goal is only to create an institutionwide estimate of results.

Since different universities enroll students with different levels of average incoming ability, it makes sense to focus on how much students learn between the day they arrive on the campus and the day they leave. And since higher education is a publicly subsidized consumer market, that information should be given to the students and parents choosing colleges, as well as to the lawmakers paying the bills.

But in the year following the resolution, SUNY leadership was subjected to intense pressure from New York's Faculty Senate and other interest groups opposed to the plan. As a result, SUNY put in place a watered-down scheme in 2004. Value-added estimates of learning growth were no longer required. Instead of common systemwide measures, every university would choose its own standards, tests, and sampling procedures, making institutional comparisons difficult. They would also be made impossible because campus-specific data would be "used for confidential in-house discussions." The results, it was stressed, should never be used to "punish, publicly compare or embarrass faculty, courses, programs, departments, or institutions either individually or collectively." Note how public comparison was crammed between negative words, as if that's where it naturally belonged.

Even after the original plan was bowdlerized, a lot of interesting data remained. SUNY's "Master Plan 2004–2008" reported that 52.6 percent of students in the state's comprehensive colleges were "exceeding" standards in the application of scientific data, concepts, and models in one of the natural sciences. Meanwhile, 58 percent of students in doctoral institutions like SUNY-Buffalo weren't fully meeting expectations in data analysis and quantitative reasoning. While the measures were purposefully obscured by multi-institution aggregation, they were still interesting and in some cases alarming. Naturally, opponents of student assessment quickly moved to wipe them out.

Over the following months, a task force surveyed institutions about the assessment program. "Institutions responded very strongly against the requirement that institutions must report to System Administration the percentage of students who 'exceed, meet, approach, or fail to meet' standards," it found. In late 2004 a reporter began asking for campus-level results. After huddling with the Faculty Senate and others to "broker" the situation, the SUNY administration released some of the data. "Ultimately, the newspaper articles that appeared were few in number," the task force found, "possibly because the inability to compare institutions made the data of less interest." Possibly!

Having insisted that institution-level results be incomparable, and thus of little value, the SUNY institutions proceeded to argue that the results shouldn't be reported to state officials, on the grounds that they were incomparable, and thus of little value. Plus, you never know when someone might start asking rude questions. "Stop gathering the numbers at a central place where they are potentially vulnerable to a freedom-of-information request," pleaded one institution. And so New York's short, doomed experiment in publicly reporting how much college students learn effectively came to an end.

As a result, university leaders like President Simpson have a tough row to hoe. They're begging for the chance to charge students more money, but the system has no mechanism for reporting the kind of learning results that students can expect in exchange. And the remarkable thing is that SUNY is arguably a national leader in putting the college learning question on the table.

I spent the better part of 2008 working with my colleagues at Education Sector to study higher-education accountability systems in all 50 states. Most states have never even bothered to ask any serious questions about student learning. SUNY gathered real data of a kind, partially concealed it, and then stopped gathering it. It tried and failed. Most states haven't tried at all. The Voluntary System of Accountability undertaken by some public institutions holds promise - but it too falls short of providing true apples-to-apples comparisons of learning results.

To be sure, learning is complex and assessment is difficult. But America has—or so I am told—the greatest higher-education system in the world, filled with bright people who have been exquisitely trained to unravel complex phenomena and find truth in the unseen. If colleges can't come up with a reasonably accurate, comparable estimate of how much their students are learning, then perhaps the people who occupy them aren't as smart as we've been led to believe.

Some people argue that diverse institutional missions, settings, and student bodies make comparisons impossible. But that confuses types of diversity. Colleges may indeed have different approaches to learning, highly diverse student bodies, and histories as rich and varied as the nation itself. But the goals that colleges have for students are often very similar. Does anyone seriously believe that mastery of calculus means one thing at SUNY at Oneonta and something else at SUNY at Oswego? Do the principles of organic chemistry change when you drive from Plattsburgh to Potsdam? If institutional diversity of whatever kind leads to different student learning outcomes, that is precisely the kind of information students choosing colleges need to know.

In truth, colleges are perfectly comfortable being compared to one another - as long as the terms of comparison conform to what they hold dear. Higher education is built on status, after all. Certain departments and institutions are known to be first-rate, others up and coming, others the kind of scholarly backwater from which you either escape or get mired. Last year the high-profile New York State Commission on Higher Education recommended hiring 250 "eminent scholars" over five years, "eminent" being another way of saying "unusually successful, compared with everyone else." Yet few people think rank-and-file faculty members are being "punished" or "embarrassed" by the contrast.

The root cause of colleges' deep aversion to learning-based comparison is the shared knowledge that, even as our higher-education system has become ever-more elaborate and expensive, learning itself has been systematically shortchanged. Academic freedom to conduct scholarship has become all but synonymous with freedom to teach as well or as poorly as one pleases. Undergraduates are too often seen as itinerant sources of revenue, rather than the principal reason most higher-education institutions exist in the first place. The irony of colleges founded on the promise of truth steadfastly refusing to reveal crucial truths about themselves is becoming increasingly difficult to swallow.

It's time for higher education to abandon its intellectually bankrupt fight against public comparison of learning results, not in half steps or gradual measures, but by embracing the opportunity to prove just how valuable its services are in a time when learning matters more than ever before. If even half of what is said about the excellence of our higher-education system is true, it has a powerful case to make for increased public support, for more investment in times of economic peril, not less. All we lack is the one kind of knowledge that our knowledge institutions refuse to provide.