Education Sector in the News

TIME education reporter Gilbert Cruz sits down with Policy Director Kevin Carey to discuss why parents—and public officials—should demand more accountability from colleges.

Excerpt from this TIME interview:

"With almost 40% of the nation's college-age students in some form of post-secondary education—and tuition costs as high as they've ever been—we don't really have a handle on what students learn at university. Or whether they're learning anything at all. Kevin Carey, the policy director at Washington think tank Education Sector, believes that many colleges do a bad job of (a) teaching students and (b) getting them to graduate. An essay he wrote for the December issue of Democracy is making waves in the higher-ed world because it describes how lots of colleges are keeping confidential a lot of student-assessment data...

You refer in your essay to a 'veil of secrecy that has shrouded higher education' for a very long time. What information don't colleges want people to know?

There's the information that exists that they don't want you to know about, and then there's the information that doesn't exist that they don't want to exist. In the latter category, no one knows how much students learn at a given college or university. No one knows. The entire process for assessing learning is completely idiosyncratic and course-based. Now, in some cases, there's good reason for that. There may be courses where literally there is one professor somewhere who is the only person who teaches a certain subject a certain way. At the same time, there is also a great deal of commonality. If you look at the courses students tend to take—almost everyone who goes to college takes a psychology class and takes an English class and takes a math class and takes basic science classes. Virtually no college assesses how much students learn in any subject and publishes data in a way that would allow you to compare it to other colleges. That information simply does not exist. ..."

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