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| Photo courtesy Regents College London, via creative commons |
In an interesting opinion piece by Jack Grove in Times Higher Education (THE) - a journal published in the UK - today, entitled "You can't have it, it's private" talks about researchers finding it difficult to get data from some private higher ed institutions. The reason, academics say, is that institutions fear negative exposure the data might reveal. It is interesting because here in the US, institutions are required to provide data to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) (whether that information looks negative or not) and optionally may provide information to national publications or college guides for public relations purposes. Being required to provided accurate data to NCES almost makes it impossible if not inadvisable to provide inaccurate or misleading data to ratings guides or journals, as it is easy enough to check data against what is provided to NCES. However, an institution's wariness of the public's reception of such data is well founded, as often the rankings publications do not tell the whole story. Just this Spring, US News and World Report released their 2011 college cost rankings, in which some private higher ed institutions were made to look like a terrible tuition deal, because taken out of context, costs were presented without deeper explanation. In the report, for example, Bowdoin College rates as one of the most expensive colleges to attend, but the reality is, Bowdoin does not separate tuition from room and board, and so the costs were presented together under Tuition. While that may be evident to those in the world of higher ed, a parent or potential student might not understand the complexities underlying the data.
Luckily, consumers have a handy tool to use here in the US when shopping for higher ed, and it's also a tool that helps researchers. Because all US institutions are required to report to NCES through IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System), a portal was created for consumers called College Navigator. This tool, one of the more positive results of the initiatives by Secretary Margaret Spellings's Commission on the Future of Higher Education allows the user to perform a college comparison and to drill down using indicators to help see explanations for the information shown. For example, an institution might show a low student retention rate which, on the surface (especially when compared side by side in a rankings report), might indicate a lack of ability on the institutions' part to keep their students to stay, but the reality being perhaps that the institution has a low amount of first time full time freshman, and actually accepts more transfer students in to the institution who are further on in their studies, and stay until they graduate. Consumers are able to better see this kind of caveat when presented through College Navigator. It also allows Institutional Researchers to benchmark their own institutions against their peers.
I'm pretty sure I will be posting more about the Rankings Game, as it seems to be a hot topic in higher ed, and especially with Institutional Researchers, as we are the folks behind the scenes preparing and providing the information. Consumers are out there using these tools. We need to make sure that our data is clear, transparent, and available. Secrecy is old school.
