Supporters of parental choice of schools claim that this reform will improve education, but critics charge that the evidence for this claim is thin and anecdotal. Not so, say James E. McClure and T. Norman Van Cott, economics professors from Ball State University. According to the Wall Street Journal (June 25, 1990), Professors McClure and Van Cott argue that there's plenty of evidence that choice leads to excellence, and it comes from the U.S. system of higher education.
It's true that our colleges and universities operate on what might be called a choice system. Students graduating from high school are free to apply to any college they wish, and if they get into more than one college, they are free to pick the one they prefer. As Professors McClure and Van Cott point out, colleges and universities don't have "captive students" so they "must compete for student enrollment by offering attractive educational packages." But is it also true that "the salutary consequence of colleges' self-interested pursuit of students is a system of higher education without equal"?
Parts of our system of higher education are certainly without equal, and talented students from all over the world flock to our best colleges and universities. But is it true of the entire system of higher education or even most of it? How can it be when our high schools graduate poorly educated students and over half of graduates go on to postsecondary education? Do students who could not write a decent paragraph or do a two-step math problem when they were 17-year-olds in high school suddenly become able to do so when they matriculate at a college at 18? The widespread complaints of college teachers about how much remediation their students require tell a different story.
One of the reasons people can talk so confidently about how we have the best higher education system is that there are no commonly applied measures for what U.S. higher education achieves. We constantly assess the achievement of students in elementary and secondary schools, and even though our measures leave a lot to be desired, they give us some sense of our students' performance. But we don't find out what students who graduate from college know and are able to do, and we don't assess what value is added by four years in college.
So the talk about the excellence of our entire system of higher education is nothing but assertion. If we didn't test students in elementary and secondary schools, there's no doubt that people in public education would be saying exactly the same kind of thing.
Although there are few performance measures of higher education, a 1985 study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Literacy: Profiles of America's Young Adults, does give us some clues about the skills of a representative sample of 21- to 25-year-olds, including high school graduates and those with a two- or four-year degree or more.
The good news is that there is no question that young adults with postsecondary degrees score higher on NAEP's literacy assessment than ones who only have a high school diploma -- although of course we can't tell how much of this is a result of what college added and how much of it reflects the fact that kids who went on already knew more than the ones who did not. So 91 percent of two- or four-year college graduates can write a letter explaining an error in billing (as opposed to 67 percent of those with high school diplomas), and 80 percent (as opposed to 48 percent) can locate information in a news article. But what they don't know is shocking.
Sixty percent of young adults with two- or four-year college degrees were unable to use a bus schedule effectively. And 40 percent can't look at a simple cafeteria menu and figure out how much change they should get from $3. 00 if they bought a particular soup and a salad and how much to leave for a I0 percent tip.
Based on what we know of students entering college, their high dropout rates and the increasingly longer time it takes them to graduate -- and considering what NAEP's survey of young adults tells us claims about the universal excellence of U.S. colleges seem pretty farfetched. To the extent that market forces are operating in postsecondary education, it might be more accurate to say that they are making sure there is a college for every kind of consumer -- from the kids who enter college with an extraordinarily high level of achievement to ones who don't have to know very much to get in or learn very much to graduate.
Of course this allows for lots of choice, and it certainly has helped produce one of the most open and accessible higher education systems in the world. But that's not the same thing as universal excellence. Competition in higher education has nourished many mediocre institutions, as well as excellent ones. And contrary to the claim of choice supporters, it does not inevitably cause the mediocre ones to go under or improve for want of customers.
The case of higher education is indeed useful for elementary and secondary education: It proves that choice, whatever its considerable merits, does not necessarily lead to quality.