I wrote an essay yesterday about unbundling college. You might want to read that first before tackling this essay.
In today’s essay, we’re going to decide how we’re going to judge the efficiency of college. What framework should we be using and why?
A Framework for Judging the Efficiency of College
Efficiency is actually fairly easy to define: maximal output for minimum input.
And input is also fairly easy to define: minimum resources to be used in terms of time and money.
It is the output bit that is rather more difficult to specify and define.
What is the output of a college? Here are some candidates:
- The number of students who graduate in a given year
- The marks these students score
- Particularly in the Indian scenario, the placement record of the college
- Number of seminars/workshops/outreach programmes conducted by the college
- Research output of the faculty/students in the college
Let’s work our way through each of these, and highlight the problems that present themselves:
- Number of students graduating per year:
Do large classrooms – that is, classes with a very large number of students in them – work well?
The obvious reason I ask this question is if you’re going to graduate more students, the number of students per class must go up.
There is a large amount of academic research on the subject, if you feel like going through it. I haven’t read all of the papers on the subject, but the consensus seems to be that larger classes are necessary from an economic viewpoint, but don’t work as well as small classes would. Key points being, there ideally needs to be some sort of an opportunity to have a discussion with the professor, and that doesn’t necessarily work out well in a large class.
I’ll speak of my own personal experience in this blog post, rather than cite academic studies. The largest class I have taught included 250 students, while the smallest included just two students. Neither of those extremes is ideal: 250 is more of a speech than a lecture, while two students is economically infeasible. My personal preference would be for a class size of not more than thirty.
More students graduating per dollar spent by the university isn’t a great way to judge the output, or the educational outcome, of a college, because students don’t necessarily learn better in a large classroom. And in any case, if you are going to use this is a measure, online classes have offline classes beat! - The marks these students score:
Here’s a Hindustan Times article for your reading pleasure.
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I quote:
“Compared to last year, the number of students scoring 95% and above has increased by 118.6% and those getting 90% and above by 67.48% this year in the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) Class 12 results announced on Monday.
A total of 38,686 students have scored 95% and above marks in aggregate of all subjects, up by 118.6% from 17,693 in 2019. As many as 1,57,934 students have scored 90% and above, 67.48% higher than last year’s tally of 94,299.”
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Are students this year twice as good as they were last year? If so, why? If not, are we just giving more marks this year than we did last year?
Personally, I don’t think this year’s cohort is any better (or worse) than last year’s. It is quite likely that marks have been given more liberally this year than they were the last year. You can work your way through to what the equilibrium will be, but here’s my assessment: grades become mostly meaningless in the long run. Especially when they’re being handed out like this.
Judging the output of a college by taking the average marks scored by the graduating batch doesn’t make for a great outcome either. - Placement record of the college:
I should state at the outset that I am the faculty-in-charge for placements at Gokhale Institute.
Colleges, in an ideal world, should have skin in the game. Is learning a means to an end in itself, or is it the means to an end? If it is the means to an end, and that end is gainful employment, then should college not be paid only if the end is achieved? Income sharing agreements are, you might argue, a natural next step in this regard.
But that being said, there is a part of me that dies a little when I think about the whole means to an end thing. Yes, employment matters, and yes, colleges should be held to higher standards than they are right now in this regard. But I would hate to live in a world where you go to college only in order to get employed. There’s surely more to life and education than that! - Number of seminars/workshops/outreach programmes conducted by the college
Goodhart’s Law. Goodhart’s Law. Goodhart’s Law. - Research output of the faculty in the college
See 4. above.
Honestly, I don’t quite know how to measure educational outcomes, and I’m not the only one. By the way, the first chapter from “The Case Against Education” is worth reading while thinking about some of the issues we’re speaking about here.
But this raises an important, and potentially problematic issue. Change is worth pursuing if what is new is objectively better than the old. But as it turns out, we find ourselves unable to settle on an objective measure by which to differentiate between the old and the new!
Consider the range of services that a college provides:
There are four outcomes you get from college: grades, placements, peer networks and the degree. Of the four, we have spoken about and discarded grades, placements and number of degrees awarded as useful/appropriate measures of outcomes in education. That leaves peer networks, and this is perhaps even more nebulous and difficult-to-measure than the other three.
Of the lot, employability and the quality of peer networks are (to me) the most important. But the latter is literally immeasurable, and the former ought to not be the only benchmark for judging the outcomes from education.
There is, as it turns out, a problem waiting to be solved, and it is a fundamental one.
If I’m wrong, please let me know how!
EconForEverybody 