Why Students Don’t Suffer (Part III)

The Student as Data

The credentialization of knowledge by university accreditors is one of the primary drivers in the standardization of knowledge and the growth of administrators and staff.[21] To be certified by these accreditors is to have access to the federal government’s financial loans so students can borrow in order to pay for school. The traditional division of supervising universities – the federal government monitors issues of financial support and access, the states focus on consumer protection, and accreditors examine educational quality – has changed with the federal and state governments relinquishing their responsibilities to accreditors.

Accreditors now include access and consumer protection in their mission to see whether universities are ensuring equal access to all types of individuals and groups for an education and to see whether students are learning.[22] These two responsibilities are amendable to metrics of quantification by examining how students received financial support and default on their loans, how many students are retained and graduate, how many students are employed after graduation and how much they make afterwards. The outcomes especially for student learning have changed from qualitative, peer-review self-studies to corporate documents of strategic mission statements, branding, and numerical data. Universities are now accountable to these metrics with poorer outcomes interpreted as a sign of failure rather than a baseline from which the institution should improve.[23]

Quality of education consequently is defined in the metrics of student retention and postgraduate salaries rather than evaluations of student character and reflections about life. These metrics assert themselves even more today because in the age of technology information is more available. Data, as the numerical assignment and valuing of reality, has the illusion of being objective and transparent.[24] It is therefore a valuable commodity by which accreditors, administrators, teachers, and students evaluate themselves. Those experiences, activities, and moments not amendable to the pre-set standardized categories of evaluations are ignored. It is no wonder that the university is governed by the metrics of external affirmation because of the ease and attractiveness of data that accreditors use to see whether an educational institute has succeeded or failed.

The power of data resides in its apparent objectivity, an attractiveness that is especially appealing in democratic societies where, according to Tocqueville, individuals believe that everyone has an equal right to understand reality for him- or herself.[25] In democratic societies, each individual relies upon his or her own judgment to make decisions and reduces everything to its practical or utilitarian value: to “accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as lesson to be used in doing otherwise and doing better.”[26] But because everyone is equal to one another in democratic society, no one is certain that his or her judgment is better than anyone else’s, ultimately yielding a consensus dominated by the majority.

But the assumptions behind the creation and reception of data require examination, for data is a type of scientism, an ideology that assumes the fact-value distinction where facts are derived only from the scientific-technological method and values are products of only subjective prejudice.[27] On the one hand, knowledge is restricted to realities that conform to the scientific-technological method because this process is objective, valid, and universal; on the other hand, any realities outside of this method is an illegitimate form of knowledge because it is unscientific. The use of data by accreditors, universities, teachers, and students is to de-legitimate a whole set of experiences and knowledge that cannot be standardized or quantified in a pre-given way.

Now there is nothing wrong with data as long as it is recognized as one way of evaluation among many.[28] The problem today is that data is the only way to evaluate anything in education. This not only neglects a valuable body of knowledge and experiences, particularly those who are needed for cultivating sympathy and empathy, but also has several potential negative consequences. Muller lists a number of these problems, such as goal displacement through diversion of effort to what gets measure; the promotion of short-termism and the discouragement of risk-tasking and innovation; the cost in people’s time to compile data; and the diminishment of cooperation and common purpose in the university where reward is based on individualized measured performance.[29] Rather than cooperation and teamwork, competition and rivalry become the driving motivation for people.

The university’s demand for more data also changes the nature and purpose of teaching from the cultivation of the interiority of a student’s intellect and character to the mastery of measurable performances of skill sets. Students therefore see education as a series of competencies to be conquered before graduation and a career; teachers view their vocation in term of citation indexes and student evaluation scores; and administrators conceive of the university as a store to placate student consumers, manage teacher employees, and appease the accreditor board.[30] The university has become like any other business in the United States governed to maximum growth, minimize liability, and motivated by profit.

There are no immediate practical solutions to this present state of American higher education. Accreditors and administrators are too entrenched in the power while students and teachers implicitly agree with this arrangement so as long as students pass their courses and teachers are mostly left alone. The university has become the preparatory grounds for students to succeed in a globalized economy where things are quantified, standardized, and externally sanctioned. The interior life of the students, their character and the cultivation of sympathy and empathy, is absent in this world because it cannot be measured.

Notes

[21] R. Kelchen (2018) Higher Education Accountability; S. D. Phillips (2018) Accreditation on the Edge.

[22] S. R. Gallagher (2016) The Future of University Credentials.

[23] J. Z. Muller (2018) The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 67-88.

[24] L. Floridi (2014) The 4^th Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press); D. Beer (2016). Metric Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan); C. N. Davidson (2017) The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux (New York: Basic Books).

[25] L. Trepanier (2011) “Tocqueville, Weber, and Democracy: The Condition of Equality and the Possibility of Charisma in America” in L. Trepanier, ed. Political Rhetoric and Leadership in Democracy (Cedar City, UT: Southern Utah University Press, 2011), 22-48.

[26] A. d. Tocqueville (1990) Democracy in America Volume 2, Phillips Bradley, trans. (New York: Vintage Classics), 3.

[27] L. Trepanier (2008) “The Recovery of Science in Eric Voegelin’s Thought,” in Lee Trepanier, ed. Technology, Science, and Democracy (Cedar City, UT: Southern Utah University Press), 44-54.

[28] Muller provides a checklist to see whether one should use data and how to use it to evaluate performance. The checklist includes questions like “What kind of data are you thinking of measuring?”, “How useful is the data?”, “How useful is more data?”, “What are the costs of not relying upon data?”, “To what purposes will data be put: to whom will the information be made transparent?”, “What are the costs of acquiring the data?”, and “How and by whom is data developed?” Muller warns that even the best data are subject to corruption or goal displacement and that “recognizing the limits of the possible is the beginning of wisdom” (182). See J. Z. Mueller, The Tyranny of Metrics, 175-83.

[29] Ibid., 169-74.

[30] B. Ginsberg (2011) The Fall of Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press); W. G. Bowen and E. M. Tobin (2015) Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press); T. Kaufman-Osborn (2017) “Disenchanted Professionals: The Politics of Faculty Governance in the Neoliberal Academy,” Perspectives on Politics 15/1, 100-15; R. Srigley (2018) “Whose University is It Anyway?” Los Angeles Review of Books, 22 February. Available at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/whose-university-is-it-anyway/#!.