Teaching, Learning and the College Ratings Framework - Patricia McGuire, Huffington Post

USDE has now declared learning outcomes impossible to consider in its framework for establishing ratings on the quality and value of institutions of higher education. Instead, reverting to the outmoded academic practice of determining quality through inputs, the Department's metrics are heavy on inputs data about the economic profile of students (highlighting the percentage of Pell Grantees in the student body is like counting books in the library) but short on true learning outcomes (the seriously flawed federal graduation rate measuring seat time in one place is a surrogate for the question of whether students have actually learned anything). By dismissing the primary work of colleges and universities -- teaching and learning -- as impossible to measure across institutions, the proposed framework exposes the utter folly of the Administration's plan to impose some kind of generic rating system on the thousands of disparate institutions of higher education in this nation. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patricia-mcguire/teaching-learning-and-the_b_6362768.html