RALEIGH – Intercollegiate Studies Institute Vice President for Programs Mike Ratliff uses a story about a University of Colorado student to discuss what he considers to be some of the problems with higher education today.
The student had originally intended to study engineering. However, some friends convinced him to change majors to communication studies in order to have more fun in college. When the student graduated, he found out that the only job he could gain were ones that required a high school degree. Even the military would only allow him to enter as an enlisted solider and not the officer training program.
To Ratliff, the student’s struggle to find gainful employment after college highlights some of the problems with higher education. Ratliff believes that higher education, as an institution, is not making a return on the investment made by taxpayers, alumni and others.
In a discussion March 7 at the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society Luncheon, Ratliff outlined some of those concerns as well as a plan by ISI to make higher education more accountable to that investment. Ratliff says that more than $270 billion is invested in higher education each year through state appropriations or other funding.
“I don’t think we are getting the results for that investment that we deserve,” Ratliff said.
Few people understand the depths of some of the issues regarding the failing of higher education, Ratliff said. Several polls indicate that most Americans have a high level of respect for the performance of higher education. One poll, Ratliff quoted, stated that 80 percent of Americans would not change anything about higher education.
“That tells us that they are just not well informed,” Ratliff said.
Why most Americans are not well informed, Ratliff said, is because higher education as an industry avoids conducting performance reviews of its product. Without those reviews, higher education goes without any form of accountability for all its spending and programs.
Ratliff said ISI is preparing to produce a pilot program to provide a level of accountability review on the performance of higher education to educate its students properly and prepare them for the workforce. Twenty-two schools have been selected by ISI to interview freshmen students about their knowledge of various institutions, such as government, and trace their educational progress through their final year in school. The survey will measure what the students learn and rank the schools based on its performance in educating students.
“It’s time to measure the outcome of higher education on our campuses, and to do that on a recurring basis and a comprehensive basis, and to make it available to those people who can hold higher education accountable – legislators, trustees, donors, parents and others,” Ratliff said. “They need that information. If colleges and universities will not measure their product themselves, then we think there is a real opportunity for ISI, as an outside entity, to measure how they are doing and to provide that information to people who can hold them accountable.”
Ratliff says he believes that the scientific survey will find that biases would be increased because of their time on campuses. This is because a large majority of professors and other teachers in higher education are predominantly liberal, another problem facing higher education, he said.
“There is a narrowness to intellectually outlook on campuses,” Ratliff said.
The role of examining the performance of colleges and universities is one similar to Ratliff’s previous military career before joining ISI. Ratliff, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, was the Director of Naval Intelligence and looked closely at Soviet and Arabic naval operations.
Ratliff said there are parts of his 30-year naval career that corresponds with his work, now, to reform higher education.
“Some of that analytically experience translates to the reform of higher education,” Ratliff said. “You are trying to understand higher education. Trying to understand what is going on there and design the effort that can be employed to drive reform there.”
Ratliff said making the jump from the U.S. Navy to the public policy field was not difficult to make. He had experience working with ISI through his collegiate career at Towson University and kept in constant contact with the organization during his military career.
Even before 9/11, he thought that “the first line of our defense for our country was on the college campuses,” Ratliff said. “That is where the next generation’s thinking is being formed.”
Shannon Blosser (sblosser@popecenter.org) is a staff writer with the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Chapel Hill