Inside Higher Ed: Accountability System Launched
A new way for students and their families to compare colleges — and for legislators and others to evaluate them — was unveiled Sunday with the start of a campaign to get institutions to sign up to use it.
“College Portrait,” as the effort is called, is a template for information that public, four-year institutions will provide online in an easily comparable way. Some of the information — statistics on the student body, figures on college costs — is fairly commonly found (if not always in comparable ways) on colleges’ Web sites today. But the program also includes a new method for measuring graduation and retention rates and, controversially, a requirement that institutions that choose to participate conduct and release results from standardized tests as a means of measuring the learning that goes on at their institutions. Those tests would be administered to small, representative cohorts of students — possibly 100 or fewer freshmen and a similar group of seniors — and would not be generally offered or required of all students.
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