Idea of the Day: Help Develop Better and More Widely Available Information About College Quality

September 2, 2008

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Being an empowered student customer means having ready access to high-quality and easily digestible information on a range of quality measures, including rates of degree completion, learning assessment outcomes, faculty and program effectiveness, and costs. Yet there is much debate but little consensus about what kinds of higher education quality measures to develop and how to provide students and parents easy access to this type of information.

CAP recommends that the Fund for Innovation in Postsecondary Education, or FIPSE, partner with the National Institute for Standards and Technology, or NIST, with extensive quality experience through the Malcolm Baldridge Quality Program, to fund demonstration projects and invest in research to develop and disseminate a consensus set of college-quality measures that can be used by consumers and potentially adopted as standards by states and local accrediting agencies.

For more on this topic, please see:

• College-Ready Students, Student-Ready Colleges: An Agenda for Improving Degree Completion in Postsecondary Education by Louis Soares and Christopher Mazzeo