A recent report by the Veterans Education Project argues that a policy proposal that would hold colleges and universities accountable for the value of education they provide would unfairly disadvantage nontraditional institutions, reports Inside Higher Ed. Proponents of the policy say the report misrepresents what would be practiced.
The policy, proposed by Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn) and organizations like Third Way and the Century Foundation, would measure how much of a institution's tuition dollars are used for instructional spending in order to see how schools with poor student outcomes are using their resources, reported Inside Higher Ed. Colleges with a lack of resources would not be penalized for not improving outcomes.
The Veterans Education Project report, authored by Andrew Gillen and Jason Delisle, stated that for-profit institutions would be at a disadvantage, as public nonprofits would not be penalized because they have higher instructional spending ratios. They indicated a "weak correlation between spending and outcomes."
However, proponents of the instructional spending test say that the VEP report misinterprets how the metric would actually be used to examine student outcomes.
"The purpose of instructional expenditure policies was never to suggest that they—either by themselves or in conjunction with outcomes—would be adequate proxies for quality," Barmak Nassirian, vice president for higher education policy at Veterans Education Success, told Inside Higher Ed. "Quality is much more complicated than that."
Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for Third Way, added that the spending-to-outcomes ratio would only help determine the direction of what should be done to raise outcomes. "Instructional spending is not a proxy for outcomes—it's a diagnosis of why the outcomes are bad," Erickson told Inside Higher Ed.
Related Link
Inside Higher Ed
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/09/08/report-proposals-test-quality-unfairly-target-profits