How do we know that a school or university is delivering tangible results? You might be surprised, but it turns out that measuring the impact of education has not been a core focus for schools.
Of course, there has been global research over the years about how a successful education can have an important impact throughout someone’s life (read “Does education reduce income equality?“ for example). But at the school level, or at the training level, there is usually not a lot of focus on impact.
We’ll look at 2 different ways to measure education outcomes:
The traditional academic one, based on research and means provided
The modern one, based on job impact
The Traditional Way: Research and Means
Universities have 2 distinct roles:
Education: teach students
Research: produce new knowledge
Research tends to play a big part in how universities measure their performance. This has been described in The Innovative University, a book by famous researcher Clayton Christensen:
Teachers are spending a lot of time working on research and some of their time on teaching students (with the help from assistants sometimes). However, they are usually evaluated on their research more than they are on their teaching. This is how they get promoted and how they can obtain tenure (an indefinite academic appointment at the university).
This is why, most of the time, universities focus on… research. You’re the best university:
Because you’re providing the best means for education:
The best teachers (they are famous, have a Nobel prize, have PhDs…)
The best library (preferably a big one)
The best campus (with sports facilities)
The best brand (brands hold a lot of value in education, it’s always a great social proof to say you’ve been at Harvard 😎)
Because your teachers are producing the best research papers:
Number of research papers published
Bonus points if your research has been published in top academic journals like Science and Nature
Bonus points if your research paper have been cited many times by other researchers
In practice, the number of research papers published is one of the most distinctive elements used to evaluate teachers and ultimately the university. University rankings value research a lot.
The Modern Way: Graduation and Job Placement Rates
Schools are more and more invited by governments to look at 2 different metrics:
The graduation rate
The job placement rate
These metrics look at how efficient a school is at helping students acquire new skills, and how these skills end up being useful in the workplace.
This is a very different way to look at how efficient schools are. Here, we’re looking more at the results of the learning process.
Graduation Rate
The graduation rate measures the percentage of your students completing the training and ending up with the qualification.
Graduation Rate = Number of students achieving qualification / Number of students who started the training
If you have 100 students and 78 of them end up with the qualification, it means that you have a 78% graduation rate.
In a way, this should tell you how efficient a school is at helping students to acquire new skills.
However, the goal should never be to get to a 100% graduation rate. Getting into a school should never be a guarantee that you’ll be receiving a qualification (otherwise you would just be “buying a qualification”). Schools need to do what they can to best help students learn, but they can’t do everything. Students also have to put some effort in! 😆
Job Placement Rate
Once students have graduated, they’ll usually be looking for a job. Schools can measure how efficient they are at helping their students get a job by calculating their job placement rate.
In a nutshell:
Job placement rate = Number of graduates who get a job / Total number of graduates
If you have 100 graduates and 70 of them have a job, then the job placement rate is 70%.
Of course, “getting a job” can mean very different things. Some people don’t want to become employees and will create their own company, become freelancers, etc. Some will get a job but in a totally different field than the one they were trained for (in this case, did the school have any real impact?). Some will get a job but at a much lower salary. Should it count?
This is why there are wildly different ways to measure the job placement rate. Once again, comparing schools job placement rates is very tricky as almost none of them use the same formula.
Some organizations like CIRR are trying to set up standards so that schools measure their impact in the same way, however they only had very moderate success to this day.
Beyond Graduation and Job Placement Rates
Graduation and job placement rates are practical. They’re a first step in measuring concrete education outcomes for a school or university.
However, they’re not perfect for at least 2 reasons:
One can wonder if the goal of education is just to help people get a job. It’s true that sometimes education is too disconnected from the workplace. However, education serves other purposes, for example in helping people become better citizens. This is not currently measured.
Your social environment plays a big part in your chances of success. If you are privileged, you’ll probably have to put in less efforts to succeed. If your parents are wealthy with a big network, you have a better likelihood of getting support at home while learning, which will help you to graduate, and then to find a job.
This is why other measures should also be considered, although they can be harder to track. For instance, one should try to measure if the school is having a measurable effect on one’s trajectory. For example, a school helping under-privileged students to get a high-level job should be considered as more impactful than a school helping privileged students to get a high-level job.
