Interesting op-ed on Inside Higher Ed:  The Feds Are Coming, The Feds Are Coming!, by Richard Hersh:

Higher education has neither developed adequate metrics to assess learning nor demonstrated a willingness to publish such results when they are available, content to rely on and participate in, while at the same time damning, spurious college guides and reputation rankings. And it is not uncommon to hear faculty and administrators across the country protest that most of what we teach is too complex to be measured, that the diversity of college and university missions precludes one-size-fits-all assessment, or that the market place is the only required arbiter of quality. This implicit “trust us” attitude is now confronted by a market place that is questioning quality and is no longer accepting what amounts to higher education’s privilege of what is in essence a form of “faith-based” entitlement. …

The Spellings Commission got it right — quality needs to improve, accountability must become far more transparent, and assessing learning, including value-added assessment, is crucial to both. This is not to say, however, that this requires that one single test be imposed on all institutions or that that we know how to measure all that is worth learning. But it is to say that transparent, systematic learning assessment can be a powerful force for improvement and is necessary for regaining public trust in the public good served by higher education. …

What is needed before anything else, however, is for higher education to get its professional and collective act together immediately on the issues of learning assessment, accountability, and the role of accreditation lest the cry, “the feds are coming” result in a federal No College Left Behind.

In our article, What Law Schools Can Learn from Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, 82 Tex. L. Rev. 1483, 1554 (2004), Rafael Gely and I make a similar point:

In our view, law schools are faced with a clear choice. We can continue resisting public demands for accountability and transparency through rankings. But such resistance is futile, as a market that demands rankings of brain surgeons and heart-transplant programs will not accept protestations from the legal academy that what we do is simply too special to be evaluated with objective measures. …

As institutions and as individuals, we have nothing to fear from the accountability and transparency spotlight. Indeed, we do our best work in the light. We should welcome the opportunity to tell the world what we do and help them measure our performance as teachers and scholars. If we do not, the story will be told by others and it will no longer be our own.