Chief academic officers must stress the need for systematic assessment of the “value added” by a college education, urged Richard H. Hersh, senior fellow at the Council for Aid to Education and co-director of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) project, in his closing plenary address at the 2005 CIC Institute for Chief Academic Officers.

Studies of the outcomes of education have shown, Hersh began, that it does not matter where students go to college, but it does matter that they go to college. He cited the finding by Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini in How College Affects Students, that simply going to college—any college—makes a significant difference in a young person’s psychological development. “Although they found wide variations in learning within each college or university, they were unable to uncover significant differences between colleges once the quality of the entering students was taken into account.”

“If this is true,” Hersh said, “then we need systematic evidence to prove our claims that it does matter where a student goes to college.” Hersh stressed that CAOs should encourage faculty members to embrace the use of assessment tools such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) tests and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). CAOs can use the results of these assessments to begin important discussions with the faculty about the quality of teaching and learning, and what is working and what is not in the curriculum.

“The higher the expectations and standards shared by faculty and administrators, the higher the outcomes,” Hersh claimed, adding that “assessment is a powerful signaling tool that allows for improvement in many directions.” He indicated that CLA results are aggregated at the institutional level to permit comparisons across institutions and to determine how well individual schools are doing. In addition, the data allow CAOs and other campus officials “to show students how they are doing, and to show faculty members how to determine if they’re getting the desired results from their teaching.” CLA findings to date do, in fact, show that “which school a student attends does make a difference,” he noted.

Hersh added that “unless the academy is willing to assess learning in more rigorous ways, the cry for enforced accountability will become louder, and government intervention will become more likely.”

View a supplemental article by Hersh related to this session.