That was one of the key takeaways from a policy briefing staged on Capitol Hill Tuesday by The Civil Rights Project within the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at UCLA.
The briefing took on the form of a symposium and featured papers penned by several scholars who sought to illuminate the complexities associated with trying to develop standards by which to judge institutions of higher learning — particularly if those standards will be used to determine financial aid, as the Obama administration has signaled it wants to eventually do.
Several speakers suggested that graduation rates alone — typically the most popular of all benchmark — are not a fair measure of institutional effectiveness. Instead they said that certain variables — such as having fewer financial resources per student or serving students with less academic preparedness — should be weighted differently so that minority-serving institutions are not unfairly penalized.
“Any national rating system must be fair to students and fair to systems that serve many low-income, first-generation and underrepresented groups,” said Sylvia Hurtado, professor and director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, noting that such groups are less likely to graduate irrespective of the type of institution they attend.
Professor Gary Orfield, co-director of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA, said it would be wrongheaded for the proposed rating system to cause a college to be deemed as subpar — and to lose financial aid — simply because it accepts students who are less academically prepared.
“If we take those institutions that are going to take a chance on [less academically prepared students] and then punish the college for taking them, we’re replacing one crisis for another and cutting off social mobility,” Orfield said.
