Two Modest Suggestions for the Regents

Recently the regents have asked us to perform another program review, whereby we count every graduate in the past five years in every major and compare that number to an arbitrary one, picked by them, to determine the "health" of or "demand" for that major. Is this how we decide what books to keep in the library? In 641 A.D. the Arab conqueror Omar ordered all the books in the library at Alexandria burned because "either the books contain what is in the Koran, in which case we don't have to read them, or they contain the opposite of what is in the Koran, in which case we must not read them." For six months the city baths were heated by burning parchment./1/ Do we want to reenact this either-or fallacy by picking a magic number to determine the fate of knowledge? Never mind that holding all units to the same arbitrary number despite large differences in enrollments makes only marginal sense. MSU-Bozeman enrolls about eight times as many students as MSU-Northern, for example. If the regents are serious about improving university education in Montana, perhaps they'll consider the following two suggestions. They are offered in the spirit of disinterested utility; the present author stands to gain nothing monetarily by the adoption or rejection of them.

Suggestion #1 concerns program review. As much as we all enjoy athletic events, and however much the spirit of cooperation may be fostered among the students who participate in college athletics, their numbers represent only a tiny fraction of the enrolled population in the MUS. So only they derive any direct educational benefit from athletic programs. Often we're told that some programs are inherently expensive but necessary because of the service their graduates provide to society; one thinks of medical schools, engineering schools, nursing schools, and perhaps flight schools. These provide us caretakers of our health and safety. Do athletic programs provide us the same returns for the investment? A quick look at some figures may help us decide.

This table shows actual expenditures for the units of the MUS in 1998, the last year for which our comptroller could obtain complete figures. They do not include monies spent on renovations or other building projects, like the $10 million improvement project for MSU-Bozeman's fieldhouse (announced in 1997 by President Malone at commencement) or startup costs for new athletic programs, like the $300,000 spent by MSU-Northern to launch football. (According to our comptroller, MSU-Northern's expected annual expenditure for football is about the same as Western's, about $190,000.) It's worth noting that at MSU-N, the athletic budget accounts for nearly $1 million, modest as athletic budgets go even in Montana, but still almost 10% of the annual budget.

If athletics were removed as a budgetary item and the money spent on scholarships, even MSU-N could award 1000 of them at $1000 each. At all MUS units now we see scholarships in the $50 to $250 range; how about 2000 of them at $500 each? Wouldn't this help recruiting? And 500 extra students under the present misguided funding system would bring about $1.5 million into the coffers of the school, instead of sending $1 million out.

Readers can perform the calculations for their own units. Praise the day when such will be the direction "program review" takes by fiat of the commissioner and/or regents! But eager anticipation is not yet warranted; Reason and Honesty, though seeking admission to those conclaves, are kept without the walls, huddled in the cold air of suspicion that issues therefrom.

Meantime, the regents and commissioner have decreed that all units must detail and execute some sort of outcomes assessment of each major, ostensibly to show that graduates have learned the materials they've studied. And this decree leads to suggestion #2. Because of relatively small enrollments--Montana after all barely breaks the 1 million population figure altogether--in most majors, the statistical results of our assessments are usually invalid, just like a poll with greater than plus or minus 3% error is invalid. What we've got as a result of mandated assessment is busywork, which is pretty near meaningless for measuring what our graduates have learned.

The cynical among us might see this as a sneaky way to praise or criticize teaching effectiveness, even though studies like Robert Scholes's The Rise and Fall of English (1997) and Larry Cuban's How Scholars Trumped Teachers (1999), as well as the tested maxim about leading a horse to water, show that most learning results from student, not professorial, effort. So here's an alternative assessment procedure. It costs MUS units very little, because students pay for it. It's nationally normed, and thus statistically valid. And if the regents mean to raise academic achievement, then starting at a set date they can call for minimum scores before awarding degrees for graduation. This successful method already governs which students receive high school degrees in France and Belgium, to name but two countries that are serious about measuring student progress. The instrument is the Graduate Record Examination. Administering it to all graduates has the additional happy advantage of identifying those students who are academically ready for graduate school, and so might produce larger enrollments for some MUS graduate programs.

These modest suggestions are offered in the spirit of communal improvement for the entire MUS. Is academic improvement on the regents' and commissioner's agenda? Their responses--or their silence--will tell us.

Notes

1. Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (New York: Oxford UP, 1980), 32.[Back]
2. Figures in the table were obtained during fall semester 1999 by MSU-Northern's comptroller. They were originally requested by student Marie Bradbury, whose kind permission makes possible their use in this column.[Back]