Professor Elam

In Education Communication we focus this week on Vision Mission Outcomes. Many administrators make the common mistake of  substituting inputs as a measure of their school's success. For example, I once read the description of a campus by its President in which he paraded the appraised value of the buildings!  What pray tell does that have to do with student success or their outcomes? If they were studying in open shelters as perhaps Plato's students did, would that mean poor results?

As usual the expert on this is Tom Sowell  Click the link to read his latest column on inputs versus outputs. As he says, the USNWR survey focuses on inputs, not what happens to the students. We will read his column in class today. Check out his website

Again, one of the output measures I have for you as a class is to change you from a consumer of education information to an evaluator of information. Think how often you read a description of say a college or K-12 school and it cites these stats

Number of students (the all time administration favorite!)
Number and size of buildings – the library at SWT is cloaked in Italian marble, the President at the time made two trips to Italy to pick out the marble, imagine how that went over with faculty….
Number of books in the library – what is wrong here, is anyone reading them, circulation or book reports assigned would be far better
Athletics – we won regional whatever…
93% of faculty have PhDs in their field

None of these measures tell us anything about what happens to the students. I mentioned yesterday that the best of state colleges only manage about 61% graduation rates. What of the graduates themselves? What happens to the 39%  Remember 67% of the graduates move back home, gee how many does this leave that are in the workforce?  Remember the piece we read about improving providing a high quality college education – hmm how many people would automatically translate that to a high presidential salary?

This is a very important metric when we establish what our outcomes will be. Are  we measuring student success or are we just touting our inputs?