Most colleges and universities take up "outcomes assessment" at the behest of accreditation agencies — which seem to be staffed largely by extraordinarily unimaginative recyclers of edu-speak. If we can get accreditation agencies that care about genuine academic achievement, rather than, say, "values-based outcomes," then those agencies can put legitimate and serious pressure on colleges and universities to clean up their acts. But what are the chances of that happening? Who will police the policers?

Honestly, if you can't read or do simple fractions by the time you're in college then teaching that in college is far too little, too late. Colleges shouldn't be tasked with cleaning up the mess left by the rest of the educational system as a last ditch effort to teach these kids the basics, if for no other reason than that would be an enormously expensive and inefficient way to go about it even if they were capable of it. It seems to me that where colleges are falling down on the job is letting unprepared students matriculate in the first place. If they stopped admitting students who couldn't identify the three branches of government or compare the cost of food items the problem, and the pressure to fix it, would be laid back at the feet of the parents and institutions whose responsibility it was in the first place.

Is there any actual evidence that Americans are losing out to non-Americans in *getting* jobs? We might lose out to other nations in creating jobs in the first place; or we might lose out to other nations in competing for jobs at the lowest possible wage. But it seems like there's a slim percentage of US jobs that are hired out to non-US citizens because of ability (and the US exports plenty of citizens to do these jobs in other nations, so it's probably pretty balanced).

I'm not saying students shouldn't be tested. Test all you want. Testing creates jobs! But I don't think unemployment today is caused by failure to write coherent paragraphs. That logic is whack.

This discussion of academe's responsibility to the job market, assessment as a vehicle for progress, etc. amuses me. Academic institutions exist in an environment dominated by external influences and are keenly aware of where they funding flows from. In the US, with our saturated higher education marketplace, there is also keen competition between institutions for resources. The awarding of college degrees to students who can't write simple paragraphs, do simple math, or think their way out of the proverbial paper-bag is an inevitable consequence of the increase in American affluence over the past 60+ years that has led to ever larger legions of young people flooding into the halls of the academy. For many institutions, students equate directly to tuition dollars which provides a strong incentive to keep the doors open and the students coming. These "market forces" provide an inevitable pressure that drives expectations downward at the majority of institutions that rely on tuition dollars to keep the lights on. At those institutions endowed enough to not be forced into viewing students as revenue, the same market pressures encourage the raising of academic expectations as this is what employers of their students desire. The problem of lower standards is, consequently, unlikely to improve until their is a divorce between academic funding and tuition (in whatever form that might take).

The reality is hat our undergraduate population is poorly prepared for the rigors of higher education (done right) and that our system of 4-yr baccalaureate degrees was never really meant to handle the volume of students we try to push through the system today. The problem begins in our primary and secondary education systems and it is naive to think that 4 years is going to serve as a fix for 13 years of public primary education that is driven by least common denominators. Until we can fix problems there, our higher education system will remain what it is - the best in the world in a small percentage of our institutions and mediocre to shoddy in a larger fraction of the remainder.

pr0phet -- Well said, and just be aware that you are pretty much preaching to the choir over here. This site has made the points you make many times over the years, as have many of my commenters. Every post can't make every point--and this one just touches on one issue among many. So the post you see above was not written with no awareness of the issues you raise, but with full recognition that these large, intractable problems are there as a backdrop for every discussion we have about reforming higher ed -- and K-12, which I write about a lot here, too.