Does More Information Really Solve Anything?
Does More Information Really Solve Anything?
By Alex Usher, May 15 2014
Posted on: Higher Education Strategy Associates
One of the great quests in higher education over the past two decades has been to make the sector more “transparent”. Higher education is a classic example of a “low-information” economy. Like medicine, consumers have very limited information about the quality of higher education providers, and so “poor performers” cannot easily be identified. If only there were some way to actually provide individuals with better information, higher education would come closer to the ideal of “perfect information” (a key part of “perfect competition”), and poor performers would come under pressure from declining enrolments.
For many people, the arrival of university league table rankings held a lot of promise. At last, some data tools with some simple heuristics that could help students make distinctions with respect to quality! While some people still hold this view, others have become more circumspect, and have come to realize that most rankings simply replicate the existing prestige hierarchy because they rely on metrics like income and research intensity, which tend to be correlated with institutional age and size. Still, many hold out hope for other types of information tools to provide this kind of information. In Europe, the big white hope is U-Multirank; in the UK it’s the “Key Information Set”, and in Korea it’s the Major Indictors System. In the US, of course, you see the same phenomenon at work with the White House’s proposed college ratings system.
