The Language of Higher Education Assessment: Legislative Concerns in a Global Context

In recent years, state and federal legislatures have taken increasingly outspoken stands as guardians of the public interest regarding the costs and benefits of higher education, particularly state-funded higher education. In the 1980s, several states passed legislation requiring educational outcomes assessment for state-funded colleges and universities. Very recently, federal legislators have, while in the process of reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, begun asking for assessment regulation in all higher education, public and private. Assessment issues are not new. The search for means to measure educational outcomes emerged around 1900 with the development of educational foundations and the movement to accredit higher education institutions. This movement was motivated by a concern for commensurateness, or lack thereof, among the structurally various institutions of higher education of the late nineteenth century. In contrast, current calls for assessment are motivated by concerns for the spiraling cost of education. Nevertheless, throughout the history of U.S. higher education, the question underlying all concerns for assessment is: “What is the outcome of that education supposed to be?”

While most academics have never found any simple answers to this question, the corporate and government voices initiating these calls for assessment have tended for the past century to see higher education in terms of workforce preparation. Since 1980 or so, a globalized rhetoric of skills and workforce preparedness has emerged with which U.S. discourses of education, skills, and work have become tightly coherent. In effect, this has become the new global “common sense” rhetoric of workforce preparedness. Moreover, this globalized neoliberal discourse has often taken place in conservative social and political contexts, giving it not only the aura of common sense but of moral correctness as well. In this discourse, the central point of educational assessment is the assessment of skills that have a workplace payoff, skills having become a general term for practices or forms of knowledge that fit a worker into a job. Education as a process of inculcating skills is ideally cast as a life-long investment in human capital. Such rhetoric of education and continual skill improvement deflects attention from the structural changes of late capitalism. This rhetoric assigns responsibility for job finding and retention onto the workforce itself and onto the higher education system, which is now tasked with workforce training. In such a climate, legislative concerns with educational “value for money” appear immune to challenge and U.S. educators comply readily with legislative requests for accountability. No one examines the terms of this new “common sense”; nor, of course, are educational institutions in any position to not comply. No one asks if education has “outcomes” in the ways that private enterprises do or why private enterprise is supposed to be a model for education.

This paper proposes that the legislative calls for assessment are an assertion of control over higher education’s opacity to and independence from the market logic. Market logic has attained a sort of unquestioned moral authority among political conservatives in the United States (and elsewhere) and among neoliberal market interests globally. This is reflected in the unquestioned reification of knowledge and practices as assessable skill sets. Of particular interest here is the fact that such accountability is now proposed as a way to protect the public interest. To examine these connections, I lay out the following elements: a brief sketch of key moments in higher education assessment; the function of education vis-à-vis the United States and global workforce; the rhetoric of skills accounting; contrasting perspective on skills assessment; and legislative pressures reinforcing the “common sense” of education as skills-inculcation in a globalized economy.