In operations work, a quality control department is often a tell that a company catches symptoms instead of tracing causes. Higher education is covered in the same tell: a survey write-up that casts the wounded as lapsed customers instead of witnesses, a trust committee where the winners examine the winners, and an accreditor’s rulebook that never tests the outcome families borrow against.
Michigan is one of the best universities in the country, and it answered a student distress problem by deciding to cover first-semester grades. The number I think its administrators were looking at is true, excellent, and aggregated at exactly the level where the actual problem disappears. This is how capable people miss a root cause, and it is the same error the college-ROI research made for twenty years.
Michigan’s College of LSA will stop putting first-semester letter grades on transcripts, to help students explore and to curb a mental health crisis. The pressure is real. The evidence on hiding grades mostly runs the other way, and the university kept the measure for itself.
Forbes reported LinkedIn’s ranking of the “most versatile” college majors. But LinkedIn defines versatility as the share working outside their major’s top two industries, counted only among graduates employed full time who keep a profile. For the majors at the top of the list, it is praising underemployment and calling it a skill.
Benchmarking Coronavirus Management results can give us some keen insights on what needs to be changed, even if we are not at the end of the pandemic
Stunning examples of world-class media organizations using facts to mislead us. Find out the truth about how media is misleading with facts