Matt Reed has an excellent post at Inside Higher Ed about the difficulty of assessing the quality of community colleges. If you look at future earnings as a metric of success, then that opens up a whole host of problems.

Sarah graduates from her local community college, and transfers to a nearby four-year college. She subsequently graduates from the four-year college and goes on to medical school. She spends a few years in residency, then gets a high-paying job as a physician.

At what point do we count her earnings? And who gets credit for them?

The standard measure is looking at starting salaries right out of college. But Sarah’s salary right out of community college, and even right out of her four-year school, was zero. We could include the zero, but it would be deeply misleading. Or we could exclude Sarah, but that would be misleading, too; if not for the start she got at the community college, she would not have been able to land her physician job. By excluding Sarah and others like her, we wind up with an artificially low figure for community college grads.  And in this political climate, that’s the kind of figure for which a college is punished.

We had an interesting discussion about this issue a few weeks ago, but I don’t think we came to any conclusions.

If the public is going to support higher education with student loans or with state money, then there has to be some sort of accountability and assessment. But it is very tricky at schools with high transfer rates or at community colleges, which can be stepping stones to other schools.

How should we assess community colleges?