Quality Education

I had an interesting conversation yesterday that brought up the question, "How do you measure the quality of a university?" It's a question that I know has been posed before, and it is important enough that there was a documentary on PBS about the situation, (though unfortunately I missed it). If we analyze some of the common metrics that universities use to measure themselves, we quickly find them to be inappropriate. For example, retention is often a key mark for schools. However, retention measures only the number of students who stay enrolled from one period to another, not how well those students did or the difficultly or appropriateness of their classes. Other often advertised statistics like first term enrollment and incoming student GPA or standardized test scores only reflect the institution's ability to market its self. No matter where we turn, it appears that by using any of the standard measurements, we end up with misleading or irrelevant data. So this leads me to one conclusion: we must be asking the wrong question. 

So what is the right question? As a working start, I was given "How can you empirically measure the effectiveness of a public university?" It's a start, but it leads to other questions. The most glaring is, what is the purpose of a public university? In fact, what is the purpose of a university? More to come, as I try to answer these questions, and possibly come up with more questions. It's going take some research.