I believe in this question. It’s one of the most important we can ask about college educations, especially as tuition prices skyrocket. I agree strongly that many colleges and professors are not doing a good enough job of educating students. What we have to do, though, is be very careful about keeping in mind why we want accountability, because the obvious answer — so that students learn the content of the required number of courses — is one of the least important, and in fact it is positively detrimental to the more important reasons to get a college degree. As a means to an end, accountability is a dangerous tool, in part because it can bring the deadening hand of red tape down on a process that should exemplify democratic independence and participation.

First, we should question why the average workplace is a good standard for accountability. Forgive me for my skepticism, but I have very rarely heard anyone describe the average workplace as an exemplar of high efficiency, intelligence, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, or moral worth. I think almost everyone experiences the management practices of corporations and organizations as at least as detrimental as helpful to the institution’s goals. The reason has to do with the underlying goal of enforcing accountability through bureaucracy: to remove any dependence on unpredictable, outside-the-box achievements. Bureaucracies achieve accountability through routinization and standardization. This is fine if the overall goal is producing something many times with nearly identical outcomes, like a car in a factory, but it’s not so good if the aim is to develop independent, creative, entrepreneurial human beings.

Now, many people no doubt believe that the purpose of a college education is to get a job, any job, that pays well enough to be middle class. They don’t care if the job is creative or a dead-end. While I respect the basic desire for a comfortable life, I think it’s in fact essential to the continued stability of our democracy that we aim to do better. To say why, it’s important to look not at the average work place, but the ones held in highest esteem who regularly succeed at creative, ground-breaking projects. What about these organizations leads to good outcomes even when they are creating inherently non-standard, non-routine products?

Ironically, I think some of the best exemplars are universities and the sort of open-ended R&D centers (like the old Xerox PARC) that were notorious problems for managers because there was no good way to run them in a routine way. We can argue about what the best cases are, but it’s worth asking why (at least historically) the employees at these organizations did such great work despite having considerable creative autonomy. One answer is that accountability doesn’t need to come from outside; in fact, the best scenario is holding oneself accountable for some task because one genuinely believes in its importance. That importance may be for the sake of others, or it may be simply for the challenge and pleasure of succeeding at a difficult goal, or both.

But the significance of our best work occurring outside bureaucratic standards goes beyond the workplace. The consequences are in fact quite broad: learning to think creatively and having the necessary agency to hold oneself accountable are important for public life in general, and especially for continuing the entrepreneurial, self-starter tradition of American politics.

As a result, it’s critical that we be very leery of imposing the deadening hand of bureaucracy on college education. Even if college were only for the sake of getting a good job, the requirements for a good job these days are not simply having mastered certain course material or technical skills. Indeed, the very best jobs require much more than subject-based knowledge: teamwork, critical analysis, quick learning, and flexibility are paramount. It’s difficult to imagine how colleges would inculcate these abilities in students if they were held accountable to regimes of testing, quotas, or other hurdles. In sum, while it’s true that we need to hold colleges more accountable for their results, it should be clear that importing the standards of the average corporate workplace would be a mistake, and indeed the very ideal of higher education is consonant with the sort of accountability, i.e. self-accountability, which cannot be produced en masse like cars in a factory.

Here’s the real landscape, Jim. There are huge incentive compatibility problems in higher ed, but they’re not the ones you talk about here. Leaving aside top tier universities, where the students come in well-prepared and resources are plentiful, higher ed has to pick up where the K-12 system leaves off, and often fails. Many, many students (the vast majority at some places) come in unable to write a coherent essay or do algebra. Making up those deficits and graduating with a college degree that honestly certifies an advanced level of education would require years of hard mental labor. But do students do that kind of work in college. Absolutely not. The National Survey of Student Engagement consistently reports that full-time students do about twelve hours per week of work on academics, not including time spent in class. With time in class (12 or 15 hours a week, depending on the institution), that’s an average of 24-27 hours per week on schoolwork. Not enough. Not close to enough, given the accumulated K-12 deficit.

Why don’t the institutions demand better work of their students? Serious incentive incompatibilities. Student evaluations now form a major part of tenure and promotion files at non-research universities. Most professors are convinced that heavy workloads and low grades are the route to poor evaluations (though the evidence supports only the correlation between low grades and low evaluations). For higher ed teachers on term contracts (some 2/3 of college teachers, responsible for roughly half of the courses being taught), bad evaluations can lead to an immediate contract termination. So the incentives are to demand little of one’s students.

There are ways to turn this around, by the way. I direct a program where we’ve been collecting data on student effort for the past decade, and we push our students hard. Sixty percent of the students in my program’s courses meet or exceed the norm of two hours of work outside of the classroom for every hour spent inside the classroom. Getting my colleagues on board was easy, and the students in my program take pride in working harder than their peers. The people who really don’t like me are other chairs and directors, who take offense when I point out that most of our students aren’t working hard enough (and, by implication, that their programs aren’t making students work hard enough).

If you want to have a serious conversation and learn something, let’s talk.