You get what you pay for

When rewards or prizes are made available in return for doing something, we’ll do whatever is easiest in order to get the reward. If the reward for a high school student is acceptance to their first-choice college, they’ll take the path of least resistance, doing what’s needed to gain that acceptance, but no more. As this article points out, what’s needed usually does not include acquiring more lasting learning or genuinely increasing and enhancing the competencies that colleges and universities hope their new students will bring. If selective institutions want to do a better job of admitting students who possess the qualities and competencies they want to see in their freshmen, they first need to do a better job of specifying those qualities and competencies and (especially) a better job of assessing whether or not applicants possess them.

From the institutional perspective, various rewards have been made available for graduating a large percentage of their students. So institutions engage in all sorts of practices that they hope will result in more students staying in school and eventually graduating. But practices that result in more retention and a larger percentage of students graduating too often don’t have much to do with improving students’ learning. As a result, college graduates do not possess the competencies, skills, knowledge, values, or qualities that they need to lead productive and satisfying lives and that our nation and our world need to prosper or even to survive.

How is this different from the much-despised Wall Street moguls whose exclusive focus on short-term profits led us to the brink of economic and social catastrophe?