In his book The Tyranny of Merit, Harvard Professor Michael Sandel propose that prestigious universities have an explicit admissions lottery among the many qualified applicants as a way to combat the meritocratic treadmill and the meritocratic hubris to which their students are subject. He misses a more direct and more productive way of toning down the size of the prize that admission to the top schools now represents: pushing these top schools to increase the size of their undergraduate classes. (See “The Extensive Margin: How to Simultaneously Raise Quality and Lower Tuition at Elite Public Universities” and “Noah Smith: If Elite Schools Care About What They Claim To, and Believe in the Value of What They Do, They Should Take On More Students.”)

I want to make the radical claim that colleges and universities should, first and foremost, be in the business of educating students well. One implication of this radical claim is that colleges’ and universities’ performance should be measured by value added—by graduation rates and how much stronger graduating students are academically than they were at matriculation. By this standard, bringing in students who were impressive in high school raises the standards for what one should minimally expect a college’s or university’s students to look like at graduation, and colleges and universities become truly impressive if they help weak students become strong.

I doubt that higher education in the United States will reform itself without a push from the outside. We need more competition from new kinds of higher education. The key to allowing alternative forms of higher education to flourish is to replace the current emphasis on accreditation, which tends to lock in the status quo, and instead have the government or a foundation with an interest in higher education develop high-quality assessment tools for what skills a student has at graduation. Distinct skills should be separately certified. The biggest emphasis should be on skills directly valuable in the labor market: writing, reading carefully, coding, the lesser computer and math skills needed to be a whiz with a spreadsheet, etc. But students should be able to get certified in every key skill that a college or university purports to teach. (Where what should be taught is disputed, as in the Humanities, there should be alternative certification routes, such as a certification in the use of Postmodernism and a separate certification for knowledge of what was conceived as the traditional canon 75 years ago. The nature of the assessment in each can be controlled by professors who believe in that particular school of thought.)

Having an assessment that allows a student to document a skill allows for innovation in how to get to that level of skill. For example, certification of skills separately allows academic instruction to be unbundled into instruction in each of the specific skills a student decides to acquire. One place this has already happened is in coding. It is straightforward to get a certification in a particular programming language. Having a good assessment of what students know at the end of their instruction also allows new entrants to higher education to show they are doing a good job.

I think this is doable. There are enough students who come out of colleges and universities not being able to write well or read carefully that it should be helpful to students in getting a job to have a certification proving that they can. To the extent colleges and universities claim to be teaching higher-order thinking, an assessment tool to test higher-order thinking is needed. One might object that testing higher-order thinking would be expensive, but it takes an awful lot of money to amount to all that much compared to four or more years of college tuition. And colleges and universities should be ashamed if they think we should take them seriously were they to claim that what they taught was so ineffable that it would be impossible for a student to demonstrate they had that skill in a structured test situation. On this, see “False Advertising for College is Pretty Much the Norm.”

Everything I am writing here is very much in line with my Quartz column “The Coming Transformation of Education: Degrees Won’t Matter Anymore, Skills Will.” This transformation can be hastened if the government or some other large actor creates appropriate assessment tools.

On a modest initiative to better measure student learning in my Economics Department, see Measuring Learning Outcomes from Getting an Economics Degree