Quality Education / What The Instruments Read

Employment and earnings read the labour market as loudly as the teaching

Where graduates end up says a great deal about the economy they entered.

Outcomes after study feel like the honest test, because they are about the world rather than the institution's own account of itself. They are also the measures most contaminated by things the institution does not control. Whether graduates find work depends on the state of hiring, the region, the timing, the industry's appetite, and the networks a person already had. A program can teach superbly into a shrinking occupation and record poor figures, while a weaker program feeding a booming one records excellent ones. The figures are accurate in both cases. They are simply answering a question about the economy that was asked as though it were a question about the classroom.

Earnings are worse, not better, in this respect. What a graduate earns is dominated by the field they entered, and fields differ in pay for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of instruction preparing people for them. Ranking providers by graduate earnings therefore ranks the occupations their students chose, with a faint educational signal underneath. Any institution wanting to improve its position on such a measure has an obvious and entirely legal path available that involves no change to its teaching whatsoever, only a change to what it offers and to whom.

This does not make outcome measures useless. Within a single field, over time, they can reveal something. Across fields, at a single moment, they mostly reveal the labour market. Treating them as an index of teaching quality flatters providers positioned in prosperous parts of the economy and punishes those serving occupations that society needs and pays poorly, which is a strange thing for a quality system to do. Care, early childhood work and the trades that keep infrastructure standing are all taught somewhere by somebody, often very well, and none of that teaching will ever look impressive on an earnings comparison. If a measure systematically undervalues the education society most depends on, the sensible response is to narrow the measure's remit rather than to accept its verdict.