What if the standards for accreditation were changed so that primary weight was given to the percentage of graduates who were gainfully employed in the field of their major within one year of graduation? What if student loans once again became dischargable in bankruptcy, with the university being liable for the unpaid balance?
How would education in America change if the federal government published statistics for each university showing the median gross income of graduates one year and five years after graduation, broken down by major?
What if more American students got their degrees overseas, and their overseas degrees were accredited?
Perry also suggested separating teaching budgets from research budgets, as a way of encouraging teachers to teach and researchers to do research. Tenure would be granted only to teachers who spent a large majority of their time teaching; a defined percentage of tenure jobs would go to researchers, who would concentrate on pure research. A system of cash awards and other incentives would compensate professors who successfully taught a large number of students.
Any businessman in a profit-seeking enterprise would see ideas like pay for performance as unremarkable, but they overwhelm the delicate sensibilities of people who have spent their professional lives on campus, where the word nonprofit is meant to act as a firewall against the unpleasantness of commercial life. Texas Governor Treats Colleges Like Businesses, headlined the Chronicle of Higher Educationa sentence sure to induce aneurysms in faculty lounges from El Paso to Galveston. The outrage was deafening, especially when university regents began acting on the recommendations. The Texas A&M system, for example, which includes a dozen schools, posted a spreadsheet on its website evaluating teacher performance on a cost-benefit basis.<<<....