The biggest culprit [contributing to rising costs of higher education] is the lack of objective, publicly available information about how well colleges teach and how much college students learn. Nobody knows which colleges really do the best job of taking the students they enroll and helping them learn over the course of four years. After decades of inaction, some recent efforts have been undertaken to collect that information: It now exists, but colleges and their powerful (and virtually unknown) lobbies will not permit the public to see it.
The above from today's Idea Of The Day article. It had me thinking a bit longer than usual, and it just occurred to me why: it has just illuminated to me why I've always leaned more towards qualitative analysis than quantitative.
The problem I have with metrics is that they have to be interpreted. This is usually done poorly, on some third-grade level like "more impressions/eyeballs=successful message. Quantitative!"
The above suggests that there is a set of data that can be used to determine - objectively - "how much students learn."
As you might imagine, the methods by which those metrics are determined and valued are entirely subjective. This is not to say that they can't be good, it is more to say that they have to be selected carefully.
What it means to "successfully learn something that will be valuable" is just a nebulous question as what it means to "successfully deliver a message." Determining what metrics will best measure those things is a qualitative processes.
In other words: on some fundamental level, it's all qualitative.
(Quant vs qual is obviously quite a complex subject so I'd imagine someone out there disagrees or has another perspective on this. Perhaps it's you? )
