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Americans Think We Have the World’s Best Colleges.
We Don’t.

JUNE 28, 2014

Kevin Carey

Americans have a split vision of education. Conventional wisdom has long held that
our K-12 schools are mediocre or worse, while our colleges and universities are world
class. While policy wonks hotly debate K-12 reform ideas like vouchers and the
Common Core state standards, higher education is largely left to its own devices. Many
families are worried about how to get into and pay for increasingly expensive colleges.
But the stellar quality of those institutions is assumed.

Yet a recent multinational study of adult literacy and numeracy skills suggests

that this view is wrong. America’s schools and colleges are actually far more alike than
people believe — and not in a good way. The nation’s deep education problems, the
data suggest, don’t magically disappear once students disappear behind ivy-covered
walls.

The standard negative view of American K-12 schools has been highly influenced

by international comparisons. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and

Development, for example, periodically administers an exam called PISA to 15-year-
olds in 69 countries. While results vary somewhat depending on the subject and grade
level, America never looks very good. The same is true of other international tests. In
PISA’s math test, the United States battles it out for last place among developed
countries, along with Hungary and Lithuania.

America’s perceived international dominance of higher education, by contrast,

rests largely on global rankings of top universities. According to a recent ranking by
the London-based Times Higher Education, 18 of the world’s top 25 universities are
American. Similarly, the Academic Ranking of World Universities, published annually
by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, gives us 19 of 25.

But there is a problem with this way of thinking. When President Obama has said,

“We have the best universities,” he has not meant: “Our universities are, on average,
the best” — even though that’s what many people hear. He means, “Of the best
universities, most are ours.” The distinction is important.

PISA samples the whole population of students. When Mr. Obama said, “In

eighth-grade math, we’ve fallen to ninth place,” he was referring to the average score
of eighth graders. He didn’t say anything about how many of the world’s 13-year-old
math geniuses were American.

International university rankings, moreover, have little to do with education.

Instead, they focus on universities as research institutions, using metrics such as the
number of Nobel Prize winners on staff and journal articles published. A university
could stop enrolling undergraduates with no effect on its score.

We see K-12 schools and colleges differently because we’re looking at two different

yardsticks: the academic performance of the whole population of students in one case,
the research performance of a small number of institutions in the other.

The fair way to compare the two systems, to each other and to systems in other

countries, would be to conduct something like a PISA for higher education. That had
never been done until late 2013, when the O.E.C.D. published exactly such a study.

The project is called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult

Competencies (known as Piaac, sometimes called “pee-ack”). In 2011 and 2012,
166,000 adults ages 16 to 65 were tested in the O.E.C.D. countries (most of Europe
along with the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and South Korea) and Cyprus
and Russia.

Like PISA, Piaac tests people’s literacy and math skills. Because the test takers

were adults, they were asked to use those skills in real-world contexts. They might, for
example, be asked to read a news article and an email, each describing a different
innovative method of improving drinking water quality in Africa, and identify the
sentence in each document that describes a criticism common to both inventions. The

test also included a measure of “problem-solving in technology-rich environments,”
reflecting the nature of modern work.

As with the measures of K-12 education, the United States battles it out for last

place, this time with Italy and Spain. Countries that traditionally trounce America on
the PISA test of 15-year-olds, such as Japan and Finland, also have much higher levels
of proficiency and skill among adults.

Of course, all 15-year-olds are required to go to school. College is voluntary. But

when the Piaac numbers are calculated for people with different levels of education,
America stills falls short of most other countries.

Only 18 percent of American adults with bachelor’s degrees score at the top two

levels of numeracy, compared with the international average of 24 percent. Over one-
third of American bachelor’s degree holders failed to reach Level 3 on the five-level
Piaac scale, which means that they cannot perform math-related tasks that “require
several steps and may involve the choice of problem-solving strategies.” Americans
with associate’s and graduate degrees also lag behind their international peers.

American results on the literacy and technology tests were somewhat better, in the

sense that they were only mediocre. American adults were eighth from the bottom in
literacy, for instance. And recent college graduates look no better than older ones.
Among people ages 16 to 29 with a bachelor’s degree or better, America ranks 16th out
of 24 in numeracy. There is no reason to believe that American colleges are, on
average, the best in the world.

Instead, Piaac suggests that the wide disparities of knowledge and skill present

among American schoolchildren are not ameliorated by higher education. If anything,
they are magnified. In 2000, American 15-year-olds scored slightly above the
international average. Twelve years later, Americans who were about 12 years older
scored below the international average. While American college graduates are far
more knowledgeable than American nongraduates, creating a substantial “wage
premium” for diploma holders, they look mediocre or worse compared to their college-
educated peers in other nations.

This reality should worry anyone who believes — as many economists do — that

America’s long-term prosperity rests in substantial part on its store of human capital.
The relatively high pay of American workers will start to erode as more jobs are
exposed to harsh competition in global labor markets. It will be increasingly
dangerous to believe that only our K-12 schools have serious problems.

Kevin Carey directs the education policy program at the New America Foundation. You can follow him on Twitter

@kevincarey1.

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A version of this article appears in print on June 29, 2014, on page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline:
Who Has the World’s Best Colleges?.

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