Assessing College Educational Quality: An Inside View of Teaching Quality and Rigor in U.S. College and University Classrooms

Do rankings represent colleges with strong educational practices? While many critiques of higher education focus on a lack of learning in college (e.g. Arum & Roksa, 2011), these studies do not view higher education from the inside: by watching the educational processes unfold. In this study, I use a new conceptualization and proximal methods to witness the educational quality of classrooms across diverse institutions of higher education. Building upon the previous work of k-12 and higher education scholars of teaching and learning, the study uses a developing framework that focuses on college coursework and the practices that take shape between faculty, students, course content, and context. By contrast with K-12 education research, which has an extensive, broad-scale, quantitative observational program of study (e.g., Hill, Charalambous, & Kraft, 2012), to date there is no similar study of college teaching. In this study, I examine a representative sample of 587 courses across nine colleges and universities by witnessing in-class educational processes (observation) and analyzing curricula (syllabi). Data were collected during spring 2013-fall 2014. The colleges and universities represented in the study range from highly selective and highly ranked to broad access and unranked. My work begins to address substantive questions about educational processes across diverse institutions, for example: Do courses in high prestige institutions have better teaching than courses in low prestige institutions? Although early in understanding, this study begins to question whether the reward structures in higher education have bifurcated prestige and the teaching and learning process.