She graduated from the college last April with a bachelor of business administration degree, majoring in information technology.  Trina finished with a “solid” attendance record and a grade point average of 2.7.  She applied to every potential job placement available through the college’s placement services, but to no avail.  Because she cannot get a job, she is suing the college for tuition costs ($70,000) plus compensation for the stress due to her inability to land a job ($2,000).

News agencies that have reported on this event uniformly point out that the case is meritless because colleges do not promise a job to their students.  Instead, they promise an education.  These reporters and pundits, however, miss the significance of the lawsuit.  When universities offer an education to their students, what are they really offering and what do they deliver?  And how can you tell whether the university has actually provided an education to the student?

We used to say institutions of higher learning supplied higher levels of knowledge; but with the knowledge explosion in the last 100 years or so, nobody today comprehends much of the total human knowledge that we collectively have.  Besides, anybody can log on to the web and presumably find knowledge.  Whether the individual knows what to do with it is another matter.

And Bill Gates is one example that it is possible to gain knowledge without a college degree.  Of course, one might quickly add that for every success story such as Gates’, there are hundreds of uneducated people who are unemployed or working for minimum wages.

For some time universities have been asserting that an education is a process by which the university teaches students to think.  Academia teaches “critical thinking”, communication skills, global awareness, and diversity training.  Bypassing any thoughts about whether this is what higher learning should be about, I want to focus on assessment.  When a student graduates, how does he or she (or parents) grasp whether the mission has been accomplished?  Did they receive value commensurate with the costs?

Our society is quite utilitarian, and that philosophy began to pervade universities when Congress democratized college education after World War II with the GI bill.  Education at universities was once for the elite, but now it exists for the masses.  By necessity, universities have had to water down the content of courses because the average person, by definition, is unable to accomplish what the elite can do.

The irony, as many have stated, is grade inflation for the masses, especially when contrasted with grades that existed a century ago.  The interesting point is that universities do not have the will to change this aspect of the system.  They prefer to have satisfied “customers” and parents and governments—and the tuition dollars.

One simple scheme to improve the grading system is to require faculty to rank order the students and resolve ties with the median of the tied scores.  Any faculty member who assigns all A’s ranks all of the students in the 50th percentile.  A faculty member who gives 60% A’s and 40% B’s assigns the first group to the 70th percentile and members of the latter group to the 20th percentile.  But, this improvement will never be implemented because universities don’t really want to fix this problem.

The utilitarian worldview raises its head at various points, and one concerns the value of education.  While many analysts dismiss Thompson’s lawsuit because her college did not promise her a job, it would prove interesting to take a poll of students and parents across the land.  My hunch is that enough people would side with Trina to make university administrators uncomfortable.

After all, how can you tell whether somebody has achieved a sufficiently proficient level of critical thinking?  How can you assess one’s ability to communicate or his or her ability to grasp global issues or be sensitive to diversity?  Of course, we professors claim to have the professional judgment to answer these questions, but what we do is a black box to outsiders, if not to ourselves.

In a lot of ways trying to answer these questions isn’t much different from debating the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead.  I hypothesize that most Americans would escape the subjectivity of these issues by saying the acid test for these concerns is the ability to get a job.  Perhaps not immediately, as a liberal arts education is often deemed a useful foundation for a professional education, such as law, but eventually one needs some sort of employment to say that the education has succeeded.

Accounting education is no different.  On the one hand, we would like graduates to demonstrate critical thinking, ethical decision making, and be aware of international business issues.  On the other hand, graduates need skills for the marketplace.  And not just skills to obtain a job, but skills and attitudes and a work ethic to advance and contribute to the firm and to society.

As I reflect on Trina Thompson’s lawsuit, I wonder how many more students will sue their alma maters.  And, if a judge allows the suit to proceed, I wonder whether jury members will sympathize with the colleges or with the unemployed graduates.  There is more at stake here than merely the discontent of one unemployed former student.