Intermountain Healthcare in Utah began experimenting with setting default medical procedures for certain conditions in the 1980s. First launched as a research grant to study a pulmonary disorder common in young adults, the hospital chain has since reviewed practices for 50 clinical conditions that account for more than half of Intermountain’s patients. What they’ve found is that, by simply setting a default practice, allowing individual doctors to vary their choices if so inclined, and constantly measuring the results, they’ve been able to dramatically improve care. This is in line with research from many other fields that shows that the default options are incredibly powerful. For example, whether or not an employee participates in their 401k plan at work is largely a function of whether they are required to opt in or opt out. Either way, employees overwhelmingly pick the default option.
Higher education in the United States prides itself on choices. Colleges and universities hand out course catalogs listing all the options, and students are given separate lists of requirements for each individual major they intend to pursue. They may or may not meet with a counselor, who is there to “guide” students through the process. But it’s all left up to the individual. Even so-called pre-requisites, which are supposed to define a proper sequence of coursework, have been diminished as institutions reduce course offerings and bend their own rules to accommodate hordes of students.
This is the opposite direction of what research suggests people need. Research on the limits of rational choices suggest students should be provided with a solid default option, and then given an allowance to opt out if they want to. This strategy would be especially beneficial for low-information students who are more likely to enroll in the wrong classes or be uncertain of the necessary steps toward a diploma. Large percentages of community college students enroll with the expectation of attaining an associate’s degree or transferring to a four-year institution. Many of these students fail to accomplish their goals. Since we know people are heavily influenced by outside factors and default settings, it makes sense for our nation’s colleges and universities to use this information to help students achieve their academic goals.
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Chad,
I strongly recommend that everyone read the article in full, after they read my blog post about it in thisweekineducation.
John, I strongly recommend you read the article in full. I chose to highlight how it pertains to higher education, but there’s quite a bit that pertains to K-12 as well. For example, there’s a discussion on professional intuition versus empiricism that could just as easily be about teachers. This is a pretty good example of what I mean:
Perhaps the clearest example is the Pronovost checklist. As many as 28,000 people in this country die each year from infections that come from intravenous lines. Several years ago, Peter Pronovost, a Johns Hopkins physician, developed a simple list of five steps that intensive-care doctors should take before inserting an IV line, in order to prevent the introduction of bacteria. The checklist reduced the infection rate to essentially zero at 108 hospitals in Michigan where it was adopted. Pronovost published the results in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2006. But most intensive-care doctors are still not using the checklist. To insert an IV line, they continue to rely on their own judgment.
When I started your post I was looking forward to your thoughts on standardization and public schools. I was surprised, however, that you’d apply it to the adult choices of college and community college students. If adults can’t choose their own college path, then that is the much more serious issue. What have we come to if college students need default curricula? If we’re really getting to the point that Americans are so “other directed” that they can’t have the learning experience of higher ed without default plans of study, then America has a much more serious cultural problem.
Much of the problem, as you imply, is low-information students. First generation college students need more counseling. But I worry the more serious problem is students who left public schools lacking the background required to succeed.
You do great work in identifying the ways that college’s have misled students regarding financing. But I wonder if your already approaching the point that housing activists faced when expanding home ownership. We need more college-going, and we need better consumers. We don’t need shortcuts and fig leafs to keep us from facing the real problems.
That being said, the obvious first step is repeal NCLB accountability so that high school counselors can go back to being counselors, and not fulltime test proctors. The obvious second step is community schools where university representatives get introduced to kids at an early age, and university programs get integrated into public school and the fabric of neighborhoods. But practically speaking, that also requires the repeal of NCLB-type accountability.