Postsecondary Education Student Outcomes and Undercover Online Experiences

This book examines post-secondary education with a focus on student outcomes and undercover online experiences. Institutions of higher education, including for-profit, non-profit, and public schools, receive billions of dollars each year from the Department of Education to help students pay for school. Measuring the quality of educational programs (i.e., how much knowledge or skill students gain) is difficult. Because few direct measures are available, indirect outcome measures, such as graduation and student loan default rates, are often used. Although no single outcome can be used to fully measure something as complex as educational quality, looking at multiple outcome measures (eg: graduation rates, pass rates on licensing exams, employment outcomes, and student loan default rates) can shed light on the quality of education provided by schools.