Currently universities compete on prestige, but they should be competing based on the quality of student learning.

FORBES: Technology's Continuing Struggle to Disrupt Higher Ed

The answer is actually quite simple: consumers of higher education use prestige as the signal of higher quality because commonly accepted measures of actual student learning do not exist.

FORBES: Technology's Continuing Struggle to Disrupt Higher Ed

In SMILE, the quality of the student-generated question is the evidence of learning outcomes, not test scores.

UNESCO: Education

Indeed, evidence suggests that quality of teaching is the most important non-demographic contributor to student learning.

FORBES: Blame a Teacher Day