Archive for March, 2010
In his recent Huffington Post article, Jeff Brenzel, dean of admissions at Yale University, offers some very sensible advice to high school students who are weighing various choices now that they have been accepted by more than one college or university. Disappointingly, however, he never mentions anything about actually inquiring about a prospective college’s academic program! This, of course, is part and parcel of the general American public view that all colleges—or, at least all selective colleges—will offer students the same high-quality academic program. Students also tend to think that their choice of major is all that matters. This just isn’t true.
Isn’t it time we started letting prospective students in on the secret: not all college curricula are the same. It is, indeed, possible to make one’s way through a college degree program even at selective schools—meeting all the requirements and even making decent grades—and still graduate without the skills and knowledge one needs to really succeed in our turbulent global economy and in the face of the inevitable challenges life will present. A recent national survey AAC&U commissioned showed, for instance, that only about one-quarter of business leaders at companies that hire a lot of college graduates believe that today’s colleges and universities are “doing a good job” of preparing college student effectively for the challenges of today’s global economy. A large percentage of the employers surveyed, in fact, want colleges to place much more emphasis on such outcomes as written and oral communication, critical thinking and analytic reasoning, and applied learning in real-world settings.
With the release of the new Tim Burton movie based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I was reminded of the wonderful lessons that book teaches, especially about the ongoing struggle to communicate clearly in a topsy-turvy world. As AAC&U continues to work in our LEAP initiative to “make the case for liberal education,” for instance, we constantly struggle with confusions about language related to liberal education.
Sometimes talking to reporters about the LEAP campaign feels like a world in which everyone is, like Alice, commenting, “I think I should understand that better, if I had it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.” Or, as the Eaglet in the book notes, “Speak English! I don’t know the meaning of half those long words, and I don’t believe you do either!”
In a recent interview in Inside Higher Ed, where author Paul Gaston discusses the subject of his new book, The Challenge of Bologna: What United States Higher Education Has to Learn From Europe, and Why It Matters That We Learn It, Gaston urges engagement with developments in Europe:
We share most of Europe’s priorities for higher education. We believe that increased accountability should support responsible comparisons of programs and institutions, that students should have less difficulty in transferring academic credits, that the credentials we offer should be more easily understood by the public, that teaching should be more intentional in the light of a consensus on outcomes, and that as a nation we should remain highly competitive in attracting international students. We have important initiatives under way in many of these areas. But the Bologna Process represents a coordinated commitment to such reforms that is monitored continually throughout the continent. With one decade of progress to report, Europe can offer us a useful example.
