Author Archive
I know that many of you have probably been reading the copious news coverage of the new book Academically Adrift. The articles in the higher education press have already elicited hundreds of comments—some useful, some defensive, some derisive. All this attention, of course, is because the book presents some very compelling and disturbing data about learning in college. I know there are limitations to the data presented in this book, but I don’t think any reasonable person can simply dismiss the facts its authors present: that too many students are, indeed, not developing their analytic thinking and writing skills, especially in the first two years of college. These two aspects of college learning are incredibly important for success in today’s world. There are, however, other capabilities that we also need to develop in college students if we are to prepare them well for work, life, and citizenship in the twenty-first century.
For those of us who care about increasing students’ achievement of key liberal education outcomes—including students’ integrative and applied skills—there are also two other articles published in the past few days that shouldn’t be missed. Heather Wilson, a former member of the US House of Representatives, graduate of the US Air Force Academy, and former Rhodes Scholar, writes in the Washington Post about her experiences evaluating candidates for Rhodes scholarships. She has served for twenty years on the selection committees and has “become increasingly concerned in recent years—not about the talent of the applicants but about the education American universities are providing.” Rather than bemoan these top students’ lack of writing skills, however, she worries about another important capacity we would hope a quality liberal education would develop in students. In her experience, even “high-achieving students seem less able to grapple with issues that require them to think across disciplines or reflect on difficult questions about what matters and why.”
Thomas Friedman’s satirical column in yesterday’s New York Times, written as a mock cable from Chinese diplomats, makes it painfully clear how different America is compared with other nations in terms of our priorities—including the need to raise the bar on educational achievement. Friedman writes, in jest, of course, that “we [meaning the Chinese] at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now fighting over how ‘exceptional’ they are. Once again, we are not making this up. On the front page of The Washington Post on Monday there was an article noting that Republicans Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are denouncing Obama for denying ‘American exceptionalism.’ The Americans have replaced working to be exceptional with talking about how exceptional they still are. They don’t seem to understand that you can’t declare yourself ‘exceptional,’ only others can bestow that adjective upon you.”
New data on the existing state of educational achievement show just how unexceptional the United States really is, at least in terms of preparing our students for college. No one should miss the recent study from ACT examining whether the increasing numbers of students taking the ACT college entrance exam—most of whom say they aspire to attain at least a bachelor’s degree—are ready to succeed in entry-level college courses. The numbers have barely budged in recent years, and they aren’t good. Only about one-quarter of those taking the ACT are college-ready, based on all four benchmarks (reading, math, English, and science). Twenty-eight percent met none of the benchmarks. Only 4 percent of African Americans and 11 percent of Hispanics were judged college-ready in all four basic areas!
Those who know well the work of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)—an organization that has existed for nearly one hundred years—will probably be surprised that AAC&U has something in common with Wired Magazine. Wired recently published an article, “7 Essential Skills You Didn’t Learn in College”— in the form of a mock “Wired University Course Catalog.”
Once you get over the uber-hip format of the whole thing, it’s actually pretty interesting—and not bad advice for today’s college students. The “essential skills” the magazine highlights are actually pretty similar to at least some of the essential learning outcomes at the center of AAC&U’s Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative, and are also in synch with the outcomes on which employers say they want traditional colleges to place more emphasis (pdf). (See our recent national survey of employers). What Wired recommends are exactly the kinds of things that AAC&U has also recommended—learning experiences that prepare students to solve unscripted problems and to understand knowledge in the context of how today’s complex world actually works.
A recent column by Jay Mathews at the Washington Post got me thinking about what an interesting transitional time it is in education. His piece, “Curiosity is Banned at Westfield High,” described a well-intentioned but ridiculous set of rules created to prevent student plagiarism in an AP World History course at a high school in northern Virginia.
The article noted that students were “ only allowed to use [their] OWN knowledge, [their] OWN class notes, class handouts, [their] OWN class homework, or The Earth and Its Peoples textbook to complete assignments and assessments UNLESS specifically informed otherwise by your instructor.” Mathews noted further that, “students could not use anything they found on the Internet. They were not permitted even to discuss their assignments with friends, classmates, neighbors, parents, relatives or siblings.”
Community colleges are suddenly in the spotlight. Jill Biden, wife of the vice president and the country’s most famous community college instructor, hosted a White House Summit on community colleges today. This follows upon President Obama’s attention-getting proposal—the American Graduation Initiative—to provide additional funding to community colleges. That initiative never came to fruition, but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has stepped up to the plate and announced yesterday a new round of grants to raise completion rates at community colleges.
This sector of American higher education certainly deserves the heightened attention as the nation’s leaders finally start to take seriously the challenge of meeting demands for a more highly educated citizenry and workforce. Too much of the focus of all this attention, however, is simply on increasing the numbers of students who graduate or successfully transfer from two-year institutions to four-year institutions. More attention should also be paid to community college efforts to lead the way in advancing more engaged and effective forms of liberal learning.
I recently responded to a remarkably bad article that appeared last week in the Washington Post called “Is College Overrated?” The article—inexplicably written by the paper’s dance critic—used a few anecdotes and the amazingly self-indulgent example of a wealthy entrepreneur deciding not to send his kids to college to launch a discussion about why college isn’t worth the time and money. As readers of this blog will already know, I’ve written a lot about this storyline that, somehow, continues to have legs. And my letter to the editor was, I admit, a bit overwrought, since I was so tired of responding yet again to the misguided assumptions and manipulated data in the article. It worked, however, as the Post decided to publish the article along with a few other very reasoned critiques. This is how media works, but every once in a while, “sanity” does return. (I’m marking on my calendar the Jon Stewart-sponsored Rally to Restore Sanity on October 30 in Washington, DC, by the way.)
While pleased to have gotten my arguments in print to counter what I do think is a pretty dangerous trend—discouraging kids from pursuing college—this argument (and all its over-coverage) seems so completely out of synch with what the country really needs from both higher education and those of us who write about it. College learning is, of course, more important than ever to succeed in today’s economy—and, God knows, we need better educated citizens to help our country work our way out of our current mess. And all the ink being spilled about the dire state of public education, the funding crisis in the states, etc., is certainly worth it. But the public also deserves to know more about what is going right with higher education. Read the rest of this entry »
Readers of this blog may not have noticed the significant announcement last week by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan of the recipients of Race to the Top grants to support the development of a new generation of K-12 assessments that are more performance-based, technologically sophisticated, and inclusive of both formative and summative evaluations of students’ math and language arts skills. This development—if successfully implemented in even a fraction of the states involved—will, indeed, be a game-changer in K-12 education and have profound implications for higher education as well.
Whether these assessments really will measure students’ “college readiness” or not remains to be seen, however—at least in my judgment. Much will depend on how involved college and university faculty and assessment experts are in both the development of the tests and the implementation of the new common core standards they are designed to assess. To date, there has not been nearly enough serious involvement by college faculty either in the assessment consortia or in the development of new standards. Time will tell if that can be remedied going forward. The leaders of these consortia seem to be seriously committed to involving higher education faculty and leaders— a reason for optimism.
I’ve been anxiously following the news about the new National Governors Association initiative, Complete to Compete, and the recent announcements about states competing for Race to the Top funding, and I continue to worry about reductionist models of education driving our reform agendas. I think that many of our policy makers and government officials at both the state and federal levels actually do believe in the full promise of liberal education, but somehow forget what that really means in educational practice when they get down to developing actual policy proposals. I was pleased, then, to see that the United States isn’t the only place where these issues are being debated.
Anthony Seldon, the master (head of the college) of Wellington College in Great Britain, wrote a wonderful article in a recent issue of The Independent where he warns of the dangers of “the whole process of education with schools and universities becom[ing] mechanized and industrialized: mass production factories of the mind.” He discusses how—in ways very similar to debates here in the United States—political and educational leaders in Britain recognize that “genuine education has never been more necessary than now,” but, in practice, students aren’t experiencing the kind of education they really need. As he notes, “good education should be the opportunity for each child to discover who they are, how they should relate to others, and what they love about life.” Instead, he bemoans how all around the world, “students sit inert in large school and university classrooms, passively absorbing material dictated to them by grey men and women, which they repeat in their essays and dissertations, straining every sinew to produce the ‘right’ answer.”
I recently returned from a meeting in Minneapolis of the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) that overlapped with a meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and featured speeches by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter. Reflecting on these meetings and the flurry of recent news about the rapid adoption of the common core standards by many states, my feelings have veered from hope to serious concern about the direction of K-16 education reform.
On the “hope” side of the equation, I was heartened by presentations and discussions at the SHEEO meeting. These individuals—who are at the very center of managing severe state budget cuts and positioning their state systems to educate far more students with fewer resources—were very aware of the need to focus attention not only on meeting President Obama’s 2020 goal to increase the number of college graduates, but also on ensuring that the quality of student learning increases as well. As one speaker, Jamie Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation, put it, in all our discussions about educational goals, it’s “the learning that matters most.” There were also other thoughtful discussions about how to improve learning outcomes and specifically about the role of accreditation in assuring institutional quality. For instance, SHEEO members discussed whether the current system can and should do more than define “minimum” standards and, instead, push institutions to improve at all levels—including for the top performers. Can accreditation also be about raising aspirations at the top, as well as ensuring that institutions guarantee a minimum achievement level for graduates?
I’ve answered far too many reporter calls in the last few months in which I’ve been asked about whether this recession will finally put the nail in the coffin of the humanities. Of course, not one of these questioners seems aware of the most recent data on humanities majors or course-taking that suggest, for instance, that the number and percentages of students majoring in the humanities has actually been rising for the past twenty years. And several disciplines—including philosophy and religion—have seen increases in the numbers of students taking courses, if not choosing them as majors. They also seem unaware of the many skills and abilities employers are seeking that humanities majors exemplify. I suspect that increasing interest in the humanities will continue in our increasingly troubled world—and, unfortunately, so will the questions, including the all-too-common question, what can you do with a humanities major?
I share below the text of a wonderful talk given recently to prospective students at Muhlenberg College on just this question, reprinted here by permission of the speaker, David Rosenwasser, professor of English and codirector of the writing program at the college.
