By Steven S. Volk, Professor of History, and Director, Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence, Oberlin College
Are we “losing our minds?” Richard Keeling and Richard Hersh, of Keeling & Associates, argued as much in their panel of the same title. What they mean, of course, is that by having allowed the petrification of a culture of higher education which stressed everything from rankings and athletics to student life and “throughputs,” but somehow ignored student learning, we are not just “adrift,” but at risk of losing student learning, and all that would come from it. Where, they ask, is the higher learning in higher education?
Critiques of higher education have stacked up over the past two decades, largely focusing on important issues such as escalating costs or the decline of the full-time professoriate. But Keeling and Hersh point to the value of Richard Arum and Josipa Roska’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011) in providing demographic and research data to sustain the argument that the attributes we value most in higher learning – critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills, among others – are not being achieved at institutions of higher education.
By: Ken O’Donnell, Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Policy for the Office of the Chancellor of the California State University
Henry Eyring of BYU-Idaho got a lot of attention with last year’s publication of The Innovative University, an insider’s account of changes to the higher ed business model. BYUI has pursued online learning and year-round operations to rationalize its costs of instruction, taking some cues from the for-profit sector.
Eyring began by observing that higher ed may be slow to adopt online learning, owing to a rollout that coincided unfortunately with the tech bubble. He said in the decade or so since, the technologies have gotten stronger while higher ed’s finances have weakened, making alternate delivery more attractive. Read the rest of this entry »
By: Ken O’Donnell, Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Policy for the Office of the Chancellor of the California State University
Sherrill B. Gelmon won this year’s Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award, conferred by Campus Compact. She’s a professor of public health at Portland State University, teaching in PSU’s College of Urban & Public Affairs. She began by pointing out how well that positions her for community engagement work: she and her colleagues are at the heart of downtown Portland, in a university whose motto is “Let Knowledge Serve the City.”
She used both survey data and personal anecdotes to identify faculty motives for engagement, but the real reward kept coming back to joy. Her colleagues report that community engagement makes their work more satisfying, deepens student learning, and adds dimension and relevance to their own teaching and scholarship. For each personal story, Sherrill projected an image that the respondent felt represented joy, some of them really whimsical. Of the comparisons she made, I think my favorite came from her PhD student Katrina, who said the pressures of faculty work reminded her of professional skaters, bringing their arms in and twirling faster and faster. Connections to the community pull the arms back out. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Hubert, Professor of Political Science and ePortfolio Director, Salt Lake Community College
It’s the first day of AAC&U’s Annual Meeting and I’m already bleary-eyed. Yesterday afternoon I flew into Washington from Utah, registered for the conference, and crashed in my room. It wasn’t so much the travel that has caused me to be so tired this morning, but the “goodie” I received in my registration packet. I’m referring to A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future, by the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement. This call to action kept me up half the night reading and thinking about its message. And now that I just finished attending the opening plenary session, I want to get my thoughts down before they dissipate with the activities of the day ahead.
There is simply no better time than the present for a national call for elementary, secondary, and higher educators to work together to renew our commitment to democratic engagement. As Carol Geary Schneider, president of AAC&U, mentioned in her opening remarks, the scope and severity of the challenges the United States and the global community face are truly daunting. If I may elaborate just on the American situation: our over-leveraged economy seems incapable of returning to the levels of growth and employment we have come to expect in the post-World War II era; we appear to be running up against resource scarcities and environmental challenges at every turn; economic inequality has reached a level of toxicity not seen in the United States since before the Great Depression; our fellow Americans seem more enthused by their roles as consumers than their responsibilities as citizens; we have engaged in an extremely unilateral and militarized foreign policy that magnifies rather than diminishes national security problems; and our national institutions are held in varying degrees of disregard by the people they purport to serve. Read the rest of this entry »
By: Shyam Sharma, University of Louisville
When I look at the description of events in the schedule of the AAC&U Annual Meeting this year, images of my undergraduate students cross my mind. I begin to think about what use my students from the English 101 class in fall 2007 (my first semester of teaching college writing) made of the “critical thinking skills” that I taught after they left my classroom. I wonder if my students from the advanced writing course that focused on global citizenship last year continued to “pause to look at two more perspectives” before beginning to argue and defend their own positions. The events in the schedule represent big and often abstract ideas emerging from the experience and wisdom of scholars who are intellectual leaders in higher education. But when browsing the themes and descriptions in the schedule, my mind turns toward the students from the past and students I will teach in years to come. Has my teaching helped them become productive citizens in their communities and work? How much am I helping them become the digital and global citizens that they need to be today? What else do I need to do in order to shoulder the responsibilities of an effective educator of the twenty-first century—and what does it mean to be an effective teacher today in light of the changes, challenges, and opportunities that are created or complicated by the forces of economic crises around the world, advancements in information technologies, and the growing interdependence of knowledge (and other) markets around the world? I will be seeking answers to these questions in the many exciting discussions that I look forward to attending at the AAC&U Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.
The sessions that I am most interested are concerned with what I call digital-global citizenship. (And, by the way, the schedule that I carry is not in a diary, nor a printout: it is, thanks to AAC&U, a mobile “app.”) For me, integrating technological skills into teaching does not mean just including “cool” new technologies: I help students use new technologies to achieve and enhance the age-old mission of liberal arts education, of critical thinking, finding and synthesizing information, enhancing their civic awareness and developing in democratic engagement. I help students develop and maintain broad and deep “personal learning networks”—webs of places, resources, and people where they receive and also share knowledge. My students use technology to learn, write, solve problems, and develop new ideas, often collaboratively. Their collaboration is facilitated and enriched by technologies like wikis and blogs; they seek to understand the perspectives and practices of apparently universal phenomena in different cultures and societies around the world by using multimedia in their research, critical analysis, composition, and presentation of ideas and practices. Read the rest of this entry »
Take a look at the college-going population and this is what you see: the future of postsecondary education is in the hands of community college educators. Almost half of all undergraduates are enrolled in community colleges, and that percentage appears unlikely to change in the wake of the Great Recession. The largest numbers of students historically underserved who make it to higher education attend community colleges. If you think in terms of population—the overall numbers of students and the evolving demographics of the United States—it’s clear that community colleges are crucial to the future of higher education. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data show that the largest numbers of Latinos in higher education attend community colleges. The same is true of African American students, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and American Indian students. This is the emerging majority of people who will move democracy forward. The future of liberal education is in their hands, heads, and hearts as well.
Community colleges are an increasingly important sector of institutions committed to liberal education, and they will be key to how liberal education evolves in the future. Many would argue—I hear this all the time on community college campuses—that they already are the foundation and center of liberal education, especially for all those students who transfer from community colleges into four-year institutions. Community colleges are positioned to educate the majority of students, and they are likely providing most of general education—certainly most of lower-division general education—now and as far ahead as we can see. We may already be there. If you think of common patterns of transfer, as Cliff Adelman has been arguing for years, you’ll realize that many students enrolled in four-year institutions simultaneously take courses, often in general education, at community colleges. Students, and in some state systems like the California State University, the majority of students, begin their studies elsewhere, primarily in community colleges. In the CSU system, 60 percent of graduates transferred into their institutions from community colleges (see here, here, and here).
Often, when I am introducing myself to a group, I start by letting the audience know that I am the mother of a four-year old son, and that reality makes me an optimist and a realist (for those of you who don’t know me, I am African American, which may shed some light on that statement). I make this opening remark not to elicit praise, sympathy, or empathy, but to state a fact about my lived experience, and my optimism and skepticism about what will be my son’s lived experience. What usually occurs after I make this announcement is several audience members—often other African American mothers—nod their heads in knowing agreement. They often are the first people to speak to me when the opportunity presents itself. I find this camaraderie refreshing, but I also find myself more focused on the members of the audience who may not understand why being a mother of an African American son makes me both an optimist and a realist. Let me tell you why.
My optimism stems from my current role as the senior director for student success at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, where I regularly engage in conversations with my like-minded peers about making excellence inclusive in higher education, and the need for equity in learning at all levels. These conversations tend to reaffirm my belief that “we” in higher education are poised for significant change focused on issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity—all leading to new definitions of student success. We often share with the larger community campus examples and information from our member institutions about how educators are asking difficult questions that are the foundation for sustainable change. For example, how do we introduce first-generation, low-income, and/or underrepresented students to the cultures of the academy? How can we alter those cultures to make them more inclusive and responsive to difference? How do we effectively engage traditionally underrepresented students in high-impact practices? How do we create equitable pathways for student success? These questions are at the heart of our conversations for making excellence inclusive, and illustrate the optimism I share with my colleagues about the future. I have no doubt that my son will attend educational institutions that have engaged in these types of discussions and created environments of inclusion, not exclusion. On that level, I am optimistic.
It is highly unusual for a U.S. president to call a small group of higher education leaders to the White House. But, these are clearly unusual times. Building on national economic concerns being expressed so powerfully through the various “occupy” demonstrations, many reporters have begun more intense coverage of the issues of college costs and student debt—the topics of today’s White House meeting. The meeting today follows on a high-profile speech delivered in late November by Education Secretary Arne Duncan in which he called on higher education officials to “think more creatively—and with much greater urgency” about how to reduce the cost of going to college and how to reduce students’ debt loads. I am hoping that the conversation at the White House today also addresses creatively questions of educational quality in addition to questions about college costs.
The renewed and intensified attention to college costs isn’t unwelcome. We should be having a “national conversation” about college costs—about the importance of investing in higher education in order to fuel economic growth, and about who should bear the financial burdens of educating our citizens for success in the 21st century. But we also need to have a national conversation about quality, and about who has access to high-quality college education.
We want people to get jobs. No doubt about it. To get jobs these days, people need both broad learning and practical skills. In this series of posts, I have been presenting exemplars among community colleges of programs that accomplish these goals and connect K-12 and college learning, all with the intention of increasing people’s success in getting jobs. These civically minded colleges are taking their place as centers for learning aligned along the continuum from school to college to university in their communities. From these highly responsible and resilient institutions, I am learning a thing or two about a blended model of liberal education as practical education—a robust model of what sustainable learning for employment ought to be in the twenty-first century.
A recent visit to Oxnard College, a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) in Ventura County, California, has helped me articulate what it means for a college to invest deeply in the vitality of its community. Oxnard fosters applied learning in the arts and sciences, and liberal education in career and technical education (CTE). It is a thing of beauty. Driving to Oxnard, you traverse vast strawberry fields; you’re near the Pacific coast and the Channel Islands National Park. The massive agricultural enterprise abutting the coastal sanctuary reminds me how challenging it is to negotiate across different worlds within higher education, but also how urgently we need future generations of students to be ready for stewardship and civic responsibility as well as for workforce success.
You may have seen the dismal news about completion rates contained in the newest report from Complete College America (CCA). Higher education leaders and practitioners have complained for years that the data collected by the federal government about college students’ progress toward degrees and certificates doesn’t include part-time students, who account for nearly 40 percent of all college students. Unfortunately, according to new data collected by CCA, these students’ completion rates are even worse than those of their full-time counterparts.
As Washington Post columnist Dan de Vise noted in his recent blog posting, “the completion rate for part-time students seeking a bachelor’s degree is 24 percent…even when students are given eight full years to finish.” This record is clearly not acceptable. But as I have noted before, completion of a college degree in a reasonable amount of time isn’t all that matters. We need to pay at least as much attention to whether these students are actually learning what they need for success in the twenty-first century as we do to getting them across the finish line in less time.
