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.
One of the most interesting aspects of reading articles online, for me, is reading the comments that come with them. Such was the case recently when I reread a Chronicle of Higher Education article reporting on new research by Anne Colby and William Sullivan, from the Carnegie Foundation’s BELL (Business, Entrepreneurship, and Liberal Learning) project. The project examines models that integrate business and liberal arts education. Integration is particularly critical, Colby and Sullivan stress, in order to strengthen business students’ understanding and navigation of the moral and ethical consequences of business practices.
The Chronicle article focuses on the gulf these researchers have found on many campuses. Business programs frequently employ active, hands-on pedagogies where students become responsible for their own learning, work within groups, and apply principles and methods to new phenomena, either in real-world situations or in simulation. The liberal arts, on the other hand, offer rich ethical and moral frameworks from a host of perspectives, but the pedagogies can often be less active and engaging as a matter of standard practice.
By: Susan Elrod
Friday morning of AAC&U’s Annual Meeting, a panel of experts in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) learning and assessment was convened to present different tools and resources for assessing learning in the STEM disciplines. The focus was on interdisciplinary learning, and the room was filled with an enthusiastic crowd of 150 people.
Charlie Blaich (Wabash Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, Wabash College) emphasized that good assessment starts with knowing who your students are from the very start. In other words, what experiences, knowledge, and expectations do they bring to your institution as first-year students? Charlie presented results from a STEM-focused analysis of data from the Wabash National Study, which utilizes multiple metrics to analyze the critical factors influencing liberal arts education. Here are a few highlights:
By: Ken O’Donnell
Here’s an e-mail I got from a colleague after this session: “Brings tears to my eyes. Truly amazing.” I wasn’t quite crying, but this was an amazing set of stories. Professor Barbara Clinton of Highline Community College has developed an Honors Program that, since its 2003 inception, has transformed hundreds of lives. Her three copanelists were all alumni, with spectacular stories to tell.
Clinton described Highline as a college in a “poverty pocket” of King County, near Seattle, Washington. It’s the most diverse community college in Washington state, and most of its students come in not knowing a lot about higher education — where it can take them, and how they can get it. She was blunt about the raw material of the student body, and I was surprised her three panelists were, too. Read the rest of this entry »
By: Stephen Langendorfer
As we enter a new decade, education is still plagued by one of the more misdirected assessment initiatives of the past decade: No Child Left Behind. NCLB, unfortunately, arose from the faulty notion that simply by administering standardized tests, educational practices magically would be improved. Indeed, the most underperforming schools as measured by standardized test scores are punished and the children who need the resources the most are deprived of them.
Along the same mistaken line of accountability thinking, institutions of higher education were coerced into engaging in the misnamed Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA). The misguided idea behind VSA is that the primary focus of assessment in colleges and universities should be garnering some single standardized score by which an institution can compared to its peers. Although we know from the LEAP initiative that all institutions of higher education should share some common focus on liberal education as measured by the Essential Learning Outcomes, each institution must have its own unique mission and vision. No standardized test can come close to demonstrating the degree to which any institution is achieving its self-identified mission.
By: Dwight Smith, Ed.D.
Highline Community College’s Honors Scholar program demonstrates that combining wit and will can benefit students’ wallets. Through the will of a dedicated faculty, the program was implemented in 2003 with thirteen students and three faculty and has grown to approximately 250 students who work with 100 faculty on research projects integrated in courses. The students enroll in a two-credit “bootcamp” course to develop a personal statement, an academic resume, and explore transfer opportunities throughout the United States. A one-credit course serves as a capstone experience to prepare them to submit admission and scholarship applications to further their higher education. Graduates of the program have transferred to public universities, elite private universities, and the military academies.
The three Highline honors graduate students at the session demonstrated the varied paths community college students take through higher education. One student was a Marine who is now a student at Tufts; the second student, from Ethiopia, now is in a master’s program at the University of Washington; and the third student, a UPS employee, is now a George Washington University law student. Some five years later, each student recalled in detail his or her research topic and the results of their honors projects. The three students represented very well the 85 percent of their fellow honors students who transferred to a university.
By: Laura Behling
Is Randy Bass right? Is the traditional course dead and it just doesn’t know it? Have we really entered the “post-course era,” a time where the bounded, traditional course, the defining item of our institutions and their curricula, is no longer the site of high-impact teaching and learning practices? Is the formal curriculum still at the center of our institution? And if it is, should it be?
Given all the practices we have worked to incorporate into our students’ experiences because of their increasingly proven positive impact on student learning—global education, undergraduate research, and experiential learning, for example—why, Bass asked, do we fund, hire, tenure, and promote as if the formal curriculum is the most important thing we do?
By: Jonathan Rossing
For AAC&U members to succeed in advancing the values and issues important to us, it is crucial to understand not only our institutional constituents but also the public view of higher education. Accounting for the predominant attitudes toward higher education in society, we are better equipped to adapt our goals of liberal education for broader, public audiences. One strategy for analyzing our public audience is to take stock of the ways media institutions discuss higher education.
On Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, Comedian Stephen Colbert bemoaned contemporary higher education after he met a college intern taking “whatever courses look interesting.” Colbert joked, “It turns out these days they let college kids do anything they want. They live in co-ed dorms, make friends with people from different backgrounds both in the real world and on ‘The MyFace.’ And they can even eat cereal for dinner. It is chaos and we need to address this crisis.” Colbert’s satire successfully reflects for his audience common public attitudes and discussions about higher education.
