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.
My last posting in my series on school-college alignment described how the Maricopa Colleges have been using the Significant Discussions Guide to help them align learning from school to college to university. The Significant Discussions project, as I’ve written in previous posts, aims to improve student success by promoting collaboration on curriculum alignment among secondary schools, community colleges, universities, and employers. Anne Arundel Community College (AACC), in Maryland, has been using the Guide in their own way with high schools in their county. This local work is part of a larger career and technology education (CTE) program for high schools throughout the state.
Maryland, I discover, is a national leader in CTE. The state has merged secondary vocational and college preparatory programs. Instead of the two traditional tracks, Maryland has embedded CTE within the overall high school program. If you choose a career cluster, what you get is an infusion of applied learning, for example, in arts, media, and communication, starting in tenth grade. The goal is to develop and reinforce the more traditionally academic knowledge, skills, and abilities through application and hands-on activity in real-world settings. CTE is particularly attractive to students who are not thriving in the high-stakes testing regimen of No Child Left Behind. This approach clearly aligns with the emerging blended model of liberal education advanced in the LEAP initiative.
AAC&U’s upcoming Annual Meeting, Shared Futures/Difficult Choices: Reclaiming a Democratic Vision for College Learning, Global Engagement, and Success, will challenge the current dangerously narrow vision for higher education that seems to value degrees exclusively for their economic and individual benefit rather than for higher education’s contribution to the common good.
One precedent for a broader democratic vision of college learning is the 1947 Truman Commission Report, Higher Education for American Democracy, which linked education to “a fuller realization of democracy in every phase of living”; the development of “international understanding and cooperation”, and “the solution of social problems.” Of course, such a democratic vision emerged alongside a Cold War strategy for global engagement that emphasized American dominance and containment. Read the rest of this entry »
This blog post was first published on July 21, 2011, on the George Mason University General Education blog. The author is Rick Davis, associate provost for undergraduate education at George Mason University.
It’s Orientation season again on our campus—the summer ritual (conducted on this particular day amid an Excessive Heat Warning) of welcoming our roughly 2,600 incoming freshmen and their parents with two days of information overload, placement tests, registration advice, fun and games, more and quite possibly better food than they will find in the fall, and my little bit about the liberal arts.
How do community colleges serve as centers advancing the education and wellbeing of a region? Insights garnered from Significant Discussions in practice have much to tell. The Significant Discussions project, as I’ve written in previous posts, aims to improve student success by promoting collaboration on curriculum alignment among secondary schools, community colleges, universities, and employers. Let’s start with the Maricopa Community College District (MCCD)—ten community colleges and two skills centers in the Phoenix, Arizona, area. Leaders at Maricopa have launched a project using the Significant Discussions guide, and they report promising results.
Maricopa got into Significant Discussions through a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant program. The program intends to strengthen connections between higher education and schools, and to accomplish that objective by giving priority to emerging knowledge in technology education in a region. In the greater Phoenix region, the economy will increasingly depend on technology, including emerging high tech fields such as bioscience, sustainability, and solar energy. It’s easy to see that outreach to future students in STEM is critical to the wellbeing of Phoenix, and that a diverse community of workers there is eager for employment. Many more applied fields are likely to emerge; the workforce needs to be ready to move and adapt. Attention now to secondary, community college, university, and industry connections will pay off in regional development well into the future. This concept is elegant and seemingly obvious. But it is difficult to enact on the ground.
In the United States, in statehouse after statehouse, funding for higher education continues to be cut. Debates in Washington continue—and include proposals to cut funding for Pell Grants and for subsidies of student loans while students are in college. (To his credit, President Obama seemed to draw a line in the sand on this latest proposal, saying he wasn’t “going to take money from old people and screw students.”)
Reflecting on this dismal state of affairs in light of my recent study tour of EU universities, I can’t help but note that European higher education faces similar challenging circumstances. And the irony is that, both in Europe and in the United States, despite the storm clouds, amazing progress is also being made to “modernize” higher education systems, clarify what different degrees mean in terms of levels of learning and essential learning outcomes, and improve curricula and teaching methods to ensure that students graduate with the ability to innovate and continue learning over the course of their lives. (More on these positive efforts in future blog posts).
I have just completed a fascinating study tour of European higher education trends sponsored by the European Centre for Strategic Management of Universities (ESMU), an international think tank associated with the European Union. (It was somehow reassuring to learn that Europe is facing some similar challenges and is also just as awash in peculiar acronyms as is Washington, DC, where I live.) This will be the first of several blog postings reflecting on trends in European higher education and what US colleges and universities can learn from our European friends.
Many in the United States might have heard about the continuing Bologna Process—an effort to bring into better alignment higher education institutions and systems across Europe and, increasingly, in other parts of the world, including Latin America. I had understood this process, however, in far too narrow terms prior to this recent ESMU tour. (The tour included stops in Brussels, Valencia, and Glasgow, and presentations from educational leaders in these three location and from Hungary, England, Norway, Portugal, Holland, and Germany.)
Humanities fields have certainly taken a beating in the press in recent months. This isn’t particularly surprising given the current economic downturn and how little the public or the media understand about how interdisciplinary and integrated college curricula are becoming. But, alas, we must continue to educate the media and the public about the most promising changes in undergraduate curricula and the continuing importance of the humanities as part of those changes.
The economic downturn is, of course, driving much national dialogue about higher education—and about the worth of the humanities and the liberal arts. I’m sure that many of you saw the recent coverage of Tony Carnevale’s new report, What’s It Worth. Nearly all the stories about this report covered its findings using the familiar trope of humanities majors ending up driving cabs or flipping burgers. Those of you who only read the coverage should definitely look more closely at the report’s actual findings (pdf) and also other reports, including AAC&U’s surveys of employers. Beyond what a student chooses as her major, lots of research suggests that achieving a broader set of learning outcomes is essential for success in today’s economy—no matter what post-graduation professional journey one takes. Everyone who cares about the state of humanities departments—both because of their contributions to all students’ learning and for their education of “majors”—should note in Carnevale’s report the high numbers of humanities majors who go on to graduate school and the bump in earnings they get as a result.
Last week, I attended the 2011 National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE) in San Francisco, California. The conference explored some of higher education’s most pressing issues—diversity and access, social justice, and inclusive excellence. Speakers challenged attendees to revise our thinking about how we educate students and to what ends.
On Friday morning, Daniel R. Wildcat, Director of the American Indian Studies Program at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, gave the keynote address. In his talk, “Diversity: An Issue of Life-Enhancement for the Planet,” Wildcat called for a paradigm shift in the ways we think about place, power, and human personality. He explained that in his native language, there is no word for “resources,” but instead, the word for materials drawn from the earth is closer to the word “relatives.” It is not acceptable, Wildcat asserted, to treat family and relatives as we would “resources” or ATM machines, so why should we continue to treat the environment in such a way? He emphasized the need for restoring the symbiotic bond between people and place, and for reconceptualizing “wealth” as the number of strong relationships we maintain with people and not as the amount of resources we can gather.
