Posts Tagged ‘college learning’
Recently, there has been a flurry of articles and reports about higher education and the policy choices that will affect its future. As a communications professional, I would normally welcome the attention to higher education; the whole sector is underreported, in my humble opinion. However, this recent coverage has centered on the wrong questions and the wrong debates—and is diverting attention from some really important trends and problems.
Both the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times have recently published forums on the question, are too many students going to college? This is the kind of question editors love because it makes it easy for them to line people up on either side of a seemingly important debate. But the answer to this particular question is pretty clear-cut: for any individual student, going to college is clearly better than not going. This is why students are flocking to colleges of all sorts—two-year, four-year, for-profit, not-for-profit, public, private.
This is the first posting to a new multi-authored blog launched by the Association of American Colleges and Universities as part of its national initiative, Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP): Excellence for Everyone as a Nation Goes to College. This blog will be a platform for discussion about the future of college learning—why the outcomes of a liberal education are so important in today’s world and how those within and outside of higher education understand these outcomes and the idea of a “liberal education.”
We will try to shine a spotlight on what a liberal education is in today’s colleges and universities, but also the ways that the term “liberal education” is still misunderstood—even by many students and their own college and high school teachers. Read the rest of this entry »
