I have written before about the problems with how these national conversations are framed. There are, of course, many problems that require urgent action – and, indeed, national dialogue is needed.

But these conversations are not, as yet, leading to scalable solutions to our most urgent educational problems, in part, because of the scope of the challenge they are tackling, but also because of what has been missing from them. First, there has been near silence on what “success” really means in today’s world. Nearly all the policy discussions and prescriptions for change assume that if students graduate from college, they must have learned what they need to learn. In other words, completion=success. We know that just isn’t true for too many students (see the AAC&U president’s recent written testimony about this provided to the Department of Education.)

Second, when anyone does ask a question about what college outcomes really should be, the focus in most policy discussions is exclusively on how we prepare students to succeed in the workplace. Almost no one points to the equally important civic aims of education. (See the previous blog posting by my colleague, Caryn Musil, for more on this point and ways that AAC&U is working on this issue.)

A third missing element in these conversations, however, is the voice of faculty—the army of committed educators working in very difficult circumstances to actually graduate more college students and ensure that they have actually learned what they need to learn on their way to graduation. Last week, however, a powerful group of faculty came together to begin to insert themselves into the national dialogue. At a press conference to launch the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, the voices of faculty were front and center. AAC&U is a partner in this new campaign, whose precise shape and mission is not yet fully formed. It holds great promise, however, because it is poised to mobilize faculty to get much more involved in shaping both local and national discussions about the future of higher education. Powerful and informed faculty voices could have a dramatic impact on the shape of new funding structures as well as on the new and emerging regulatory frameworks that will have significant impact on our ability to provide a quality learning experience and the full breadth of outcomes that all students seeking higher education really need and deserve.

While much of the press conference was dominated by the decline in funding for higher education—both at the federal and state levels—and the impact of that decline on students’ access to college, I was pleased also to see a recognition of the quality shortfall we must address within higher education even as we struggle to increase funding and advance sensible regulatory frameworks.

As Barbara Bowen, president of the professional staff congress at City University of New York, put it, “we are launching this campaign because we refuse to see genuine college education replaced, for all but a tiny minority, with something of lesser value.” This, of course, resonates strongly with one of the key goals of AAC&U’s LEAP initiative—to make excellence inclusive. The way AAC&U puts it, we must speak out to “make visible the inherent inequities in current practices that steer low-income students to college programs that teach narrow job skills while more advantaged students reap the full benefits of a first-rate liberal education.”

The Campaign leaders also make the important point in their own statement of principles that, “the curriculum for a quality 21^st century higher education must be broad and diverse.” They note, further, that, “our economy demands a population that is broadly educated for critical thinking and innovation…. [and] narrow job training alone can condemn graduates to dead-end paths.”

They go on to point out something one almost never hears in public conversations about higher education. They note that “the value of a broad and diverse curriculum extends beyond economics. In the increasingly interconnected world of the 21^st century, we will need more people who understand its history, who can think outside of narrow boundaries, and who have the tools to function in a culturally diverse environment.”

Because the Campaign leaders are right that “our democracy needs a broadly educated citizenry,” AAC&U is shaping its 2012 annual meeting around the question of exactly how we advance this goal both for the future of our democracy and for the “shared futures” of people around the world. At that meeting, we hope to bring together the voices of faculty and many other voices from within and outside the academy to craft a more powerful way forward.

The challenge for the Campaign, I believe, will be to make faculty voices heard, but in the context of a very challenging policy environment and with a clear-eyed understanding of the complexities facing college and university leaders and state and federal policymakers. For all these players have a role to play in increasing access, completion, and quality in higher education. Much is at stake—as the Campaign puts it, “civic participation cannot flourish when a liberal education is reserved for the elite, and narrow training is provided for everyone else.” This is precisely why AAC&U works every day to extend the advantages of an engaged liberal education to more students.

Krugman suggests that because of globalization and outsourcing, the US job market isn’t, in fact, ever going to be characterized by rising demands for more educated workers.  He notes the “hollowing out” of the job market—with both high-wage and low-wage employment growing rapidly, but medium-wage jobs lagging behind.  He seems to miss, however, the fact documented so well by Tony Carnevale and his colleagues at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce that both medium-wage and high-wage jobs are demanding higher levels of knowledge and skill. Carnevale has also documented that, even with increased outsourcing of jobs at many levels, the American economy still will face a shortage of college-educated workers in the coming years.  In their report, Help Wanted, Carnevale and colleagues suggest, in fact, that, “by 2018, the economy will create 46.8 million openings…nearly two-thirds of these 46.8 million jobs—some 63 percent—will require workers with at least some college education.” He notes further that, “by 2018, the postsecondary system will have produced 3 million fewer college graduates than demanded by the labor market.”  This is the reason why President Obama–whom Krugman criticizes in his article–is trying so hard to hold the line against those who want to cut education funding.  If anything, we need to increase funding for education at all levels–including funding for higher education.  This clearly is as important a public policy priority as maintaining the rights of workers to organize.

AAC&U’s own research on what employers are seeking in new workers reinforces both Obama’s and Carnevale’s conclusions.  We found that new and existing jobs in today’s economy require a broader skill set and higher levels of learning and knowledge than in the past.  These are, in fact, the jobs that have not been outsourced. In our report, Raising the Bar, we note that

When it comes to future hiring, employers indicate that their greatest increase in emphasis will be on hiring graduates from four-year colleges.  When asked to think about the emphasis they will place on hiring individuals with various educational degrees in the future compared with the emphasis they placed on hiring people with these qualifications before the economic downturn, employers indicate the biggest shift in emphasis will be away from those who hold a high school degree with no further education and toward those who hold a bachelor’s degree from a four-year college.

Carnevale and his colleagues explain these trends further, noting that “[the] growth in demand for postsecondary education dovetails with two major trends.  First, the fastest-growing industries—such as computer and data processing–require workers with disproportionately higher education levels.  Second, over time, occupations as a whole are steadily requiring more education.”

Other economists have also noted that even today, a significant portion of unemployment is resulting not from a lack of openings, but instead from a mismatch between job seekers’ skills and educational attainment levels and the demands of today’s workplace. Moreover, recent research by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Booz Allen Hamilton suggests that “no longer is offshoring all about moving jobs elsewhere; increasingly it’s about sourcing talent everywhere.” In other words, globalized companies are looking for highly educated and talented workers wherever they can find them. Shouldn’t we invest in enabling our own citizens to compete for those jobs? Sure, we do need to bolster bargaining rights to ensure that workers in all sectors are paid fairly for the work they do. But we also need to equip current and future workers with more education. In fact, they need more liberal education and the cross-cutting capacities it provides to help them compete for the best jobs in the global economy.

Too many people—including perhaps even Paul Krugman—still retain a twentieth-century view of the economy.  Carnevale and others have taught me, however, that even jobs that sounds “blue-collar”—the kinds of jobs my father successfully did without a college education—now require very high levels of skills and knowledge. As Carnevale puts it in Help Wanted, “over the past several decades, about 70 percent of the increase in requirements for postsecondary training has stemmed from upgrades in skills demanded by occupational categories that previously did not require higher education.  What we called a ‘foreman’ or ‘manufacturing supervisor’ in the late 1960s, for example has morphed into new occupations that now require postsecondary education, including the modern manufacturing engineer.”

I certainly agree with Krugman that we need to build “broadly shared prosperity” by “restoring the bargaining power” of labor. I also agree that “there are things education can’t do.” But I firmly believe we cannot get to that shared prosperity or to a more vibrant economy if we don’t invest in cultivating talent here at home. Most importantly of all, we must continue to increase meaningful educational opportunity and close achievement gaps. We must provide access to the best quality higher education we can provide to many more students, especially those from minority and poor backgrounds. We must do all these things. And, shame on you, Paul, for suggesting it is an either/or choice.

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.

The economic data are clear on the larger societal value of sending more people to college too. Tony Carnevale, president of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, has published two definitive articles—one in AAC&U’s Liberal Education, and another in New Directions for Community Colleges—clearly demonstrating (1) the income advantage of going to college vs. entering the workforce without college-level learning (a wage premium that, surprisingly, has continued to rise even as the supply of college-educated workers has also risen); and (2) that even after accounting for current economic conditions, the demand—and the rewards—for college-educated workers will increase over the coming decades. As he puts it, “between 2002 and 2012, there will be 24 million new jobs for workers with associate, bachelor’s, and graduate degrees, a 30 percent increase.” Moreover, if we simply keep educating students at the same rate we are now, we will have trouble meeting this demand. These articles provide lots more data that debunk many of the myths circulating in the media right now, and everyone in policy circles and higher education leadership should read them both!

Another reason this debate gains traction is that everyone likes to complain that students “these days” don’t have the skills to do college-level work. This, of course, is partly true: far too many students arrive at college needing remediation. But it does not follow that we can simply ignore these students and still expect our economy to thrive. The college-readiness deficit results, in part, from the inability of high school reform to keep up with rising skill demands. But Carnevale also definitively shows that, in fact, “there are more than half a million students, mostly from working class and low-income families, who complete high school in the top half of their classes but never earn an associate, bachelor’s or a graduate degree within eight years of high school graduation.” Surely we can, and should, bring these students into the system and do whatever is necessary to educate them at the college level. Carnevale also points out that “roughly half of low-income workers and out-of-school youth have literacy levels that qualify them for college-level work.”

Instead of debating whether too many kids are going to college, shouldn’t we instead focus on (1) getting more of them college-ready and (2) getting more of these low-income students on an educational track that will provide them with the kind of liberal education needed for success? This is part of the agenda AAC&U is prioritizing through its Making Excellence Inclusive and LEAP initiatives.

Cliff Adelman of the Institute for Higher Education Policy and Andreas Schleicher at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have also recently garnered press attention for their dust-up over the data on our country’s declining “ranking” in terms of educational attainment. Here again, instead of arguing about whether we’re losing the battle for “most-educated nation” to Finland, shouldn’t we be more concerned about whether we’re actually educating our own students to meet our own economy’s needs? And does the kind of education we’re providing lead to both economic success and a better-educated citizenry? These are the questions AAC&U is pursuing through our projects and meetings. And at our upcoming annual meeting in Washington, DC, in addition to holding sessions on these and other important topics, we’ll be releasing findings from a new national survey of employers about the skills and abilities they look for in college-educated workers—the ones we’re clearly not producing enough of!

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.

We will also use this blog to draw attention to important items in the news you may have missed—the good, the bad, the ugly, the funny, the sad—but especially those news items that college administrators and faculty members need to know about in order to ensure that today’s college education provides every student the opportunity to learn what they need to know to thrive in today’s world.

About LEAP

The “position” of this blog and its contributors is very clear.  The LEAP initiative and this blog are both designed to champion the value of a liberal education—for individual students and for a nation dependent on economic creativity and democratic vitality. LEAP focuses campus practice on fostering essential learning outcomes for all students, whatever their chosen field of study.  LEAP seeks to engage the public with core questions about what really matters in college, to give students a compass to guide their learning, and to make these essential learning outcomes the preferred framework for educational excellence, assessment of learning, and new alignments between school and college.

For the purposes of this blog, we use the term “liberal education” in the following way:  liberal education is a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with core knowledge and transferable skills and cultivates social responsibility and a strong sense of ethics and values. Characterized by challenging encounters with important issues, a liberal education prepares graduates both for socially valued work and for civic leadership in their society. It usually includes a general education curriculum that provides broad exposure to multiple disciplines and ways of knowing, along with more in-depth study in at least one field or area of concentration.

While this is what we mean by “liberal education,” we understand that many people on and off our college campuses use the term in different ways.  We welcome comments on all the blog postings and look forward to a respectful but lively dialogue about national debates and issues of importance to our shared future—and the future of each and every college student or aspiring college student.

Welcome to the liberal.education nation LEAP Blog.