Posts Tagged ‘higher education’
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.
I just returned from the annual SHEEO meeting. SHEEO is the organization representing “state higher education executive officers”—basically whoever in each state is the highest-ranking official overseeing public higher education—commissioners, chancellors, etc. About 200 people—the executive officers, their staff members, association people like me, some education researchers—attended the meeting in Denver and heard presentations from such luminaries as Michael McPherson, Senator Gary Hart, and AAC&U’s own board member, Jane Wellman.
Given the sorry state of state budgets, one would expect this meeting to be a dreary affair indeed. However, the mood was surprisingly upbeat. No one is happy about the budget situation, of course. And the consensus is that things will get worse once the stimulus money runs out. But this group of people seemed very dedicated to rolling up their sleeves and getting on with the business of improving public education no matter what the budget picture might be. Read the rest of this entry »
