Posts Tagged ‘LEAP’
Those who know well the work of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)—an organization that has existed for nearly one hundred years—will probably be surprised that AAC&U has something in common with Wired Magazine. Wired recently published an article, “7 Essential Skills You Didn’t Learn in College”— in the form of a mock “Wired University Course Catalog.”
Once you get over the uber-hip format of the whole thing, it’s actually pretty interesting—and not bad advice for today’s college students. The “essential skills” the magazine highlights are actually pretty similar to at least some of the essential learning outcomes at the center of AAC&U’s Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative, and are also in synch with the outcomes on which employers say they want traditional colleges to place more emphasis (pdf). (See our recent national survey of employers). What Wired recommends are exactly the kinds of things that AAC&U has also recommended—learning experiences that prepare students to solve unscripted problems and to understand knowledge in the context of how today’s complex world actually works.
A recent column by Jay Mathews at the Washington Post got me thinking about what an interesting transitional time it is in education. His piece, “Curiosity is Banned at Westfield High,” described a well-intentioned but ridiculous set of rules created to prevent student plagiarism in an AP World History course at a high school in northern Virginia.
The article noted that students were “ only allowed to use [their] OWN knowledge, [their] OWN class notes, class handouts, [their] OWN class homework, or The Earth and Its Peoples textbook to complete assignments and assessments UNLESS specifically informed otherwise by your instructor.” Mathews noted further that, “students could not use anything they found on the Internet. They were not permitted even to discuss their assignments with friends, classmates, neighbors, parents, relatives or siblings.”
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) has since 2006 taken it upon itself to issue a series of report-length sneers at those the reports define as civically illiterate—and, by extension, at America’s colleges and universities, whose job it’s supposed to be to teach the ISI’s brand of civics. And so, every year, the ISI’s American Civic Literacy Program fields its own more esoteric version of the Tonight Show’s “Jaywalking” quizzes, and then scandalizes itself and its conservative coterie by retailing the respondents’ ignorance of such things as the conditions of “free enterprise or capitalism,” the definition of “business profit,” and the relative merits of “free markets” and “centralized planning” as means for securing “more economic prosperity.”
This year, the ISI set out to answer the following question: “How does graduating from college or gaining civic knowledge change someone’s public views?” The resulting report includes such “major findings” as that, when compared to non-college graduates, college graduates are more likely to support same-sex marriage and less likely to favor teacher-led prayer in public schools. If you consider the fact that federal judges have affirmed that both positions comport with the US Constitution, then you might expect the ISI to count these among the findings that demonstrate a consoling advance in civic knowledge. But you’d be wrong. “Civic knowledge,” the ISI found, leads instead to the affirmation of conservative shibboleths. For example, “having more civic knowledge makes one more likely to agree that prosperity depends on entrepreneurs and free markets.” And “if two people otherwise share the same basic characteristics, the one with greater civic knowledge will be . . . less likely to agree that global capitalism produces few winners and many losers.” The ISI also found the civically knowledgeable to be “less likely to agree that the Ten Commandments are irrelevant today.” You get the idea.
Community colleges are suddenly in the spotlight. Jill Biden, wife of the vice president and the country’s most famous community college instructor, hosted a White House Summit on community colleges today. This follows upon President Obama’s attention-getting proposal—the American Graduation Initiative—to provide additional funding to community colleges. That initiative never came to fruition, but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has stepped up to the plate and announced yesterday a new round of grants to raise completion rates at community colleges.
This sector of American higher education certainly deserves the heightened attention as the nation’s leaders finally start to take seriously the challenge of meeting demands for a more highly educated citizenry and workforce. Too much of the focus of all this attention, however, is simply on increasing the numbers of students who graduate or successfully transfer from two-year institutions to four-year institutions. More attention should also be paid to community college efforts to lead the way in advancing more engaged and effective forms of liberal learning.
Higher education looms ever larger in the national consciousness, but unhappily, the public discussion about the purposes of higher learning grows ever more emaciated. Both under Presidents Bush and Obama, this discussion has become far too narrow and technocratic. “It’s the economy, stupid” seems somehow to have become “It’s the economy, so go narrow!”
If you read this blog, you likely already know the AAC&U “take” on college learning. Today’s students need a liberal education because that is the only degree plan that addresses all the essential aims of college study: preparation for work, citizenship, and a fulfilling life. Liberal education does this by fostering “big picture” knowledge of human cultures and the natural world; high-level intellectual and practical skills; examined commitments to ethical and social responsibility; and the demonstrated ability to integrate and apply one’s knowledge, skills, and responsibilities to complex problems – problems in work, life and citizenship.
I recently returned from a meeting in Minneapolis of the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) that overlapped with a meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and featured speeches by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter. Reflecting on these meetings and the flurry of recent news about the rapid adoption of the common core standards by many states, my feelings have veered from hope to serious concern about the direction of K-16 education reform.
On the “hope” side of the equation, I was heartened by presentations and discussions at the SHEEO meeting. These individuals—who are at the very center of managing severe state budget cuts and positioning their state systems to educate far more students with fewer resources—were very aware of the need to focus attention not only on meeting President Obama’s 2020 goal to increase the number of college graduates, but also on ensuring that the quality of student learning increases as well. As one speaker, Jamie Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation, put it, in all our discussions about educational goals, it’s “the learning that matters most.” There were also other thoughtful discussions about how to improve learning outcomes and specifically about the role of accreditation in assuring institutional quality. For instance, SHEEO members discussed whether the current system can and should do more than define “minimum” standards and, instead, push institutions to improve at all levels—including for the top performers. Can accreditation also be about raising aspirations at the top, as well as ensuring that institutions guarantee a minimum achievement level for graduates?
The media is obsessed with covering debates about whether all kids should go to college. There couldn’t be a dumber debate to have in 2010! I was particularly surprised to read the recent article by Jacques Steinberg in the New York Times, which quoted scholars Charles Murray and Richard Vetter, but not Tony Carnevale! In my judgment, having read all three of these individuals’ writings, Carnevale is, by far, the most informed and persuasive on this issue and many other more important issues related to education and work. (Disclosure: Tony Carnevale has served on AAC&U’s board of directors and serves on the National Leadership Council of AAC&U’s LEAP initiative, but is still one of the smartest economists around —and I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks that.)
Kevin Carey provided today in his blog for the Chronicle of Higher Education a particularly cogent response to all this chatter, noting that, “of course college isn’t for everyone,” but it is indisputable that, “College opens the door to opportunity. Not for everyone and not always, but very often and certainly often enough.” There is, in fact, much evidence (see compelling economic data presented by the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown run by Tony Carnevale) to support another of Carey’s points that “college is extremely important and more people need it now than ever before.” The Georgetown Center’s data make it extremely clear that, for most students, college is still very much worth the expense in terms of future opportunities. AAC&U has also compiled a set of PowerPoint slides about the economic value of college learning—and, particularly, the value of liberal education outcomes. These slides—using data from both the Georgetown Center and the Department of Labor—make clear that, whether or not all students “should” go to college or are “well-prepared” to succeed there, we do need more of them to go to college or some other rigorous form of post-secondary education that provides them not only with narrow job training, but with a broad set of skills and abilities.
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!”
By: Dwight Smith, Ed.D.
President Obama’s call for America to reclaim its place as having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020 presents several challenges and requires wit, will, and wallet by community colleges to meet this goal of increasing the number of students receiving a degree by approximately 150,000 annually. The wit will require community colleges to embrace a “culture of completion” for our students and believe that students have the “right to succeed.” Wit will be revealed in knowing our students, their hopes and aspirations, and engaging faculty in the use of high-impact practices throughout the college.
Will is determined by community colleges’ success in the political arena to advance the American Graduation Initiative. With approximately six million students enrolled in community colleges, this sector of higher education provides the largest source of potential graduates to propel the United States to reclaim its position as world leader in educated citizens. The response to the American Graduation Initiative has not been embraced enthusiastically by all sectors of higher education for a variety of reasons. Community colleges will need to exert their political will with the help of their students, faculty, administrators, and the communities they serve if they are to realize the role that is called for in the American Graduation Initiative.
