Posts Tagged ‘liberal education’
Take a look at the college-going population and this is what you see: the future of postsecondary education is in the hands of community college educators. Almost half of all undergraduates are enrolled in community colleges, and that percentage appears unlikely to change in the wake of the Great Recession. The largest numbers of students historically underserved who make it to higher education attend community colleges. If you think in terms of population—the overall numbers of students and the evolving demographics of the United States—it’s clear that community colleges are crucial to the future of higher education. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data show that the largest numbers of Latinos in higher education attend community colleges. The same is true of African American students, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and American Indian students. This is the emerging majority of people who will move democracy forward. The future of liberal education is in their hands, heads, and hearts as well.
Community colleges are an increasingly important sector of institutions committed to liberal education, and they will be key to how liberal education evolves in the future. Many would argue—I hear this all the time on community college campuses—that they already are the foundation and center of liberal education, especially for all those students who transfer from community colleges into four-year institutions. Community colleges are positioned to educate the majority of students, and they are likely providing most of general education—certainly most of lower-division general education—now and as far ahead as we can see. We may already be there. If you think of common patterns of transfer, as Cliff Adelman has been arguing for years, you’ll realize that many students enrolled in four-year institutions simultaneously take courses, often in general education, at community colleges. Students, and in some state systems like the California State University, the majority of students, begin their studies elsewhere, primarily in community colleges. In the CSU system, 60 percent of graduates transferred into their institutions from community colleges (see here, here, and here).
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.
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.
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).
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.
A few weeks ago, I began exploring school-to-college alignment in a new series of blog postings. What does purposeful work on school-to-college alignment mean and what can it do for student learning? How can work in the Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) campaign also advance alignment efforts? What does it mean to invoke alignment and focus attention on students’ own work? Educators in both the secondary and postsecondary sectors now have the means to work together on learning-centered alignment—K-16, P-16, P-20—beyond any opportunity we have had before. The urgency that we do so has never been greater.
Why is it important that community colleges are innovatively engaged in alignment? They represent a crucial sector in the current national debate about education, the sector of higher education most critical in my view to the future well-being of our democracy. Centering attention on community colleges, we can see the achievement and promise of alignment that reaches from community colleges back to schools and onward to four-year institutions. To learn about a community college-centered approach to alignment, I strongly recommend Significant Discussions: A Guide for Secondary and Postsecondary Curriculum Alignment, www.league.org/significantdiscussions.
This blog post was first published on April 27, 2011 on the George Mason University General Education blog. The author is Rick Davis, associate provost for undergraduate education at George Mason University.
In Act 2 of Hamlet, Polonius comes upon Hamlet reading and asks him “what do you read, my lord.” “Words, words, words” – “what is the matter, my lord?” –“between who?” – “I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.” Hamlet’s sarcastic answer occasions from Polonius one of those Shakespearean phrases that has entered the lexicon as an all-purpose saying: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”
From this, we can extract two themes that may be relevant to tonight’s celebration.
We’ve seen over the past few years an explosion of high-profile national conversations about higher education. At the federal and state levels, in regulatory bodies and legislatures, as well as in many foundations and think tanks, policy makers and their many advisers are pursuing ways to increase “student success” by fixing what is wrong with higher education.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
