Posts Tagged ‘liberal education’
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 »
Commentators—on everything from education to politics to health—are all obsessed with reducing state and federal budget deficits. And, indeed, our nation faces some difficult choices in the coming months and years. If we make the right choices, we can reduce wasteful spending, but invest in the things that will enable our nation’s economy and its democracy to thrive in the future.
Many education policymakers are trying to make the case for at least maintaining investments in education, including in higher education. They make this case, however, almost exclusively by referring to how increasing educational attainment can fuel innovation and help our nation compete in the global economy. We also must invest, however, in a democratic vision for education—one that extends beyond just the need for more educated workers.
I recently read yet two more calls for more liberal education outcomes for today’s college students—this time, the calls focused on what is needed to effectively educate future doctors and business leaders. A committee of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) recently published fourteen preliminary recommendations for the content and format of the new MCAT exam—required for those applying to medical schools. One of four test sections will now cover “critical analysis and reasoning skills.” The committee also recommends that the future MCAT examine a student’s “ability to analyze and reason through passages in ethics and philosophy, cross-cultural studies, population health, and a wide range of social sciences and humanities disciplines to ensure that students possess the necessary critical thinking skills to be successful in medical school.” These are, of course, recommendations that are highly consistent with the outcomes recommended as essential for all college students by AAC&U’s LEAP National Leadership Council in their report, College Learning for the New Global Century (pdf).
I was particularly pleased to also see that the AAMC committee urged further research to allow for refinements to the MCAT that would “help medical schools consider data on integrity, service orientation, and other personal characteristics early in student selection.” This is also highly consistent with the efforts AAC&U has pursued through its LEAP VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) initiative. Through VALUE, AAC&U has worked with faculty from all across the country to develop rubrics for such important learning outcomes as: ethical reasoning and intercultural knowledge and competence.
I generally find Paul Krugman’s columns helpful and on target, but I was dismayed to read his recent piece, “Degrees and Dollars” published last week in the New York Times. In reading it, I couldn’t help but think of Jon Stewart’s common refrain when he chastises those with whom he usually agrees, but who do or say stupid things: “You’re not helping!” Krugman falsely suggests an either/or choice between restoring “the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years” or investing in “putting more kids through college.” Don’t we need to do both these things, Paul?
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.
