Libby Nelson’s fine piece today on Dyersburg State Community College in Tennessee raises a very helpful question — “how do you build the best-educated country?” She is referring to President Obama’s announced goal of making the United States “the world’s best-educated country by 2020”. I’d like to set aside the merits of thinking of public higher education as a “race to the top,” but it does seem worth worrying about what it would mean for most Americans to be “well-educated.” This is a question that is little asked, perhaps because it is so hard to answer.
The normal metric for success in higher education is the rate at which people complete degrees. So, in the conference on state funding of public education that I attended last Friday, most of the participants spoke about college “productivity” in terms of the number of students who received their bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) within six years. Notice that, unless we are discussing selective higher education, we no longer speak of degree completion in four years. Too few students finish in four years, so we would be doomed to failure if we used four-year completion as the goal. But why use six years as the goal? Admittedly, it is closer to the average in some types of colleges, but certainly not for all (or even most). How about 10 years? Higher education would look more successful if 10 years was the metric, but it seems too long to most people. Why?
Nelson quotes Andrea Franchowiak, an English professor at Dyersburg State on this point: “In a perfect world, where our students have 100-percent supportive family and friends, and they have all the money, and high-speed Internet, and a car that never breaks down, and children who never get sick, and … they don’t have to work two part-time jobs, or a full-time and a part-time job and struggle and deal with everything,” the state’s time frame “makes perfect sense,” said Ms. Franckowiak, some of whose students have needed years just to pass a remedial class. “But for real students, it takes a lot longer.”
Dyersburg is, of course, a community college in an economically depressed area, and as Nelson notes, many students in such institutions never intend to earn a degree. “They come to the community college for specific skills and leave once they can get a better job.” This is less true of four-year institutions, but students in four-year colleges are just as vulnerable to real-world problems as those in two-year institutions — and they face the additional problem that with state budget cutbacks for higher education, they could not enroll for all the courses they need for graduation in any case.
But even if we set aside the problem of whether degree acquisition ought to be the primary goal of students in higher education, the question of what those who confer degrees expect their graduates to have learned remains problematic. Generally, our expectations are expressed in the crudest possible metric — courses completed. We (think we) know how to assess course performance and we normally assume that the completion of the requisite number of courses constitutes a satisfactory measure of educational attainment.
But few serious teachers actually believe that such a metric guarantees that our students are “educated.” If we aspire to provide a four-year college education that transcends the acquisition of specific job skills, we need to be able to specify what the content of such an education would be, and what would constitute the measure of its assessment. If, for instance, we actually believe that college students should receive a “liberal” education, what do we have to do to ensure that they are receiving it? And how does acquiring a liberal education relate to acquisition of a bachelor’s degree? It would be interesting to know what President Obama thinks is required of college performance in a truly educated country.
7 Responses to The ‘Best-Educated’ Country
trendisnotdestiny - April 15, 2010 at 9:06 am
metrics and mathematical obfuscation —— Economistsgrandiose goals of competition ———– Politicianstuition and market-based education ——– Profiteerstitles, awards, and tenure promises ——- Academicsdebt, malleable, joblessness ————- Studentspoverty, violence, prison, service ——– Everyone else These are crude and simplistic labels designed to evoke a response and not an inevitability; but article like these do very little to tease out Academe’s blind spots or focus on the process of education….. but the more we aspire to replication the corporate model in our higher learning institutions, family lives and interpersonal interactions the more we are really going to hell in a handbasket…..Kind of like Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Chase) saying everyone should be allowed to fail; or NCLB; or all of those language tested workds that are designed to represent one idea and then used/sold to accomplish the exact opposite…. Oh yeah another “free markets are good”—– thats why we can’t let China buy our largest oil company or why we allow corporate welfare while dismantling the New Deal programs that led to nearly 60 years of prosperity…. rightMaybe we should aspire to the metric of becoming slightly more educated than all of our collective selves are at this moment…We could really do some good then for others like say:* mine families in west virginia or for corrupt business communities like Birmingham alabama….
physicsprof - April 15, 2010 at 10:02 am
Best-educated? Wake up. Teaching sophomore physics at R1 flagship state U I can only observe that the the vast body of students do not reach physics/math literacy of high school students in Europe and China before our students become juniors. Start with fixing high schools. Stop telling kids they can be anything they want (because many of them are not college material), teach them to respect learning and make them sweat in school. Don’t dumb down college curriculum to meet educational “needs” of students who should simply not be there, depriving a handful of good students a chance to acquire education competitive with its foreign counterpart.
intered - April 15, 2010 at 11:26 am
How do Brainstorm readers feel about the three-year degree? Instead of being delivered as we have been teaching since the mid-1900′s, this degree would employ modern learning and measurement sciences to achieve increased rates and transferability of learning. There are a few exemplars n place that will convince open minds that we can teach and assess better than we generally do, and that these methodological changes can translate into shorter and better degrees that are less expensive for the institution and the student.A problem, I believe, is that too few of us are familiar with the learning and measurement sciences of which I speak. I’m not sure why that is, since those who teach as a profession are in a position to be the definitive leaders in applying and refining these scientific findings.I understand that challenging the status quo represents “fightin words” to a few of those who seem to post on nearly everything. Against their own intellectual heritage, personal attacks quickly follow from these keepers of the old guard. But what about the many others who understand or want to understand these issues? What suggestions do you have for finding ways to ensure that higher education joins other professions in learning how to keep pace with scientific findings? How do we transform higher education from the most conservative among institutions to learn to value change instead of fearing it and attempting to kill messengers? Too many in our profession are still arguing for flat earth issues like agrarian calendars and Carnegie units. We have little time or energy left to address the deeper issues such as teaching for greater impact, whatever that might be for a particular domain. — Robert W Tucker
physicsprof - April 15, 2010 at 12:04 pm
“How do Brainstorm readers feel about the three-year degree?”#3, two things here:– From my post above you can easily conclude that given the current state in 4-year education the 3 year education (at least in physics) will look to me as proverbial LIKBEZ (likvidatsiya bezgramotnosti = eradication of illiteracy), that occured in Soviet Russia back in 1920s that stood for a program established by the state to teach illiterate how to read and write. (With the difference in that LIKBEZ graduate did not receive higher education degrees).– this time around you forgot to post the link to your company’s web-site that promotes 3-year education.
johntoradze - April 15, 2010 at 12:05 pm
As one of the relative few who post here who has started and operated multiple businesses, and who has hired on the order of 100 people myself for businesses, I have a few comments. First, as a hiring manager or employer, I care about one thing and one thing only. Will this person do the job? That’s it. That means that I had to decide: A. Does this person have the skills, and if they don’t can they learn them? B. Does this person give a rats behind about doing the job, or will they badmouth the job, their coworkers, the management, etcetera? C. If this is a high skill job like engineering, software, clinical trial, is this person able to work with others enough? Or, conversely, are they such a doormat that they can’t be left alone to carry the ball on their own? That is what I need to know. Historically, I have put some value on transcripts, sometimes. I put some value on a degree in some instances, but many times not at all. The most successful method I found for hiring people is to have a group of skilled peers that had proven themselves already by working for me or a company interview and decide, followed by 1 to 2 weeks of fulltime classes and exercises to induct the new hire into how the organization works. The other side of that is that I learned to be efficient at weeding people out, and over the years I learned to be ruthless about it. Someone with a bad attitude, or who spreads stories about others, or who rides others coat-tails, creates ripples that spread. Prima donnas are tolerated of course, but only if the donna is truly prima. So if someone wanted to be a prima donna that was the deal – you better be flawless in every other way. In general I would side with physics prof. The problem is in high schools and middle schools. They aren’t really doing kids favors by giving them A’s for doing C work. They aren’t doing them favors by telling them things that aren’t true about their capabilities. That doesn’t mean kids shouldn’t be supported, but they’ve got to learn realism. And young adults who get through college shouldn’t be thinking that because they got through calculus that means they shouldn’t be expected to be able to at least do basic first year calculus when it comes up on the job. And everyone should be able to write a sentence and paragraph that makes sense and is clear without writing “brake” for “break” because sometimes those things will change the meaning in a way that isn’t silly. If you ask me, basics of business and operating a company should be part of general curriculum in college if not high school. It’s really hard to do. Some 90% of startups fail, (yes, there are higher rates for subcategories) which should really sober people up. Starting a business is like 90% of all students in a required class getting an “F” and one in 1,000 getting a B or better. My 10 cents.
reformhigheredu - April 15, 2010 at 2:16 pm
I find the original article “How do you build the best-educated country?” to be a disappointing indicator of the state of higher education in today’s society. It is disconcerting that a university would feel proud to have an article published that states it took a student 6 semesters (about 2 years) to pass a remedial English writing class and that the student eventually earned her Bachelor’s degree. How long did it take this student to graduate? How many other courses were remedial? What is the percentage of students at that university in her situation? Universities should not be an extension of high school. It seems the trend is for universities to lower their standards and provide remedial education. There are too many articles about pushing students through college completion without mentioning how universities will resort to handing out A’s to everyone for the sake of retention and graduation. Whatever happened to student accountability? Not everyone has to go to a traditional 4 year college. What is wrong with attending community college and learning a vocation that might actually pay more than what some people earn with a 4 year degree? I agree with #2, physics prof’s statement:”Don’t dumb down college curriculum to meet educational “needs” of students who should simply not be there, depriving a handful of good students a chance to acquire education competitive with its foreign counterpart.” Well said!
intered - April 15, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Along with others expressing concerns about learning outcomes, I am not in support of any initiative that would have the effect of “dumbing down” degrees. Additionally, I see many problems to be addressed in the high schools and even below. That said, are these the focal points for this article or are they off track, however important? With the exception of one post from a person who represents himself as physics prof, I do not see any suggestion to the effect that dumbing down is a solution. Mr. Katz’s closing paragraph . . .”If we aspire to provide a four-year college education that transcends the acquisition of specific job skills, we need to be able to specify what the content of such an education would be, and what would constitute the measure of its assessment.” . . . represents a sentiment that I have been advocating and implementing since the mid-1980′s when the assessment movement first attempted to gain legs. The only way we can be certain that we are making progress is by carefully measuring the outcomes and impact of what we do in relation to how we do it.My post raised questions as to whether we can gain efficiencies. Efficiencies are logically dependent on the measures of outcomes and impact, and the issue seems especially relevant in the context of four year degrees creeping up to five, six or more years at great cost to the institutions, learners, parents, and society. While there are various ways to frame efficiency concepts, they go to the general idea of achieving the same or better learning outcomes with fewer resources. I recognize that a few individuals representing any profession will sidestep the topic by making personal attacks when their views are challenged but I wonder why so many in higher education tend to eschew the idea of teaching smarter in favor of teaching and evaluating learning as we always have. When presented with ideas about how students might achieve learning outcomes more efficiently, too many, it seems, respond with tired old nostrums warning that dumbing down and diminished quality are certain outcomes of departing from the received (now, 100 year old) view. Do these individuals really believe that efficiency is a constant? Do they believe that they have nothing to learn that might result in more efficient learning for their students? Are they self-contained experimental units that cannot benefit from the larger profession?The idea of applying modern scientific findings to teach and evaluate better seem to me to be an idea whose time has come irrespective of how well it might be received.