The real “quality problem” in higher education is that there is no consensus on what “quality in higher education” means. If we are unclear what we mean by quality, it is hardly surprising that different observers reach dramatically different conclusions about levels of quality and who is to blame for any problems.
So let’s narrow the focus by stipulating that diffuse complaints about quality are in fact complaints about undergraduate education. Let’s narrow it further. The U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Adult Literacy shows college graduates’ literacy has declined markedly.
There’s lots of blame to go around, but I’ll single out faculty norms and the news media. Faculty norms get the blame on the supply side, while the news media fail on the demand side.
All faculty members need to share the responsibility for students’ mastery of core skills. But we concentrate responsibility for those skills in certain parts of the curriculum, often delegated to lecturers or adjuncts with little voice or status.
Tenure-line faculty members have few incentives to develop skills in students that go beyond their subject area and course topic, and “norms of excellence” are defined almost exclusively in terms of discipline expertise and recognition. The centrality of the disciplines to faculty career development undermines cross-cutting efforts (such as writing across the curriculum) that seek to redistribute responsibility for core skills.
On the demand side, the news media usually focus on the wrong things. If the big story every year is which Ivy tops the rankings, or which campus is the biggest party school, we won’t ever focus on the real problems.
And when the media do look at quality, they too often settle for simple answers to complex questions—flawed approaches that either reinforce the conventional wisdom (reputation and average SAT scores, for example) or ignore content and process (graduation rates).
The media rarely ask tough questions about teaching and learning: What are we asking of our students? How do we know if we’re getting it? What are we doing to improve?
Alexander C. McCormick is an associate professor of education and director of the National Survey of Student Engagement at Indiana University.
Experts explore the quality and assessment of higher education.
7 Responses to As Literacy Declines, Faculty Members and the Media Share the Blame
trendisnotdestiny - September 1, 2010 at 8:38 am
“Quality” is a market driven word; it reinforces the receptacle approach to knowledge production and delivery… namely let’s attach a price to a product and call it quality…..Oh! The media is predominantly made up of a few corporations that consolidated over the last two decades. You might name them, since a lot of problem solving starts with naming the problem first. General Electric, Viacom, Fox, Disney would all be at the top of the list… In terms of teachers, I would suggest that you have done a superior job of scapegoating them to bear responsibility for a whole generation of students more aligned with consumption than comprehension… Well done! You have officially blamed those who have the smallest amount of power in the system while those who do (you know, the owners) have privatized gains and socialized losses… This brief article is not only simplistic but offensive
don_heller - September 1, 2010 at 4:31 pm
Excellent point about the role of faculty, Alex. I see part of my responsibility as a faculty member – and one who teaches exclusively graduate, and mostly doctoral, students – to help my students develop their writing and communication skills. So I spend a fair amount of time providing feedback on the quality of their writing, not just the content of their papers.
jeffmo62 - September 1, 2010 at 5:00 pm
True, there isn’t a “consensus” about quality in higher education, but I suspect there never has been. And one of the best works to every point this out is Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which the protagonist tries to understand what quality might mean after an instructor at a Montana University asked “did you teach quality today?” And here’s another question: does anyone out there think that the assessment efforts on so many camuses could lead to a concensus on quality?
11272784 - September 1, 2010 at 5:13 pm
I teach at the graduate level in a small public school, and I can attest that many students enter those programs unable to write at the level of a competent undergraduate. Many would be lucky to pass a writing exam at a good high school. “Quality” is a weasel word for “unable to write clearly and coherently.”The fault begins much earlier than college, but because we don’t hold students to reasonable standard and force them to take remedial writing courses when needed. we as educators deserve some blame.I believe that if you can’t communicate what you know, then what you know is irrelevant! It’s in the exchange of thought and information that our skills and knowledge of have value – and lack of ability to write prevents that effective exchange.
deanette - September 2, 2010 at 7:14 am
Ridiculous and pompous post, illustrating, ironically enough, everything wrong with universities today esp. in terms of administration. Stop the endless measuring and huffing and puffing. Stop adding layers of useless administrators. Stop filling education departments and fill departments that teach subjects. Hire good faculty, let them construct a rigorous curriculum, and permit them to fail students who don’t do the work (even those who play on the sports teams).
bbaylis - September 4, 2010 at 10:45 am
I am very sorry to disagree strongly with comment 4. As someone who has spent 40 years in 4 different private colleges or universities in many different administrative roles, I don’t believe that I what is know is irrelevant, but a taumatic brain episode 2 years ago has taken away much of my ability to communicate that knowledge, although I am trying. Aphasia is a communications disorder which does not effect intelligence. It effects the ability to communicate. In my case verbal communication has been affected more than written communication, although I now have to spend an inordinate amount of time to write even a simple paragraph like this. I believe education is meeting students where they are and helping get to where they want and ought to be. Too many times we have not paid any attention to where our students are when they come to college. Once we have determined what they know and how they best learn then we can move on to the process of education. The reflective pursuit of truth is an excellent avenue to knowledge, but it is not the only avenue. Many of our students come to us without any idea what the reflective pursuit of knowledge is, and definitely no idea of how to do it. If where our students ought to be is not where they want to be, then education’s first job is to help them see where thery ought to be. Telling them, “Because I said so, is not sufficient.” How many times do we accept that as an answer to the question “Why?” Quality in undergraduate education should be judged on how well we help students get to where they want and ought to be. As you can tell from that statement, I am proponent of increased emphasis on outcome measures instead of input measures as the most appropriate measure of quality.
mbelvadi - September 5, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Why should we talk about blame at all? Apparently society, as represented by the official educational organizations responsible for setting K-12 curriculum, decided that the kind of literacy measured by the study cited is not in fact a relevant skill, and they stopped teaching grammar, spelling, etc. Literacy is NOT the business of higher education. It’s absurd for the higher ed level to be held to “blame” for failing to graduate literate students, when the level of skills measured was entirely the responsibility of K-12. Higher ed should continue to do what it needs to do, which is to impart subject expertise. If society doesn’t like the outcome, the blame should fall squarely where it belongs, at K-12 and organizations like the NCTE that propagated learning/curriculum standards that apparently the rest of society finds unacceptable. It’s an extraordinary waste of social resources to redirect expensively trained PhDs in various complex subjects towards teaching basic literacy.