When defining the value of education, faculty must focus on teaching and learning—what I view as the core of education. Critical thinking should be at the center of teaching and learning, and professors should be ruthlessly focused on finding ways to keep criticism alive in the classroom. Regrettably, the support for allowing professors to focus their teaching on critical thinking varies tremendously from institution to institution and by college and department within larger institutions.
As an administrator, when I define the value of education, I am obligated to focus on more than teaching and learning. To do this, I must trust that the faculty is doing its job and I must also support them in doing so by facilitating an institutional culture that values the teaching of critical thinking. Too many of our colleges and universities are failing to do this. Instead, we are witnessing an all out war between faculty and administration, with neither group valuing the work of the other.
If an administrator does not trust and support her faculty, she has no place being on a college campus. While we may agree that teaching and learning are at the center of higher education, we must also be honest with one another and talk openly about the fact that the value of an education goes beyond learning. Higher education is also about credentialing. We all know brilliant former students who learned a tremendous amount but never obtained their degrees. Without the credential, they have found it difficult to get the jobs they want and to move their careers forward. Often, it is not because they lack skills, knowledge, or the social wherewithal. It is simply because they lack the credential, the degree.
However, a credential alone does not guarantee one a job, although that seems to be the expectation these days. It wasn’t always so. When I graduated from Michigan State in 1989, I didn’t expect my bachelor’s degree in psychology to magically turn into a job the minute I stepped foot off my campus. I knew that it would be tough to get a job without the degree, but I also knew that the degree was no guarantee of a job. Most of my peers did not expect their degrees to get them jobs either. We never really thought about how our Introduction to Shakespeare class would turn into a bullet point on our resumes. Admittedly, most of my colleagues and friends are traditional arts-and-sciences folks. Perhaps expectations in business, engineering, and health sciences have always been more in line with the thinking that, you get the degree, you get the job.
Although I would love to blame the media, our institutions have also actively contributed to these changing expectations. As the “massification” of higher education increased, so did the active recruitment of the working class and the quickly diminishing middle-classes. We heard the following mantra in the media and on campus: “Now you need a bachelor’s degree to get the same job a high-school diploma would have gotten your parents.” College Web sites and glossy brochures started to highlight the jobs that recent alumni received shortly after graduation. Institutions essentially are selling the ability of their graduates to get a job upon earning a credential.
It is a shame that faculty are often absent from the marketing of our institutions. If they were active participants in those conversations, perhaps we would find a way to sell teaching and learning rather than future jobs, spacious dorms, and fancy gyms.
If we take seriously the findings of reports like those covered in Academically Adrift, we must realize that many of those teaching in our institutions have caved in to the pressure to move away from teaching critical thinking toward teaching marketable skills. I would argue that this is particularly true for vulnerable faculty—contingent and nontenured faculty, who are teaching more than 70 percent of the courses on our campuses. I refer to this new faculty majority as vulnerable because they are easily threatened, harassed, and forced to teach a set curriculum.
If we hope to reverse this tide and support a faculty focused on teaching critical thinking, the least vulnerable professors–associate and full professors—are going to have to take a stand and insist on keeping critical thinking at the center of what we do as institutions of higher education.
And the administrators are going to have to start listening to what their faculty members have to say.
Join Mike Brown and Mary Churchill for the conclusion of their conversation on the values of education later this week.
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11 Responses to We’re in the Business of Selling Credentials
jovanevery - February 9, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Hear Hear. I particularly like this:
“It is a shame that faculty are often absent from the marketing of our institutions. If they were active participants in those conversations, perhaps we would find a way to sell teaching and learning rather than future jobs, spacious dorms, and fancy gyms.”
Somehow “marketing” has become a dirty word. But it’s about promoting the value of what you have to offer. If critical thinking, and Shakesepeare, and all that stuff have value (and I agree they do) then we should be selling that value, not expecting people to magically know what it is.
I also agree that there are serious issues about the different groups of university employees, their positioning, and the relationships to each other. Bigger problems there but you’ve identified the main fault lines.
sherbygirl - February 9, 2011 at 3:16 pm
I don’t think I’ve read a more precise, accurate, and ultimately damning piece on the challenges we are facing in higher education today. We often talk around the topic, about small pieces of the topic, or try to pretend like everything is fine/everyone else’s fault. Blame is easier to assign than actually looking at the problem with the goal of solving it. They say the first step is naming the issues, and you’ve done exactly that. This should be required reading for every administrator and faculty member.
But it won’t be.
I’m not sure higher education really wants to change. Too many people are comfortable where they are and it is much easier to point fingers while simultaneously throwing your hands in the air in despair and disgust: but what can I do about it! I’m trying not to be overly cynical, but when the response to two of the most important pieces of writing I’ve read in a long time about teaching and learning in higher education essentially go ignored, then I’m beginning to lose hope. Not because I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it, but because I don’t think anyone is along for the ride.
I look forward, once again, to the conclusion of this discussion.
11274135 - February 9, 2011 at 6:21 pm
I wish it were this simple. There is some confusion in a lot of minds between providing education and providing credentials. There is also a difference between “selling” credentials and providing credentials to certify that a student has achieved certain educational objectives. There is confusion about what we mean by educating students, or about how we verify that students have achieved educational objectives, or about what sorts of creatures these objectives are. I don’t think that categories such as “faculty” and “administrator” help at all to determine who is on the side of the angels in this discussion, and I certainly don’t think that adjunct or contract faculty have sold out or bought in anymore than any other group or educators. And students are not necessarily victims or co-conspirators. We have “massified” post secondary education in terms of numbers, but we but we have not really increased the complexity or diversity of the ways we think about it. We keep trying to make an enormously complex group of students, faculty, administrators into a really simple model.
bethelcollege - February 10, 2011 at 5:29 am
While I appreciate this article, I also am dismayed by its either-or thinking: “critical thinking” vs. “marketable skills” is an example. I work as an administrator at an evangelical university, and have for 17 years; for 17 years before that I was a faculty member at another evangelical university. The schools I’ve worked at don’t focus on the “either-or,” although some of my faculty colleagues think so. I agree with 11274135, above: for the sake of an argument, let’s not distort what is a complex situation.
tappat - February 10, 2011 at 9:01 am
When I have proposed to sell credentials for the cost of tuition, without requiring any further bothersome things, like sitting in a room for three hours a week or doing various sorts of paper work, hard or online, students unanimously tell me that no one would value that credential. I ask how anyone would know, and they say, simply, “they would know.” They all seem to understand that the value of the BA credential is that it represents an intellectual and social attainment, and the crafty institution that has high numbers knows how to appear to be requiring everything the credential is supposed to require for the credential’s achievement while actually not doing so. We see this in various sorts of degree programs, such as “culture” programs that graduate people with no competence whatsoever in the languages of the cultures they are credentialed in. In economics, where students have no cognizance of the many and various sorts of economies that have been dreamed up and don’t understand even the one economy they have some, fuzzy sense of. Eventually people catch on and the credential becomes worse than worthless — it becomes something a person needs to hide, if possible, like taking recreational drugs in college or being part of a bigamous household, — but until then, the people profiting from the arrangement get lots of material rewards. If college has become simply a kind of holding pen, then the arrangement makes sense, since the best condition of a holding pen is when its clients are sedate and not restless. Majors that draw large numbers provide this benefit. However, this is in the context of having troublesome majors to contrast with. When they are abolished, the popular majors will change, as some of those will be more troublesome, intellectually speaking, than others. How far down can we go might be an interesting question for an anthropological mind, supported by a body that belongs to another culture or economy, to consider.
quidditas - February 10, 2011 at 9:27 am
“I don’t think I’ve read a more precise, accurate, and ultimately damning piece on the challenges we are facing in higher education today.”
I thought it was vague. Just as one glaring example, whatever in the world is “critical thinking”? Not that most blog posts at the CHE are anything OTHER than vague, which REALLY has me wondering what this “critical thinking” could possibly be.
No doubt about it. You’re selling a piece of paper.
peter_h - February 10, 2011 at 10:42 am
Interesting discussion.
We are in the business of selling employment readiness.
See slide 34 of the PPT presentation, Looking at the Past, Shaping the Future: Getting to Know Our Students for the Past 40 Years presented by Hurtado and Pryor during the 2007 NASPA/ASPA conference. A copy of it can be found here:
http://www.heri.ucla.edu/PP/PR_TRENDS_40YR_NASPA-ACPA_04-07.ppt
Notice the switch from “Develop a meaningful philosophy of life” (RED line) to “Being very well off financially” (GREEN line).
betterschools - February 10, 2011 at 12:23 pm
My support to Mary. She is trying to accomplish something worthwhile in a state where the professoriate long ago seized control in its self-interest. On any important metric in which efficiency, productivity, accountability, or student service is material, New York ranks dead last. Separately, I would suggest to Mary that the conceptualization and measurement of “critical thinking” is fraught with difficulties. Existing assessments lack important indicators of validity. There is considerable evidence that the construct is of a family resemblance nature (no single non-trivial common element) and that it is best measured in situ. Perhaps most damning to our “academic common sense” and based on more than 20,000 employer interviews from 1994 to the present, critical thinking is not what employers mention most (or much at all) in their list of desires in college graduates they employ. At this level, employers are more concerned with communications skills and group process skills (both of which can subsume certain definitions of “critical thinking”). They also mention overemphasis on formal research as a mismatch in the colleges that produce their employees.
betterschools - February 10, 2011 at 1:58 pm
“Notice the switch from “Develop a meaningful philosophy of life” (RED line) to “Being very well off financially” (GREEN line).”
Thanks for the reference to the PowerPoint. It was interesting. Valid interpretations, however, are difficult. Recall that the proportion of working adults increased significantly during the same period. We’re still acting as if they needed us to teach them how to be good citizens when there is no reason to think that aren’t as good as we are. They are interested in reaching a specific goal, usually related to their chosen occupation or profession. Another possible factor: society is becoming more direct. The declining red line could reflect a decline in our disposition to say what is expected of us rather than what we mean. There are also differences in the economy and in the perception of economic stability. Bottom line: who knows. It is very easy to make too much out of survey data. It is not that the findings are invalid. In some cases we lack the context to know what they are telling us.
vcraryvaile - February 11, 2011 at 1:27 pm
The “pressure to move away from teaching critical thinking toward teaching marketable skills” has been going on for some time and is most strikingly visible at ground level, e.g. catalogs and course listings, especially for community colleges. I am reminded of this every time I go to an edu page, usually looking for a faculty or admin address and email. Across the country, traditional core course sections, humanities, social sciences, math/science, are bare on the catalog cupboard compared to career training and certification offerings. All the former are relevant to developing critical thinking. Scrub these from the core and offerings would no doubt shrink further.
In colleges and universities less invested in research as reflected in research Grade status, new professional degrees abound. I haven’t looked through those course offerings as closely. Perhaps someone should. Send in the Data Miners. Call it a market survey.
betterschools - February 11, 2011 at 5:21 pm
@vcraryvaile – I understand the thrust of your point about emphasis on marketable skills but the science points in a slightly different direction that you are implying. Direct attempts to teach critical thinking (assuming you can agree on what it is and how to measure it well enough to distinguish success from failure and good methods from bad) are largely ineffective. At best, you can spend a lot of time for few results that do not generalize well. Critical thinking is best learned in the context of specific skills (including marketable skills because of the typical level of interest and motivation brought to th topics) and thereafter generalized horizontally to other domains and forms of life. This does not necessarily happen as a matter of course in teaching specifics, it helps if it is engineered into the curriculum. It is more true that the convergent components of critical thinking can be taught as subject matter with reasonable efficiency. Tools for conceptual analysis, detecting fallacies, disjunctions in inference, etc. can be taught this way but the success in teaching divergent components in tis way is disappointing. All of this is to say that the dichotomy between teaching critical thinking and marketable skills is not a fruitful one. Neither is the more common pejorative distinction between education and training. In the human mind, principles develop as generalizations from specifics, tested back reflexively on new specifics and revised accordingly.