Higher Education Needs Reform, Too

Related materials

Forum: Join an online discussion about what colleges should be doing to make sure that first-year students arrive prepared to do college work.

Related articles: View all of the articles from this special supplement on schools and colleges

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines Governor's Daughter Enjoyed a High Profile at West Virginia U. About the same time last fall that university officials were awarding Heather M. Bresch a degree she had not earned, they were also considering her for appointment to two advisory panels that raise money for the university. 2 Big Athletics Associations Consider Joining Forces NIH Mulls Ways to Lure Back Veteran Peer Reviewers Unexplained 'Difficulties' Force Postponement of Scholarly Conference in China Colleges Express Concern About State Laws That Require Them to Fight Online Piracy 2 British Universities to Benefit From Saudi Prince's Gifts California State Senator Picked to Lead Community Colleges U. of North Carolina Hires One of Its Own as Chancellor of Its Flagship Campus

By EUGENE W. HICKOK

American education is in trouble. Just about anyone and everyone willing to look at the facts has concluded that we need to do some serious work if this nation is going to remain competitive. Study after study has shown that American schoolchildren are falling behind those in other countries. We are seriously deficient in the production of scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians. Too many of our students lack proficiency in reading and mathematics. The achievement gap between minority and low-income students and their white peers remains an embarrassment, even though some progress has been made in recent years. All of this in the wealthiest nation on earth.

But the troubles afflicting American education run deeper than the nation's public schools. Higher education is not immune.

We have a system (if we can call it that) where students get a high-school diploma that really doesn't tell us much about what sort of education they received, complete a few standardized tests, and enroll in an institution that will take them. They then take courses they are more or less prepared to take, taught by faculty members who know what they themselves know but almost nothing about what their students know.

After each college course, students are graded and proceed to the next course, which may or may not have any relationship to what they have completed. And the process continues until students run out of money or time, or complete their degrees. There is little that is coordinated or comprehensive about it. Majors are formed around disciplines. Degrees are formed around hours and credits earned. Courses are available when faculty members want to teach them; often what faculty members want to teach is not what students need to take.

America has always been able to boast about its higher-education offerings. Its rich and diverse mixture of institutions has produced generations of men and women capable of being informed citizens, leaders in business, science, industry, and government, and they have contributed to an economy that remains vibrant and globally competitive even during the most difficult of times. But problems loom, and higher education cannot be exempt from the talk of reform.

Perhaps the most obvious problem for colleges is price. Growth in tuition continues to outpace inflation. At the same time, studies tell us that it is almost impossible to draw a relationship between the cost of providing a higher education and the price to charge for it. The quality and character of undergraduate education remain subject to criticism: Faculty members at the most prestigious institutions regard undergraduate teaching as a bother and usually aren't rewarded for it; the curricula offered by many institutions lack the breadth and depth once expected from a good college or university. At many institutions, what passes for social-science or humanities requirements are laughable; at most, schools of education are woefully not up to the task of preparing our teachers for the challenges they will confront in the classroom.

Access to college is not the main problem. Success is. Four-year graduation for a baccalaureate degree is almost a thing of the past (34 percent), and the six-year rate isn't all that much better (56 percent). The retention rate for low-income and minority students at many institutions is much lower than for their peers; they get into college but they don't complete their education. Remedial and developmental courses for students entering college who lack the education and skills needed for college-level work continue to climb.

Yet most of higher education continues to resist any serious accountability. With the cry of "academic freedom," most institutions remain governed by the guardians of the academy, faculty members who seem intent on maintaining a management system that is designed to respond to their own concerns rather than those of students, tuition payers, or taxpayers.

What is needed to address the range of issues that confront our schools and colleges is fundamentally new thinking about the way America goes to school. The model in place today is pretty much the model in place a century ago. It might have worked for a long time. (That is debatable.) But it is doubtful that it will measure up to the challenges of the 21st century. The issue is how education is organized, governed, financed, and held accountable in this country.

The good news is that America is well situated to promote dramatic transformation in education. We know better than ever the nature of the problems we confront, and we are developing a sense of urgency about the need to confront them. What we need now is bold thinking, followed by courageous leadership.

The traditional model breaks education into elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges, and so on. But today and increasingly in the future, those distinctions will blur. Revolutions in technology are beginning to challenge education's traditional structures and institutions. We do truly live in a digital age, yet we continue to rely upon an agricultural calendar and an industrial model whereby students proceed from one stage to the next as though they are on an assembly line. Moreover, our traditional model reflects an outdated understanding of how students learn. We now know that students learn in a variety of ways and settings, progress at different paces, and respond to instruction in different ways.

Reforms like the federal No Child Left Behind law should make it easier to marry elementary and secondary education to higher education by setting standards for what high-school students need to know to prepare for college. But while some states are seeking to promote K-16 cooperation, too often they don't go far enough. In far too many places, high school is either a place to bide one's time until college or an extension of middle school, rather than a preparation for adulthood. Advanced students get bored and tune out intellectually. Others never really acquire the education high school once promised.

Students should be able to move beyond secondary education whenever they are ready. And they should not go on to higher education until they are.

Faculty members should be able to move among the sectors as well. The traditional teacher-certification models are out of date and inadequate. It is a crime, for example, that college professors, who have terminal degrees in their disciplines, are not considered certified to teach in most public schools. We are failing to tap a potentially rich pool of talent. Even worse, too many certified teachers aren't really qualified to teach, lacking adequate knowledge of their disciplines.

It is time to try new and different approaches to teacher preparation and instruction, to tear down the bureaucratic licensing systems, to encourage the development of a profession rooted in academic disciplines and the practical application of those disciplines, and to cultivate a teaching profession that transcends traditional sector and institutional boundaries. The academy and the public school need to spend more time together.

Of course, that has implications for all of education. It will force us to ask questions that we haven't even begun to consider and to contemplate ways of doing business that we haven't begun to imagine. That is the point. Education is supposed to be about ideas. We need new ones.

The trouble with education in America is that it is all about schooling, not education. It has always been about attending a place for a time and then moving to a different place for a time. It has always been about young people responding to demands imposed by a system and by men and women who went through the same system and by a society that assumes that's the way it will always be.

But education and schooling are not the same thing. Education begins when a child is born (if not before!) and goes on long after the last class is finished, the last examination passed, the last degree earned. It has to do with the intellectual, spiritual, moral, and emotional development of men and women, and the acquisition of the knowledge and skills necessary for success in life. America's way of providing an education has been to provide schooling.

Changing how we finance, govern, provide a curriculum for, and assess education will require the national government to invest in research and development of new approaches to teaching and learning, new technologies, and new designs for providing education. It will require creating incentives for policy leaders to put aside their traditional ways of thinking and create alternatives to the status quo. It will require investing in the intellectual capital of the country rather than the schooling infrastructure that houses that capital; financing should focus on the needs and promise of students rather than the needs and demands of systems and institutions.

It will require the entrepreneurship of the private sector, the venture capital of the private sector, and the energy and ideas of that sector that depends so much upon the supply of educated citizens. What is needed, indeed, is educational entrepreneurship. It is unreasonable to expect government, at any level, to introduce fundamental change in such a fundamental enterprise. It takes fresh ideas and fresh faces — qualities government seldom possesses. It takes a willingness to run risks, to which government is averse.

And it will require true leadership from those in the schools and colleges who must help fashion the next generation of American education.

Eugene W. Hickok is senior policy director at Dutko Worldwide, a public-policy and government-relations company in Washington, D.C. He was the deputy secretary of education during President George W. Bush's first term and, before that, secretary of education for Pennsylvania.