Change

Our new students have been on campus for about 6 weeks but we are already entering prime season in recruiting new students.  I already have had the pleasure of talking to the first fall open house group of the season and potential students and their families were very clearly focused on the decision they likely would be making in the next 6 months.  In thinking about my talk to these students and their loved ones, I focused on what I have heard from parents and new/potential students last year as well as what I have heard from talking with students and parents in the school district where I live. 

There seems to be, up to the last few weeks when the ill conceived effort to defund Obamacare threatened to undermine the slowly progressing economic recovery, a greater sense of optimism permeating our country.  Hopefully, that sense of optimism will reappear in the weeks ahead.  Optimism works to shift some attention from the sticker price of higher education to the value inherent in the education.  In a weak economy, price often trumps all; when the economy improves, class size, personal attention, and support services all take on greater prominence.  Scholarships, however, remain an important part of the currency of higher education; parents clearly feel they have been more successful, along with the son or daughter, when a scholarship is part of the attraction.

Even with the economy improving, students and their families seem to be maintaining their focus on the job or graduate school opportunity at the end of the baccalaureate degree studies.  Thankfully our increased attention to outcomes assessment provides us with reliable information on what recent graduates are doing and that information is very reassuring.  Students and their parents also seem to be maintaining their interest in and enthusiasm for an internship along the way. I strongly agree that an internship can provide that important bridge between school and a career and provide the student with added sophistication that increases the chances for success.  Dual degree programs also seem to be more and more attractive to potential students.  The opportunity to earn both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in an overall shorter period of time enhances the value proposition.  Think about it, even five years ago and certainly a decade ago, there was much less concern about the job at the end of the degree, much less emphasis on internships, and much less emphasis on dual degrees.  I believe the new priorities have strengthened higher education but there certainly has been a price to be paid.

The price has been the declining appreciation for the importance of a well rounded liberal arts education as the foundation for higher education.  A dual major, a minor along with a major, more time for internships, a chance at a dual degree, all are often made possible by a reduction on the number of foundational liberal arts courses that are the critical source of the common body of knowledge that higher education should provide.  The appreciation for the liberal arts is often overshadowed now by the desire to have more professional experiences, certifications and credentials.  Graduates are often expected to be more specialists and less generalists, more sophisticated in the imediate needs of the chosen profession but less able to understand world issues and challenges.

We all work hard to provide incoming students and their families with the quality education they want in their chosen field.  We change with the changing times and here there is no choice.  But along with the changes, there also has to be an ongoing commitment to the liberal arts.  Higher education should never be confused with a trade school education.

The Lessons Learned

On the same day a few weeks ago, I happened to be looking at a Hofstra Alumni newsletter and an article that I had clipped from The New York Times.  To digress for a moment, “clipped” is the right expression since I was reading the actual newspaper, not the online version.  I only read the paper version on weekends.  During the week, I read my paper online and am very efficient in reading only those articles that I identify as of great interest.  On the weekends, and at a more leisurely pace, I look through the entire paper and just by skimming find additional interesting articles to read.  There is clearly a role for both, though it will be interesting to see if the economics of printing a paper, in an online world, is viable. 

In his alumni update, the Dean of our Honors College notes the criticism of higher education, most specifically the allegation in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, that some students in some colleges finish their education with minimal learning taking place.  The Dean does this as a prelude to talking about how a liberal arts education supports “genuine learning,” because students spend “a significant amount of time studying exemplary works in literature, history, philosophy, religion, art, music, drama and the rest of the natural and social sciences, … [and thereby] come to see shadings and complexities in a world that previously seemed black and white.”  I am in total agreement with this position and the concomitant position that writing across the college curriculum also enhances the learning that is taking place.

The New York Times article on “Trying to Find a Measure of How Well Colleges Do,” takes the question of learning or not learning and couples it with outcomes assessment measures of value added.  More testing as the article notes already permeates k-12 education, and now “Pieces of such a system may be taking shape, however, with several kinds of national assessments—including, most controversially, standardized tests….”  We should be able to demonstrate that learning is taking place and we should be able to document value added.  But nevertheless there are serious concerns that must be taken into consideration.

On the k-12 level, the curriculum is becoming more standardized with the “Common Core,” which stresses revising existing educational norms by including for example, more nonfiction reading and more practical math.  But is this really the only viable road to be followed to strengthen the k-12 educational experience?  Enhanced student testing will then have to be in place to measure the value added.  This testing will in turn impact the evaluation of many teachers.  Schools in response, to ensure that their students test as well as possible (as early as third grade), may well shed some of the diversity and richness of the curriculum to stay focused on the test materials. 

As higher education gathers evidence of student learning (which we are all more and more required to do) and  strives to place that evidence in a context of other students in the same college and other students in colleges across the country, standardized test will provide a convenient yardstick for what we are trying to measure.  I understand the value of a yardstick but I also recognize the tremendous expertise that faculty bring and have brought to the design and implementation of the curriculum.  Rather than see us move to a Common Core college curriculum, we need to involve our faculty in the development of overall degree assessment instruments that effectively measure that learning/value added is taking place but preserve our right to design a curriculum that best serves the learning goals of our students.

The Undecided

The recent death of Paul Samuelson at age 94 has prompted me to reflect on my own educational journey.  Paul Samuelson as we know, was a Nobel Prize winning economist and was also the author of a long term best selling textbook that influenced me greatly at a critical time.  As a high school student and even in my first and second year in college, I was uncertain as to what field to pursue.  And there were even moments when I was unsure as to why I was pursuing higher education.  Then economics came into the picture.  I can’t even tell you why I registered for this course—I wasn’t even sure at the time exactly what economics was and I knew of no one in my circle of family, friends and acquaintances who were in the field.  As far as I was concerned, this was just another course, taken most likely to meet a requirement.