The discussion of the conditions of post-secondary education contained in our last Perspectives feature on William Bennett’s To Reclaim a Legacy is likely to be sustained by a report recently released by the National Institute of Education (NIE). Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of American Higher Education, the product of a Study Group convened by the NIE, is both an exploration of the “conditions of excellence” and a call for reforms in America’s two- and four-year colleges and universities.
It is perhaps a truism in this day to say that conditions of undergraduate education have been in a state of flux these past twenty or thirty years. Since 1950 student enrollment has climbed by 400 percent. The number of post-secondary institutions has increased by 40 percent to 3,300, including over 600 new two year colleges created since 1960 alone. These changes have come hand-in-hand with a revolution in the internal life of our nation’s campuses, from education al technology, teaching, and learning methods to institutional governance. Not all of these developments, according to Involvement in Learning, have occurred without a substantial educational cost.
Professional and vocational programs, to an alarming degree, are elbowing liberal arts courses from the core of the curriculum. Indeed, one of the more disturbing trends has been a loss of “core” and “coherence” in curriculum. Between 1970 and 1981 baccalaureate degrees awarded in the arts and sciences (as opposed to “occupational” degrees) fell from 49 to 36 percent. The report also noted a shift in the field interest of entering freshmen, away from the physical sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. (See Perspectives, October 1984, p. 4.) In part mirroring student demand and preference, the “result is that the college curriculum has become excessively vocational in its orientation, and the bachelor’s degree has lost its potential to foster the shared values and knowledge that bind us together as a society.”
While some institutions (fourteen of fifty state universities) have raised their admission standards, the Study Group laments that there has been far more emphasis on the “input” side of the educational equation (standards for admission) than on the “output” side (the quality and quantity of what students know when they graduate). While declining to say precisely what students should know when they graduate, the Study Group does believe that it is essential for college administrators and faculty to redirect their attention to crafting reasonable “expectations” that accord with the unique characteristics of each institution and student population and to “test” how well students achieve upon, or as a preliminary, to graduation. In a sense, while the bachelor’s degree is becoming a near-universal credential in American society and in the labor force, the wide variance and pluralism of the curriculum, of instruction, and of testing has rendered the bachelor’s degree an indefinite measure of academic learning. Increasingly, we are uncertain of what it means to have one.
There is also concern about conditions affecting the faculty. Faculty salaries, in terms of purchasing power, have never really recovered from the years of high inflation in the 1970s. The report estimates a loss of about 20 percent since 1975. There is a noticeable trend toward hiring of part-time faculty, up from 23 percent of the total faculty population in 1966 to 41 percent in 1980. The effect, the Study Group believes, has rippled throughout higher education institutions: “The higher the proportion of part-time faculty, the more difficult it becomes to maintain collegiality, to assure continuity in the instructional program, and to preserve coherence in the curriculum.” Freshmen identifying “college professor” as their primary career interest dropped from 1.8 percent in 1966 to .2 percent in 1982, a trend that “bodes ill for the future of higher education.”
It is against this backdrop that the Study Group developed its recommendations, twenty-seven in all. Key to the improvement of undergraduate education is promoting an “involvement in learning” that will “renew the trust our students and our Nation place in higher education, especially in the undergraduate years.” And while the recommendations cut across practically every level of institutional life, the Study Group’s guiding principle is the encouragement of new and higher standards of “student involvement.” By involvement is meant virtually every point of contact a student has with the institution as part of that student’s learning experience.
The barriers to student involvement are palpable. The burgeoning size of institutions and their attendant bureaucracies, expanding campus enrollments, the diversity of the student body (particularly in age, as only two in three freshmen now enter college immediately after high school), and the growth in numbers of students who commute to college (more than half now commute to and from college daily, and two in five are part-time students) are all factors the Study Group believes diminish the quantity and quality-of student involvement. Contending with an impersonal environment leads to student passivity in learning, one of the “warning signals” the Study Group seeks to broadcast. Meeting this challenge is central to improving undergraduate education.
Seven of the report’s twenty-seven recommendations relate to student involvement. The other twenty concern “expectations” and modes of “assessment.” Two recommendations are addressed to graduate schools, and five to “external agencies” and the research community. Some of the recommendations are reviewed below, but of course readers should consult the report themselves for a fuller explication.
Concerning student involvement, several recommendations are worthy of special note.
“College administrators should reallocate faculty and other institutional resources toward increased service to first- and second-year undergraduate students.”
Significantly this is the first of the report’s twenty-seven recommendations and encourages deans and department chairs to assign their “finest instructors” teaching first and second year students, cautions against the indiscriminate use of graduate students in teaching introductory courses, and stresses the importance of “intense intellectual interaction between students and instructors.”
“Faculty should make greater use of active models of teaching and require that students take greater responsibility for their learning.”
While the lecture is a fixture in the undergraduate teaching landscape, the Study Group sees more room for student-centered learning. This seems of special significance for history. ”To do a discipline means to speak it, to work with its primary materials, to follow its processes, and to adopt its perspective. Active modes of teaching require that students be inquirers—creators, as well as receivers, of knowledge.”
“Academic administrators should consolidate as many part-time teaching lines into full-time positions as possible.”
Part-time faculty, the Study Group recognizes, can help to lend flexibility to staffing of programs; they can also augment college instruction through their special skills or talents. But they should not be used as an inexpensive source of labor.
An overarching concern of Involvement in Learning is the “conditions of excellence,” and one way of promoting excellence is for institutions to look closely at the expectations they have of students to whom they award bachelors degrees. The degree should have significant academic meaning, and the Study Group makes several recommendations “for realizing high expectations.”
- “Faculties and chief academic officers in each institution should agree upon and disseminate a statement of the knowledge, capacities, and skills that students must develop prior to graduation.”
- “All bachelor’s degree recipients should have at least two full years of liberal education. In most professional fields, this will require extending undergraduate programs beyond the usual four years.”
- “Liberal education requirements should be expanded and reinvigorated to ensure that (1) curricular content is directly addressed not only to subject matter but also to the development of capacities of analysis, problem solving, communication, and syn thesis, and (2) students and faculty integrate knowledge from various disciplines.”
It is not enough to develop a “skills” statement in a vacuum. It must be linked with content and knowledge that we associate with the disciplines. This latter recommendation has special significance for history teaching. The rapidity of social and technological change make it difficult to predict the mix of skills needed by tomorrow’s labor force. The best hedge is to avoid narrow training and instead emphasize broad learning for adaptation. “Adaptation to change requires that one draw on history and on the experiences of other nations, and that one apply the theories and methods of empirical investigation.”
Adaptation to change requires that one draw on history and on the experiences of other nations, and that one apply the theories and methods of empirical investigation.
One of the more complex and far reaching recommendations affecting faculty concerns tenure award. One recommendation, in effect, encourages college and university personnel to define scholarship more broadly in order to promote equity in tenure requirements across the disciplines. In some fields (e.g., biology) faculty may publish their findings quickly in “research notes” and articles for journal publication. But in other disciplines, such as history, book publication is often a prerequisite for the award of tenure, and books that historians write involve “painstaking process[es] of gathering and analyzing original sources that may be located all over the world.” Moreover, the Study Group urges that “scholarship” be seen as part of a whole, and not simply as a publishing activity. College officials and others responsible for making personnel decisions are called upon to “increase the weight given to teaching in the process of hiring and determining retention, tenure, promotion, and com pensation, and should improve means of assessing teaching effectiveness.”
Another recommendation as part of realizing expectations could have a ma jor impact on the organization of curriculum:
“Community colleges, colleges, and universities should supplement the credit system with proficiency assessments both in liberal education and in the student’s major as a condition of awarding degrees.”
This recommendation is intended to “warrant” the bachelor’s degree as a credential of achievement—but equally important it will influence student course selection practices and “ensure that students take their general education or liberal arts requirements as seriously as they take their vocational or professional programs.” The Study Group also calls for a reinstituting of the comprehensive examination for majors.
A third series of recommendations concerns “assessment and feedback” and is intended to help institutions pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in how well they are educating their students.
Copies of Involvement in Learning are available from the Superintendent of Documents, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402. Cite Stock No. 065-000-00213-2. The cost is $4.50 per copy.
The Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education was sponsored by the NIE, a part of the US Department of Education. The Study Group included:
Alexander W. Astin, Director of the Higher Education Research Institute of the University of California, Los Angeles
Herman Blake, President, Tougaloo College, Mississippi
Howard R. Bowen, an economist and past president of a college and two universities
Zelda F. Gamson, Center for the Study of Higher Education, University of Michigan and the College of Public and Community Service, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Harold Hodgkinson, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Educational Leadership
Barbara A. Lee, Institute of Manage ment and Labor Relations, Rutgers University
Kenneth P. Mortimer (Chair of the Study Group), Executive Assistant to the President for University Affairs, Pennsylvania State University
