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Thursday, June 2, 2011

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Recentering Academic Development

Over the past two weeks academia has been buried in a blizzard of reports, which is a symptom of the current pandemic of concern about the state of U.S. higher education.  These reports include
  • the Education Trust's Priced Out, about the extent to which rising tuition and funding cuts are hurting low-income students
  • a dull but worthy report from UVa's Miller Center calling for a stronger focus on degree completion
  • an analysis by the Richard Vedder shop of UT-Austin's recent data dump on faculty productivity, arguing that higher ed's funding problems can be fixed by getting rid of a large number of the least productive faculty
  • the widely discussed "What's It Worth?" report from Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce that correlated differentials in wages with college majors.  It turns out that engineering majors make more than studio artists! Lower wages also unsurprisingly correlate with "womens' work" and with professions that care for and develop people rather than manage money and commodities. Though the study was reviewed in some quarters as a sign that correct market incentives would force students out of their 'fluffy majors" and toward gainful employment, Patt Morrison's disussion with the report's lead author, Anthony Carnevale, and the comments on her web page, suggest instead (1) a backlash against the injustice of the labor market and (2)  defenses of those non-technological majors that are directed at forming cultural, social, and historical knowledge, solving social problems, developing personal capabilities, and helping the individual student understand his or her future possibilities in society.
Which brings us to the real star of the show, Richard Arum and Josipa Roska's book Academically Adrift, which was widely reviewed a few months ago.
Many reviews hooked it into the current trend of bashing colleges to justify massive, absurd cuts in their public funding. Their study does suggest that students aren't learning enough in college.  But their real story is much more powerful than that. They replace stock metrics like degree attainment with specific academic development goals, and measure how well students are doing at mastering these. 

Today the Los Angeles Times published their useful crib of their book.  There you can read the following elements:
  • outcomes are faltering because "many students were not being appropriately challenged," i.e. were not being given enough work. 
  • the main reason is that universities have strayed from the core mission of instruction (I would add research which they do not). "Many institutions favor priorities that can be boasted about in alumni magazines and admission brochures or that can help boost their scores in college rankings." 
  • this amounts to a major paradigm shift in which "Colleges have abandoned responsibility for shaping students' academic development and instead have come to embrace a service model that caters to satisfying students' expressed desires."
  • the correlative is the replacement of academic-instructional with non-academic professional staff, or in other words the administrative bloat that has increased pessimism and cynicism about higher education's priorities among faculty and voters alike.
There's a vicious cycle here, in which senior managers saw alumni and donors willing to pay for a range of expensive services, benefits, celebrations, atomospherics, and derivative products (e.g. high-end medical services) but not for instruction or basic reserach, so they moved university resources very logically towards the service model for students and donors-businesspeople-politicians alike, which increased the quality advantage of those services over that of the core mission, while also requiring the increased hiring of non-academic administrators.

Much of the public is no longer willing to pay for the service-university, where so much of that service is clearly going not to their children or grandchildren or neighbors children but to the usual suspects at the top of a society whose growing inequality has led to their own economic decline.  It could be an entirely different story for the development-university, one centered on the academic development of all of its students, undergrad and grad, through teaching and research alike.

We need to take a chance that a broad majority would pay for that, and offer it to them.

5 comments:

cloudminder said...

given your last two posts--you might find this add'l post interesting (apologies if you've already seen it)

"A University President, But No Longer a Goldman Sachs Director
A frequent topic on Health Care Renewal is how leaders of not-for-profit health care organizations now frequently value their "margin," that is, revenue generation more than mission. (One good example here shows how medical school leaders value faculty most for how much money they bring in, rather than the quality of their teaching, research, or patient care.)

"Masters of the Universe" as Leaders of Academic Medicine

As we have cast about for reasons behind this important and unfortunate transformation, we noticed that many of the members of the boards of trustees of some of the most prestigious universities that house medical schools, medical schools, and teaching hospitals seemed to be leaders in the finance industry. The importance of that finding became more relevant after the global financial collapse, aka "great recession," became evident. Since then, we noted the influence of finance leaders on the leadership of.." http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2010/02/university-president-but-no-longer.html

dr_k said...

one major point of Arum and Roksa's book keeps getting short shrift - namely that learning outcomes as they measure them were best (least bad) in the humanities

Catherine Liu said...

Students in elite institutions of higher ed in core academic programs, science and humanities showed the greatest level of improvement in the College Learning Assessment from freshman to sophomore years. They weren't the least bad, they were much improved in critical thinking skills. Small classes and liberal arts, combined with a demanding core of science/math courses create a culture of achievement. Business majors who are the ones most notoriously adrift showed the least amount of improvement over the same period. Arum and Roksa are very nuanced in their study, but uncompromising in their conclusions. Students at most universities are not being taught well: they themselves are happy to game the system while believing they're being somehow practical by majoring in business. The default position of majoring in something allegedly useful but not academically demanding doesn't pay off. A & R say we need to return to core academic values in teaching -- in Universities. We all need to read the book and to think about it seriously.

Unknown said...

Google University of California wage concessions for details

Trident said...

With the economy in its current state, I would think that students are more likely to pick majors that are academically challenging as well as financially viable. People are staying longer in school in order to wait out the tough job market.

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