Free college for all
students with good academic results
Improving the Quality of Education
Increasing graduation rates and levels of
educational attainment will accomplish little if students do not learn
something of lasting value. Yet federal efforts over the last several years
have focused much more on increasing the number of Americans who go to college
than on improving the education they receive once they get there.
By concentrating so heavily on graduation rates and attainment
levels, policy makers are ignoring danger signs that the amount that students
learn in college may have declined over the past few decades and could well
continue to do so in the years to come. The reasons for concern include:
- College
students today seem to be spending much less time on their course work than
their predecessors did 50 years ago, and evidence of their abilities suggests
that they are probably learning less than students once did and quite possibly
less than their counterparts in many other advanced industrial countries.
- Employers
complain that many graduates they hire are deficient in basic skills such as
writing, problem solving and critical thinking that college leaders and their
faculties consistently rank among the most important goals of an undergraduate
education.
- Most of the
millions of additional students needed to increase educational attainment
levels will come to campus poorly prepared for college work, creating a danger
that higher graduation rates will be achievable only by lowering academic
standards.
- More than two-thirds of college
instructors today are not on the tenure track but are lecturers serving on
year-to-year contracts. Many of them are hired without undergoing the vetting
commonly used in appointing tenure-track professors. Studies indicate that
extensive use of such instructors may contribute to higher dropout rates and to
grade inflation.
- States have
made substantial cuts in support per student over the past 30 years for public
colleges and community colleges. Research suggests that failing to increase
appropriations to keep pace with enrolment growth tends to reduce learning and
even lower graduation rates.
While some college
leaders are making serious efforts to improve the quality of teaching, many
others seem content with their existing programs. Although they recognize the
existence of problems affecting higher education as a whole, such as grade
inflation or a decline in the rigor of academic standards, few seem to believe
that these difficulties exist on their own campus, or they tend to attribute
most of the difficulty to the poor preparation of students before they enroll.
Some Immediate Improvements
Many colleges provide a
formidable array of courses, majors and extracurricular opportunities, but first-hand
accounts indicate that many undergraduates do not feel that the material
conveyed in their readings and lectures has much relevance to their lives. Such
sentiments suggest either that the courses do not in fact contribute much to
the ultimate goals that colleges claim to value or that instructors are not
taking sufficient care to explain the larger aims of their courses and why they
should matter.
Other studies suggest
that many instructors do not teach their courses in ways best calculated to
achieve the ends that faculties themselves consider important. For example, one
investigator studied samples of the examinations given at elite liberal arts colleges
and research universities. Although 99 percent of professors consider
critical thinking an “essential” or “very important” goal of a college
education, fewer than 20 percent of the exam questions actually tested for
this skill.
Now that most faculties
have defined the learning objectives of their college and its various
departments and programs, it should be possible to review recent examinations
to determine whether individual professors, programs and departments are
actually designing their courses to achieve those goals. College administrators
could also modify their student evaluation forms to ask students whether they
believe the stated goals were emphasized in the courses they took.
In addition, the average
time students devote to studying varies widely among different colleges, and
many campuses could require more of their students. Those lacking evidence
about the study habits of their undergraduates could inform themselves through
confidential surveys that faculties could review and consider steps to
encourage greater student effort and improve learning.
The vast difference
between how well seniors think they can perform and their actual
proficiencies (according to tests of basic skills and employer evaluations)
suggests that many colleges are failing to give students an adequate account of
their progress. Grade inflation may also contribute to excessive confidence,
suggesting a need to work to restore appropriate standards, although that alone
is unlikely to solve the problem. Better feedback on student papers and exams
will be even more important in order to give undergraduates a more accurate
sense of how much progress they’ve made and what more they need to accomplish
before they graduate.
More Substantial Reforms
More fundamental changes will take longer to achieve
but could eventually yield even greater gains in the quality of undergraduate
education. They include:
Improving graduate education.
Colleges and
universities need to reconfigure graduate programs to better prepare aspiring
professors for teaching. As late as two or three generations ago, majorities of
new Ph.D.s, at least in the better graduate programs, found positions where
research was primary, either in major universities, industry or government.
Today, however, many Ph.D.s find employment in colleges that are chiefly
devoted to teaching or work as adjunct instructors and are not expected to do
research.
Aspiring college instructors also need to know much
more now in order to teach effectively. A large and increasing body of useful
knowledge has accumulated about learning and pedagogy, as well as the design
and effectiveness of alternative methods of instruction. Meanwhile, the advent
of new technologies has given rise to methods of teaching that require special
training. As evidence accumulates about promising ways of engaging students
actively, identifying difficulties they are having in learning the material and
adjusting teaching methods accordingly, the current gaps in the preparation
most graduate students receive become more and more of a handicap.
Universities have already
begun to prepare graduate students to teach by giving them opportunities to
assist professors in large lecture courses and by creating centers where they
can get help to become better instructors. More departments are starting to
provide or even require a limited amount of instruction in how to teach.
Nevertheless, simply allowing grad students to serve as largely unsupervised
teaching assistants, or creating centers where they can receive a brief
orientation or a few voluntary sessions on teaching, will not adequately equip
them for a career in the classroom.
A more substantial
preparation is required and will become ever more necessary as the body of
relevant knowledge continues to grow. With all the talk in graduate school
circles about preparing doctoral students for jobs outside academe, one has to
wonder why departments spend time readying Ph.D. candidates for entirely
different careers before they have developed adequate programs for the academic
posts that graduate schools are supposed to serve, and that most of their
students continue to occupy.
Many departments may fail
to provide such instruction because they lack faculty with necessary knowledge,
but provosts and deans could enlist competent teachers for such instruction
from elsewhere in the university, although they may hesitate to do so, given
than graduate education has always been the exclusive domain of the
departments. Enterprising donors might consider giving grants to graduate
schools or departments willing to make the necessary reforms. If even a few
leading universities responded to such an invitation, others would probably
follow suit.
Creating a teaching
faculty. The seeds of such a change already exist through the proliferation of
instructors who are not on the tenure track but are hired on a year-to- year
basis or a somewhat longer term to teach basic undergraduate courses. Those
adjunct instructors now constitute as much as 70 percent of all college
instructors.
The multiplication of
such instructors has largely been an ad hoc response to the need to cut costs
in order to cope with severe financial pressures resulting from reductions in
state support and larger student enrolments. But researchers are discovering
that relying on casually hired, part-time teachers can have adverse effects on
graduation rates and the quality of instruction. Sooner or later, the present
practices seem bound to give way to more satisfactory arrangements.
One plausible outcome
would be to create a carefully selected, full-time teaching faculty, the
members of which would lack tenure but receive appointments for a significant
term of years with enforceable guarantees of academic freedom and adequate
notice if their contracts are not renewed. Such instructors would receive
opportunities for professional development to become more knowledgeable and
proficient as teachers, and they would teach more hours per week than the
tenured faculty. In return, they would receive adequate salaries, benefits and
facilities and would share in deliberations over educational policy, though not
in matters involving research and the appointment and promotion of tenure-track
professors.
These faculty members would be better trained in
teaching and learning than the current research-oriented faculty, although
tenured professors who wish to teach introductory or general education courses
would, of course, be welcome to do so. Being chiefly engaged in teaching, they
might also be more inclined to experiment with new and better methods of
instruction if they were encouraged to do so.
A reform of this sort would undoubtedly cost more
than most universities currently pay their non-tenure-track instructors (though
less than having tenured faculty teach the lower-level courses). Even so, the
shabby treatment of many part-time instructors is hard to justify, and higher
costs seem inevitable once adjunct faculties become more organized and use their
collective strength to bargain for better terms.
Progress may have to come gradually as finances
permit. But instead of today’s legions of casually hired, underpaid and
insecure adjunct instructors, a substantial segment of the college faculty
would possess the time, training and job security to participate in a
continuing effort to develop more effective methods of instruction to engage
their students and help them derive more lasting value from their classes.
Rethinking the undergraduate curriculum.
The familiar
division into fields of concentration, electives and general education leaves
too little room for students to pursue all of the objectives that professors
themselves deem important for a well-rounded college education. This tripartite
structure, with its emphasis on the major and its embrace of distribution
requirements and extensive electives, was introduced by research universities
and designed more to satisfy the interests of a tenured, research-oriented
faculty than to achieve the various aims of a good undergraduate education. The
existing structure is unlikely to change so long as decisions about the
curriculum remain under the exclusive control of the tenure-track professors
who benefit from the status quo.
By now, the standard curriculum has become so firmly
rooted that during the periodic reviews conducted in most universities, the
faculty rarely pause to examine the tripartite division and its effect upon the
established goals of undergraduate education. Instead, the practice of reserving
up to half of the required number of credits for the major is simply taken for
granted along with maintaining a distribution requirement and preserving an
ample segment of the curriculum for electives.
The Need for Research
Finally, there is an
urgent need for more and better research both to improve the quality of
undergraduate education and to increase the number of students who complete
their studies. Among the many questions deserving further exploration, four
lines of inquiry seem especially important.
How can remedial
education be improved? At present, low rates of completion in remedial courses
are a major impediment to raising levels of educational attainment. The use of
computer-aided instruction in remedial math provides one promising example of
the type of improvement that could yield substantial benefits, and there are
doubtless other possibilities.
Far too little is known
about the kinds of courses or other undergraduate experiences that contribute
to such noneconomic benefits in later life as better health, greater civic
participation and lower incidence of substance abuse and other forms of
self-destructive behavior. Better understanding of those connections could help
educators increase the lasting value of a college education while providing a
stronger empirical basis for the sweeping claims frequently made about the
lifelong benefits of a liberal education. Such understanding would also reduce
the risk of inadvertently eliminating valuable aspects of a college education
in the rush to find quicker, cheaper ways of preparing students to obtain good
jobs of immediate value to economic growth.
Existing research
suggests that better advising and other forms of student support may
substantially enhance the effect of increased financial aid in boosting the
numbers of students who complete their studies. With billions of dollars
already being spent on student grants and loans, it would clearly be helpful to
know more about how to maximize the effects of such subsidies on graduation
rates.
More work is needed to
develop better ways for colleges to measure student learning, not only for
critical thinking and writing but also for other purposes of undergraduate
education.
The importance of this
last point can scarcely be overestimated. Without reliable measures of
learning, competition for students can do little to improve the quality of
instruction, since applicants have no way of knowing which college offers them
the best teaching. Provosts, deans and departments will have difficulty
identifying weaknesses in their academic programs in need of corrective action.
Academic leaders will be handicapped in trying to persuade their professors to
change the way they teach if they cannot offer convincing evidence that
alternative methods will bring improved results. Faculty members will do less
to improve their teaching if they continue to lack adequate ways to discover
how much their students are learning.
All these reforms could
do a lot to improve the quality of undergraduate education -- as well as
increase levels of attainment. With more research and experimentation, other
useful ideas will doubtless continue to appear.
