Date: Thu, 6 Jan 1994 11:27:23 -0800
To: acstaff
From: jpl
AN AMERICAN IMPERATIVE:
Higher Expectations for Higher Education
An Open Letter to Those Concerned about the American Future
Report of the Wingspread Group on Higher Education
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Wingspread Group on Higher Education
An American Imperative
ISBN 0-9639160-0-9
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 93-061441
1. Education, Higher--United States.
COPYRIGHT (C) 1993 BY THE JOHNSON FOUNDATION, INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FIRST EDITION
------------------------------------------------------------------------
An electronic version of the report of the Wingspread Group on Higher
Education is available on INTERNET through anonymous ftp at the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. To locate the report, ftp to
csd4.csd.uwm.edu, change directory to pub/wingspread/report.txt. If you
have questions, call 414-229-6151 or send E-mail to [h--p] at [csd4.csd.uwm.edu.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reproduction of this entire document for non-commercial purposes is
encouraged. Partial or commercial reproduction requires prior permission
in writing from The Johnson Foundation, Inc., except that Appendix A may be
reproduced separately and as a whole without permission.
(C) 1993, The Johnson Foundation, Inc.
Wingspread and the Wingspread design are federally registered service
marks of the Johnson Foundation, Inc., and may be used only with the
foundation's permission.
To order a published copy of the complete report,
call 414-554-2434 or write:
The Johnson Foundation, Inc.
P.O. Box 2029
Racine, WI 53404.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Members of the Wingspread Group on Higher Education
Patricia Aburdene
Author
Megatrends, Limited
Gilbert F. Amelio
President and Chief Executive Officer
National Semiconductor Corporation
Michael E. Baroody
President
National Policy Forum
William E. Brock
Chairman
The Brock Group, Ltd.
Martha Layne Collins
President
St. Catharine College
Robben W. Fleming
President Emeritus
University of Michigan
Mitchell S. Fromstein
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Manpower, Incorporated
Roger W. Heyns
Retired President
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Robert H. McCabe
President
Miami-Dade Community College District
Constance Berry Newman
Under Secretary
The Smithsonian Institution
Sr. Joel Read
President
Alverno College
Albert Shanker
President
American Federation of Teachers
Peter Smith
Dean, School of Education and Human Development
The George Washington University
Adrienne K. Wheatley
Student, John F. Kennedy School of Government and Trustee of Princeton
University
Blenda J. Wilson
President
California State University, Northridge
Joe B. Wyatt
Chancellor
Vanderbilt University
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The members of the Wingspread Group on Higher Education would like to
express their respect and appreciation for the support they received from
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Johnson Foundation, Inc.,
Lilly Endowment Inc., and The Pew Charitable Trusts.
While they all helped at every turn, we are certain they would agree
that The Johnson Foundation and the staff at Wingspread deserve particular
thanks for the gracious competence of the support they provided us. We also
want to acknowledge our gratitude for the warm hospitality offered us by
Miami-Dade Community College, and in particular our thanks to Kati Gomez.
The individuals who contributed the essays included in this volume
also deserve our thanks, perhaps most notably John Gallagher, whose
essay provided an important historical context to our deliberations.
Beyond that, he served as our continuing rapporteur; his summaries of our
discussions were immensely helpful in keeping us on course.
In the same spirit, we would like to acknowledge our debt to James J.
Harvey, whose long experience with education was invaluable and who helped compose this report. Like so many others involved in this
effort, he is a professional's professional.
Finally, every human endeavor has an unsung hero or heroine. In this
case, it is Jo Ann Weibel of The Johnson Foundation, whose cheerful
competence, grace under pressure, and devotion to "the Wingspread Way"
eased our work at every point. We want her to know how grateful we are.
CONTENTS
Chairman's Preface
An American Imperative:
Higher Expectations for Higher Education
A Changing America and a Changing World
Warning Signs
Three Central Issues
Taking Values Seriously
Putting Student Learning First
Creating a Nation of Learners
First Steps: Challenges for Higher Education
Appendices
A. A Self-Assessment Checklist
B. Resources and Documentation
C. Members of the Wingspread Group
D. Contributed Essays
E. The SCANS Agenda
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAIRMAN'S PREFACE
The world our children inhabit is different, radically so, than the one
we inherited. An increasingly open, global economy requires--absolutely
requires--that all of us be better educated, more skilled, more adaptable,
and more capable of working collaboratively. These economic considerations
alone mean that we must change the ways we teach and learn.
But an increasingly diverse society, battered (and that is not too
strong a term) by accelerating change, requires more than workplace
competence. It also requires that we do a better job of passing on to
the next generation a sense of the value of diversity and the critical
importance of honesty, decency, integrity, compassion, and personal
responsibility in a democratic society. Above all, we must get across
the idea that the individual flourishes best in a genuine community to
which the individual in turn has an obligation to contribute.
None of us is doing as well as we should in this whole business. We
are all part of the problem, if only because we acquiesce in a formal
education system that is not meeting our needs.
We must not forget that no nation can remain great without developing a
truly well-educated people. No nation can remain good without transmitting
the fundamental values of a civil society to each new generation. No nation
can remain strong unless it puts its young people at the forefront of its
concerns. America is falling short on each of these counts. It has much to
do.
Believing these things, I was very pleased when in January 1993 the
president of The Johnson Foundation suggested that I chair a working group
sponsored by four leading private foundations--The William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation, The Johnson Foundation, Inc., Lilly Endowment Inc., and
The Pew Charitable Trusts--to examine the question: "What Does Society Need
from Higher Education?"
The foundations assembled a working group of talented and experienced
men and women (Appendix C) and provided us with a remarkable collection of
essays written for our use by 32 individuals representing diverse social,
professional, and economic perspectives. Indeed, we found the essays so
helpful that we have appended them to this report for the benefit of others
(Appendix D). The Johnson Foundation made the magnificent setting of its
Wingspread facilities and, more importantly, the talents of its staff
available to us. We were encouraged to define our own agenda and to begin
our work.
Some of what we have to say in the attached open letter will not be
easy reading for our friends and colleagues in higher education. We
understand that; some of it was not easy writing, either. We have,
however, tried to avoid finding fault and pointing fingers. Our comments
should be understood as an effort by close and affectionate friends to
express concern and to offer suggestions to colleagues whose labors we
respect and badly need.
An additional point: there is no single silver bullet cure. Much as
it would simplify our national task, no single act will transform the
incredibly diverse world of higher education into an enterprise
routinely producing graduates with all of the qualities, competences,
and attitudes we would hope for them.
Rather, our suggestions and our questions will require of each
institution--campus by campus--honest introspection and some very hard and
even controversial new thinking about its roles and
responsibilities, principles, and priorities.
I want to express our gratitude to all those who have assisted our
work in so many thoughtful and gracious ways, beginning with the four
sponsoring foundations. I should note that their support and the
assistance of others (including the scores of individuals from
education, business, public life, and philanthropy who offered helpful
comments on a preliminary draft of this document) does not imply that any
of them subscribe to the conclusions we have reached or the
challenges we advance.
Finally, I think it only fair to point out that although every member of
our group supports the major themes of our open letter, none of us
necessarily subscribes to every detail. That should be little surprise. The
Wingspread Group was composed of 16 accomplished, thoughtful individuals,
all with strongly held views. On the big questions--the conviction that
American education faces serious problems, the belief that we need to
develop new ways of thinking about higher education, and the conclusions
and challenges in this document--we are unanimous.
We hope this open letter to those of our fellow Americans who share our
concern for the future will stimulate the national debate about higher
education that we consider essential.
William E. Brock Chairman
AN AMERICAN IMPERATIVE:
HIGHER EXPECTATIONS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
"Everything has changed but our ways of thinking, and if these do not
change we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."
---Albert Einstein
A disturbing and dangerous mismatch exists between what American society
needs of higher education and what it is receiving. Nowhere is the mismatch
more dangerous than in the quality of undergraduate preparation provided on
many campuses. The American imperative for the 21st century is that society
must hold higher education to much higher expectations or risk national
decline.
Establishing higher expectations, however, will require that students
and parents rethink what too many seem to want from education: the
credential without the content, the degree without the knowledge and effort
it implies.
In the past, our industrial economy produced many new and low-skill jobs
and provided stable employment, often at high wages, for all. Now the
nation faces an entirely different economic scenario: a knowledge-based
economy with a shortage of highly skilled workers at all levels and a
surplus of unskilled applicants scrambling to earn a precarious living.
Many of those unskilled applicants are college graduates, not high school
dropouts.
Like much of the rest of American education, the nation's colleges
and universities appear to live by an unconscious educational rule of
thumb that their function is to weed out, not to cultivate, students for
whom they have accepted responsibility. An unacceptably high percentage of
students leaks out of the system at each juncture in the education
pipeline. This hemorrhaging of our human resources occurs despite the low
standards prevalent in American education and the existence of a wide
diversity of institutions offering many options for students. It is almost
as though educators take failure for granted.
Education is in trouble, and with it our nation's hopes for the
future. America's ability to compete in a global economy is threatened.
The American people's hopes for a civil, humane society ride on the
outcome. The capacity of the United States to shoulder its responsibilities
on the world stage is at risk. We understand the explanations offered when
criticisms are leveled at higher education: entrants are inadequately
prepared; institutional missions vary; we are required by law to accept all
high school graduates; students change their minds frequently and drop out of school; controlling costs is
difficult in the labor-intensive academy; cutting-edge research consumes
the time of senior faculty. All of these things are true.
But the larger truth is that the explanations, no matter how persuasive
they once were, no longer add up to a compelling whole. The simple fact is
that some faculties and institutions certify for graduation too many
students who cannot read and write very well, too many whose intellectual
depth and breadth are unimpressive, and too many whose skills are
inadequate in the face of the demands of contemporary life.
These conclusions point to the possibilities for institutional decline
given that an increasingly skeptical public expresses the same sense of
sticker shock about college costs that is now driving health care reform.
The withdrawal of public support for higher education can only accelerate
as students, parents, and taxpayers come to understand that they paid for
an expensive education without receiving fair value in return.
The seeds for national disaster are also there: the needs of an
information- and technology-based global economy, the complexities of
modern life, the accelerated pace of change and the growing demands for
competent, high-skill performance in the workplace require that we produce
much higher numbers of individuals--whether high school, community college
or four-year graduates--prepared to learn their way through life. Most
Americans and their policymakers, concerned about the quality of
pre-collegiate education, take heart in the large numbers of Americans who
receive associate's and bachelor's degrees every year. The harsh truth is
that a significant minority of these graduates enter or reenter the world
with little more than the knowledge, competence, and skill we would have
expected in a high school graduate scarcely a generation ago.
What does our society NEED from higher education? It needs stronger,
more vital forms of community. It needs an informed and involved citizenry.
It needs graduates able to assume leadership roles in American life. It
needs a competent and adaptable workforce. It needs very high quality
undergraduate education producing graduates who can sustain each of these
goals. It needs more first-rate research pushing back the important
boundaries of human knowledge and less research designed to lengthen
academic resumes. It needs an affordable, cost-effective educational
enterprise offering lifelong learning. Above all, it needs a commitment to
the American promise--the idea that all Americans have the opportunity to
develop their talents to the fullest. Higher education is not meeting these
imperatives.
A Changing America and a Changing World
---------------------------------------
American society has never been static, but now change is accelerating.
The United States is becoming more diverse: by the year 2020, about
one-third of Americans will be members of minority groups, traditionally
poorly served by education at all levels. New information and technologies
are accelerating change: with a half life of less than five years, they are
reshaping the way the world lives, works, and plays. Our society is aging:
in 1933, 17 Americans were employed for every Social Security recipient; by
2020, the ratio will have dropped from 17-to-1 to 3-to-1. In 1950, the Ford
Motor Company employed 62 active workers for every retiree; by 1993, the
ratio dropped to 1.2-to-1. These statistics are a stark reminder of our
need to assure that American workers are educated to levels that maximize
their productivity and, hence, our collective economic well-being.
A generation ago, Americans were confident that the core values which
had served our nation well in the past could guide it into the future.
These values were expressed in homey statements such as: "Honesty is the
best policy"; "Serve your country"; "Be a good neighbor." Today we worry
that the core values may be shifting and that the sentiments expressed are
different: "Don't get involved"; "I gave at the office"; "It's cheating only if you get caught." Too many of us today
worry about "me" at the expense of "we."
A generation ago, our society and its institutions were overseen by
white males. Immigration policy favored peoples from Northern Europe. The
television images of "Ozzie and Harriet" were thought to reflect the
middle-class American family. Almost all of that has changed as women and
members of minority groups increasingly have assumed their place at the
table, and immigrants and refugees from once-distant lands have remade the
face of the United States.
A generation ago, computers took up entire rooms; punch cards for data
processing were the cutting edge of technology; operators stood by to help
with transatlantic calls; many families watched the clock each afternoon
until local television stations began their evening broadcasts. Today,
microprocessors, miniaturization, and fiber optics have made information
from the four corners of the world instantaneously available to anyone with
a computer, transforming the way we manage our institutions, the way we
entertain ourselves, and the way we do our business.
A generation ago, our society was affluent, richer than it had ever
been, with the prospect that its wealth would be more widely and deeply
shared than ever before. The American economy--our assembly lines, our
banks and farms, our workers and managers--dominated the global economy.
Ours was the only major economy to emerge intact from World War II. Trade
barriers limited global competition. Our industrial plant and national
infrastructure were the envy of the world. As a people, we believed we
could afford practically anything, and we undertook practically everything.
Those days are behind us. Global competition is transforming the
economic landscape. Fierce competitors from abroad have entered domestic
markets, and one great American industry after another has felt the
effects. We have watched with growing concern as our great national
strengths have been challenged, as the gap between rich and poor has
widened, and as the nation's economic energy has been sapped by budget and
trade deficits. We have struggled--so far unsuccessfully--to set the
country back on the confident, spirited course we took for granted a
generation ago.
We can regain that course only if Americans work smarter. Otherwise, our
standard of living will continue the enervating erosion that began two
decades ago. Individual economic security in the future will depend not on
job or career stability, but on employability, which itself will be a
function of adaptability and the willingness to learn, grow, and change
throughout a lifetime.
Americans may be aware of all of this, but we are prisoners of our past.
Our thinking and many of our institutions, including our educational
institutions, are still organized as though none of these changes had
occurred.
The 3,400 institutions of higher learning in America come in all
shapes and sizes, public and private. They include small liberal arts
institutions, two-year community colleges, and technical institutions,
state colleges and universities, and flagship research universities. In
each of these categories, models of both excellence and mediocrity
exist. Despite this diversity, most operate as though their focus were
still the traditional student of days gone by: a white, male, recent
high school graduate, who attended classes full-time at a four-year
institution and lived on campus. Yesterday's traditional student is, in
fact, today's exception.
There are more women than men among the 13.5 million students on today's
campuses. Forty-three percent of today's students are over the age of 25,
including 300,000 over the age of 50. Minority Americans now make up about
20 percent of enrollments in higher education. Almost as many students
attend part-time and intermittently as attend full-time and without
interruption. More college students are enrolled in community colleges than
in four-year institutions. And there are more students living at home or off-campus than there are in dormitories. Fixed in our mind's eye,
however, the image of the traditional student blocks effective responses to
these new realities.
These demographic, economic, and technological changes underscore the
mismatch between what is needed of higher education and what it provides.
Because we are now a more diverse people, society needs a much better sense
of the things that unite us. Because the global economy has had such a
profound effect on American standards of living, individuals in our society
and the economy as a whole need to be much better prepared for the world of
work.
In short, we need to educate more people, educate them to far higher
standards, and do it as effectively and efficiently as possible.
Warning Signs
-------------
Institutions, like organisms, must respond to changes in their
environment if they are to survive. Not surprisingly, given higher
education's slow adaptation, real problems shadow the real successes of the
nation's colleges and universities.
CRISIS OF VALUES. The nation's colleges and universities are enmeshed
in, and in some ways contributing to, society's larger crisis of values.
Intolerance on campus is on the rise; half of big-time college sports
programs have been caught cheating in the last decade; reports of ethical
lapses by administrators, faculty members and trustees, and of cheating and
plagiarism by students are given widespread credence.
From the founding of the first American colleges 300 years ago, higher
education viewed the development of student character and the transmission
of the values supporting that character as an essential responsibility of
faculty and administration. The importance of higher education's role in
the transmission of values is, if anything, even greater today than it was
300 or even 50 years ago. The weakening of the role of family and religious
institutions in the lives of young people, the increase in the number of
people seeking the benefits of higher education, and what appears to be the
larger erosion of core values in our society make this traditional role all
the more important.
In this context, it is fair to ask how well our educational institutions
are transmitting an understanding of good and bad, right and wrong, and the
compelling core of values any society needs to sustain itself. While there
is a paucity of concrete data, enough anecdotal evidence exists to suggest
that there is too little concerted attention, on too many campuses, to this
responsibility.
In the final analysis, a society is not simply something in which we
find ourselves. Society is "we." It is our individual and collective
integrity, our commitment to each other and to the dignity of all. All of
the other accomplishments of higher education will be degraded if our
colleges and universities lose their moral compass and moral vocation.
THE COSTS OF "WEEDING." Few thoughtful observers believe that our K-12
schools are adequate for today's needs. About half our high school students
are enrolled in dead-end curricula that prepare them poorly for work, life,
or additional learning. Too many of the rest are bored and unchallenged.
Too few are performing to standards that make them competitive with peers
in other industrialized countries. Half of those entering college full-time
do not have a degree within five years. Half of all students entering Ph.D.
programs never obtain the degree. In short, our education system is better
organized to discourage students--to weed them out--than it is to cultivate
and support our most important national resource, our people.
THE UNEDUCATED GRADUATE. The failure to cultivate our students is
evident in a 1992 analysis of college transcripts by the U.S. Department of
Education, which reveals that 26.2 percent of recent bachelor's degree
recipients earned not a single undergraduate credit in history; 30.8
percent did not study mathematics of any kind; 39.6 percent earned no
credits in either English or American literature; and 58.4 percent left
college without any exposure to a foreign language. Much too frequently, American higher education now
offers a smorgasbord of fanciful courses in a fragmented curriculum that
accords as much credit for "Introduction to Tennis" and for courses in pop
culture as it does for "Principles of English Composition," history, or
physics, thereby trivializing education--indeed, misleading students by
implying that they are receiving the education they need for life when they
are not.
The original purpose of an undergraduate education, the development of a
broadly educated human being, prepared, in the words of Englishman John
Henry Cardinal Newman, "to fill any post with credit", has been pushed to
the periphery. That purpose, restated, was the essential message of a
commission convened by President Harry S Truman 45 years ago. According to
the Truman Commission, higher education should help students acquire the
knowledge, skills, and attitudes to enable them "to live rightly and well
in a free society." The 1992 transcript analysis cited above suggests that
educators need to ask themselves how well their current graduates measure
up to the standards of Newman and the Truman Commission, and to the needs
of American society for thoughtful citizens, workers, and potential
leaders.
For without a broad liberal education, students are denied the
opportunity to engage with the principal ideas and events that are the
source of any civilization. How then are they to understand the values that
sustain community and society, much less their own values? Educators know
better, but stand silent.
There is further disturbing evidence that graduates are unprepared for
the requirements of daily life. According to the 1993 National Adult
Literacy Survey (NALS), surprisingly large numbers of two- and four-year
college graduates are unable, in everyday situations, to use basic skills
involving reading, writing, computation, and elementary problem-solving.(1)
The NALS tasks required participants to do three things: read and
interpret prose, such as newspaper articles, work with documents like bus
schedules and tables and charts, and use elementary arithmetic to solve
problems involving, for example, the costs of restaurant meals or
mortgages. The NALS findings were presented on a scale from low (Level 1)
to high (Level 5) in each of the three areas. The performance of college
graduates on these scales is distressing:
- in working with documents, only eight percent of all four-year
college graduates reach the highest level;
- in terms of their ability to work with prose, only 10 percent of
four-year graduates are found in Level 5; and
- with respect to quantitative skills, only 12 percent of four-year
graduates reach the highest level.
In fact, only about one-half of four-year graduates are able to
demonstrate intermediate levels of competence in each of the three areas.
In the area of quantitative skills, for example, 56.3 percent of
American-born, four-year college graduates are unable CONSISTENTLY to
perform simple tasks, such as calculating the change from $3 after buying a
60 cent bowl of soup and a $1.95 sandwich. Tasks such as these should not
be insuperable for people with 16 years of education.
GROWING PUBLIC CONCERN. Opinion polls leave no doubt that Americans have
a profound respect for higher education. They consider it essential to the
nation's civility and economic progress, and to advances in science,
technology, and medicine. Americans are convinced that an undergraduate
degree is as important to success in today's world as a high school diploma
was in yesterday's.
But, simultaneously, the polls reveal deep public concern about higher
education. The public is overwhelmed by sticker shock when it considers
college costs. According to the polls, the overwhelming majority of the
American people believes that colleges and universities--both public and
private--are overpriced and lie increasingly beyond the reach of all but
the wealthy. Public confidence in the "people running higher education" has
declined as dramatically with respect to education leaders as it has with respect to the
leadership of medicine, government, and business.
While the public is most interested in achievement, costs, and
management, it believes that the academy focuses instead on advanced study
and research. Several of the essays written for our study echo a number of
the conclusions of the 1992 report of the President's Advisory Council on
Science and Technology. Both remind us that the academic culture and
rewards system too frequently encourages graduate education and research at
the expense of undergraduate education. What emerges is a picture of
academic life which only grudgingly attends to undergraduate learning, and
to the advice, counseling, and other support services students need. The
dominant academic attitude, particularly on large campuses enrolling most
American students, is that research deserves pride of place over teaching
and public service, in part because many senior faculty prefer specialized
research to teaching, and in part because institutions derive much of their
prestige from faculty research. Indeed, the ideal model in the minds of
faculty members on campuses of all kinds is defined by what they perceive
to be the culture and aspirations of flagship research universities.
Three Central Issues
--------------------
It is hard not to conclude that too much undergraduate education is
little more than secondary school material--warmed over and reoffered at
much higher expense, but not at correspondingly higher levels of
effectiveness. The United States can no longer afford the inefficiencies,
or the waste of talent, time, and money, revealed by these warning signs.
Indeed, the nation that responds best and most rapidly to the educational
demands of the Age of the Learner will enjoy a commanding international
advantage in the pursuit of both domestic tranquillity and economic
prosperity. To achieve these goals for our country, we must educate more
people, and educate them far better. That will require new ways of
thinking.
Given the diversity of American higher education, there can be no single
formula for change common to all, but we do believe that there are at least
three fundamental issues common to all 3,400 colleges and universities:
- taking values seriously;
- putting student learning first;
- creating a nation of learners.
The nation's colleges and universities can respond to the agenda defined
in this open letter. They can do so by reaffirming their conviction that
the moral purpose of knowledge is at least as important as its utility.
They can do so by placing student learning at the heart of their concerns.
They can do so by working toward what educator John Goodlad has called "a
simultaneous renewal" of higher education and the nation's K-12 schools as
one continuous learning system.
To focus what we hope will be a vigorous, widespread national debate, we
have distilled the results of six-months' work and discussion into a
compact document designed to make our line of reasoning as clear as
possible. Our purpose is not so much to provide answers. Rather, we hope to
raise some of the right questions and thus encourage Americans and their
colleges and universities to consider and adopt a new direction. That is
why we close this document not with a set of recommendations, but with a
set of challenges for American higher education, for the public, and for
its representatives.
We begin our discussion in the pages that follow with an argument for
putting first things first: the need for a rigorous liberal education that
takes values seriously and acknowledges that value-free education has
proven a costly blind alley for society.
TAKING VALUES SERIOUSLY
"The Holocaust reminds us forever that knowledge divorced from values can
only serve to deepen the human nightmare; that a head without a heart is
not humanity."
---President Bill Clinton
Democratic societies need a common ground, a shared frame of reference
within which to encourage both diversity and constructive debate about the common good. A free people cannot enjoy the fruits of its liberty without
collaborative efforts in behalf of community. Higher education has a
central obligation to develop these abilities.
There are some values, rooted in national experience, even defined in
the Constitution, that Americans share. These "constitutional" values have
evolved into a set of civic virtues:
- respect for the individual and commitment to equal opportunity;
- the belief that our common interests exceed our individual
differences;
- concern for those who come after us;
- support for the freedoms enunciated in the Bill of Rights,
including freedom of religion, of the press, of speech, and of
the right to assemble;
- the belief that individual rights and privileges are to be
exercised responsibly;
- respect for the views of others; and
- the conviction that no one is above the law.
If values are to be taken seriously, the place to start is by
reaffirming the primacy of the visions of Newman and the Truman Commission:
liberal education is central to living "rightly and well in a free
society." We do not believe that a history major needs to know as much
chemistry as a forest management major, that an engineering major needs to
know as much literature as an English major. But every student needs the
knowledge and understanding that can come only from the rigors of a liberal
education. Such an education lies at the heart of developing both social
and personal values. If the center of American society is to hold, a
liberal education must be central to the undergraduate experience of all
students. The essentials of a liberal education should be contained in a
rigorous, required curriculum defined on each campus.
We believe, too, that every institution of higher education should ask
itself--NOW--what it proposes to do to assure that next year's entering
students will graduate as individuals of character more sensitive to the
needs of community, more competent in their ability to contribute to
society, and more civil in their habits of thought, speech, and action.
We are also convinced that each educational institution must, openly and
directly, begin the kinds of discussions that promise to build campus
consensus on the civic virtues it most treasures. The questions concluding
this section, and repeated in Appendix A, define some of the issues that
need to be addressed.
What do these issues mean in practice? Several implications appear
obvious: campuses must model the values they espouse; they must help
students experience society and reflect on it as an integral part of their
education; they must act on their understanding that matters of the spirit
reflect such a profound aspect of the human condition that they cannot be
ignored on any campus.
With respect to modeling values, a former president of Yale University,
A. Bartlett Giamatti, once said: "[A]n educational institution teaches far,
far more, and more profoundly, by how it acts than by anything anyone
within it ever says." Mr. Giamatti was echoed by one of our essayists,
Robert Rosenzweig, who wrote, "American society needs colleges and
universities to be active exemplars of the values they have always
professed...." In both statements, the critical emphasis is on ACTING and
EXEMPLIFYING, not simply proclaiming. On campus, as elsewhere, the dictum
"Do as I say, not as I do" is an invitation to cynicism among our citizens,
particularly students.
We want also to stress that society's needs will be well served if
colleges and universities wholeheartedly commit themselves to providing
students with opportunities to experience and reflect on the world beyond
the campus. Books and lectures provide an intellectual grounding in the
realities of the marketplace and of the nation's social dilemmas. But there
is no substitute for experience. Academic work should be complemented by
the kinds of knowledge derived from first-hand experience, such as
contributing to the well-being of others, participating in political
campaigns, and working with the enterprises that create wealth in our society.
Last but not least, we want to suggest that matters of the spirit have a
far more important role to play in institutions of higher education than
has been encouraged in recent years. We do not argue for one system of
belief or another, one denomination or another, or for compulsory religious
observance of any kind. Certainly we understand that campuses must be
dedicated to free inquiry, ungoverned by either faddish orthodoxy or
intolerant ideology. But we do argue that faith and deep moral conviction
matter in human affairs. Because they do, they must matter on campus.
We believe that the concept of a value-free education is a profoundly
misleading contradiction in terms, a blind alley with very high costs to
personal life, community, and even workplace. A campus community whose
members cannot readily give answers to the following questions is a campus
without a purpose:
- What kind of people do we want our children and grandchildren
to be?
- What kind of society do we want them to live in?
- How can we best shape our institution to nurture those kinds of
people and that kind of society? (2)
Initiating and sustaining discussions and initiatives of the sort
suggested above will be difficult on large campuses, but not impossible.
Organizing and sustaining community service programs for large numbers of
students both inside and outside the classroom is difficult, but not
impossible. Encouraging collaborative learning is perhaps more difficult
than grading on the curve, but it is not impossible. Yet activities such as
these both model and teach the skills of community.
The questions raised in the realm of values may, on occasion, be deeply
troubling. In our view that is all to the good. If the journey is too
comfortable, the right questions are probably not being asked, and asking
the right questions is essential if higher education is to rise to
Pericles' standards:
Pericles knew that any successful society must be an
educational institution. However great its commitment
to individual freedom and diversity, it needs a code
of civic virtue and a general devotion to the common
enterprise without which it cannot flourish or survive.
It must transmit its understanding of good and bad and
a sense of pride, admiration, and love for its
institutions and values to its citizens, especially
the young. (3)
It is fashionable to decry the quality of American leadership, public
and private. Yet virtually all our leadership emerges from one
institution of higher education or another. As students are groomed on
campus, so shall they live and lead. Pericles understood. Do we?
Taking Values Seriously
-----------------------
- How does our educational program match the claims of our
recruiting brochures, and where is it falling short?
- How does our core curriculum of required courses respond to the
needs of our students for a rigorous liberal education enabling
them to "live rightly and well in a free society?" Where does it
fall short?
- In what ways does our institution model the values and skills
expected in our community? Where and how are we falling short?
- What steps might we take to improve the general climate of
civility on our campus?
- How comprehensive and effective is the code of professional
conduct and ethics for our faculty and staff? When was it last
reviewed?
- In what ways does our institution and its educational program
promote the development of shared values, specifically the civic
virtues listed below, among our students?
- respect for the individual and commitment to equal
opportunity in a diverse society;
- the belief that our common interests exceed our individual
differences;
- support for the freedoms enunciated in the Bill of Rights,
including freedom of religion, of the press, of speech, and
of the right to assemble;
- the belief that individual rights and privileges are
accompanied by responsibilities to others;
- respect for the views of others; and
- the conviction that no one is above the law.
- What moral and ethical questions should we be putting to the
student groups and organizations we sanction on campus? What
standards of conduct do we expect of these groups? How have we
made these standards clear?
- How do the activities of our athletic programs square with our
institution's stated values, and where do they fall short?
- What steps will we take to assure that next year's entering
students will graduate as individuals of character more sensitive
to the needs of community, more competent to contribute to
society, more civil in their habits of thought, speech, and
action?
- What other related questions should we address at our
institution?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PUTTING STUDENT LEARNING FIRST
"The future now belongs to societies that organize themselves for
learning."
---Ray Marshall and Marc Tucker
If it is time to take values seriously on campus, it is also time to
redress the imbalance that has led to the decline of undergraduate
education. To do so, the nation's colleges and universities must for the
foreseeable future focus overwhelmingly on what their students learn and
achieve. Too much of education at every level seems to be organized for the
convenience of educators and the institution's interests, procedures and
prestige, and too little focused on the needs of students.
Putting students at the heart of the educational enterprise requires
that we face a difficult truth: academic expectations and standards on
many campuses are too low, and it shows. Institutions that start with
learning will set higher expectations for all students, then do a much
more effective job of helping them meet those expectations, points to
which we return below.
Putting learning at the heart of the enterprise means campuses must:
- understand their mission clearly and define the kinds of students
they can serve best;
- define exactly what their entering students need to succeed;
- start from where the students begin and help them achieve
explicitly stated institutional standards for high achievement;
- tailor their programs--curriculum, schedules, support services,
office hours--to meet the needs of the students they admit, not the
convenience of staff and faculty;
- systematically apply the very best of what is known about learning
and teaching on their campuses;
- rigorously assess what their students know and are able to do in
order to improve both student and institutional performance; and
- develop and publish explicit exit standards for graduates, and
grant degrees only to students who meet them.
Interestingly, steps such as these are among the recommendations
recently advanced by some of this nation's most distinguished
African-American leaders. (4) As they note, their recommendations for
improving the learning environment for minorities will inevitably work to
the advantage of all students, including disadvantaged MAJORITY learners.
We were struck by how congruent their analysis and recommendations are to
our own.
Putting learning at the heart of the academic enterprise will mean
overhauling the conceptual, procedural, curricular, and other architecture
of postsecondary education on most campuses. For some students this will
mean greater independence. For others, the academic experience may change
little outwardly; internally, it will be far more challenging and exciting.
For many others--particularly those whose learning needs are being served
poorly now--academic life will be more directive, more supportive, and more
demanding. It will be more directive on the assumption that institutions
are responsible for evaluating and responding to the learning needs of
students. It will be more supportive because it will be focused on what
students need in order to succeed. It will be far more demanding because it
will be aimed at producing graduates who demonstrate much higher levels of knowledge and skills.
SKILLS. Traditionally, the acquisition of skills essential to life and
work has been considered a by-product of study, not something requiring
explicit attention on campus. We know of only a handful of the nation's
colleges and universities that have developed curricular approaches similar
to, for example, the list of critical skills developed by the Secretary of
Labor's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS--see Appendix E).
But skills such as these--written and oral communication, critical
analysis, interpersonal competence, the ability to obtain and use data, the
capacity to make informed judgments, and the skills required in community
life--are essential attributes of a liberal education when they are
accompanied by discipline-based knowledge. These skills can be learned. If
they are to be learned, however, they must be taught and practiced, not
merely absorbed as a result of unplanned academic experience. We believe
that the modern world requires both knowledge AND such skills and
competences. Neither is adequate without the other.
STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT. There is growing research evidence that all
students can learn to much higher standards than we now require. When they
do not, the flaw is most likely to be in the system, not the individual. We
agree with those who make the important point that the truly outstanding
educational institution graduates students who achieve more than would have
been predicted on entry. (This is a standard, incidentally, that challenges
even the most prestigious of our great universities and small liberal arts
colleges, the institutions routinely enrolling the best secondary school
graduates.)
There is a growing body of knowledge about learning and the implications
of that knowledge for teaching. What is known, however, is rarely applied
by individual teachers, much less in concert by entire faculties. We know
that teaching is more than lecturing. We know that active engagement in
learning is more productive than passive listening. We know that
experiential learning can be even more so. We know we should evaluate
institutional performance against student outcomes. We know all of this,
but appear unable to act on it. It is time to explore the reasons for our
failure to act.
No group has a greater stake in the new evidence relative to student
achievement than socially and economically disadvantaged students,
particularly disadvantaged minority Americans. At the elementary and
secondary levels, the achievement gap separating minority and majority
students is slowly closing. These results appear to reflect a combination
of factors including minimum competency standards, on-going assessment, and
programs to provide the special support many of these young Americans need.
These were vitally important steps, but we share the distress of many
Americans, including educators, that they have not gone far enough: minimum
competency is not enough. Many minority Americans are still being left
behind by an education system that is not serving their needs.
We also know that support services work. From a host of small
experiments it is clear that when students--particularly those less
advantaged in life--know their institution is unambiguously committed to
their success, performance rises dramatically. Yet too few campuses have
done much more than offer perfunctory, often inconvenient, student-support
services. Too few have created one-stop "success centers" where students
can find assistance with the full range of their concerns when they most
need help--which is frequently before 9 a.m. and after 5 p.m. In the most
impressive of these centers, a student enters into a relationship with a
single individual who becomes an advocate for the student, responsible for
marshaling all of the institution's assets and focusing them on the
student's success.
ASSESSMENT. Finally, our vision calls for new ways of thinking about
assessing what students know and are able to do. In medicine, testing and
assessment are used to define the best course for future action. They provide data for both doctor (the teacher) and
patient (the student) as to what steps to take to improve the individual's
health (learning). In contemporary colleges and universities, however, such
use of assessment is rare.
Examinations in educational institutions (including elementary and
secondary schools) normally establish competitive rankings and sort
students. They rarely diagnose strengths and weaknesses, examine needs, or
suggest what steps to take next. In almost no institution are a student's
skills systematically assessed, developed, and then certified. This
assessment issue transcends the needs of learners. In an institution
focused on learning, assessment feedback becomes central to the
institution's ability to improve its own performance, enhancing student
learning in turn.
New forms of assessment should focus on establishing what college and
university graduates have learned--the knowledge and skill levels they have
achieved and their potential for further independent learning. Only a few
scattered institutions have instituted exit assessments.
The sad fact is that campuses spend far more time and money establishing
the credentials of applicants than they do assessing the knowledge, skills,
and competences of their graduates.
Indeed, the entire system is skewed in favor of the input side of the
learning equation: credit hours, library collections, percentage of faculty
with terminal degrees, and the like. The output side of the
equation--student achievement--requires much greater attention than it now
receives. That attention should begin by establishing improved measures of
student achievement, measures that are credible and valued by the friends
and supporters of education, by testing and accrediting bodies, and by
educational institutions themselves.
We understand that the changes we suggest will be difficult and
demanding. We recognize that they will require new attitudes on the part of
faculty and institutions and, most critically, new skills and ways of doing
business. There will be costs associated with these changes--though
relatively modest costs in the context of overall institutional
budgets--notably for staff development and student support services. We
believe it reasonable to suggest that campuses devote a greater percentage
of revenues to these needs.
Finally, we want to stress that responsibility in a learning institution
is a two-way street. Students, at any level of education, are the workers
in the educational process. They have a major obligation for their own
success. Too many students do not behave as though that were the case,
apparently believing (as do many parents) that grades are more important
for success in life than acquired knowledge, the ability to learn
throughout a lifetime, and hard work on campus. Educational institutions,
having accepted students and their tuition, have a positive obligation to
help these students acquire the knowledge, skills, competences, and habits
of intellectual self-discipline requisite to becoming productive citizens
and employees. Students, parents, and community leaders will have to be
willing to support the high expectations and hard work that superior
student achievement will
require.
Too many campuses have become co-conspirators in the game of
"credentialism." Many campuses still do not offer the guidance and support
all students require to reach the higher levels of achievement contemporary
life requires. Too few are sufficiently engaged in effective collaboration
with other learning institutions, notably K-12 schools, to assure that
students arriving on campus are prepared intellectually and are received in
ways which enhance their prospects for success. Institutions of higher
education must reach out much more effectively to colleagues elsewhere to
help create a nation of learners and reduce the barriers to their learning.
Putting Student Learning First
------------------------------
- How recently have we reviewed our program offerings to assure that
they match our mission and the needs and goals of the students we admit?
- In what ways could we do a better job of helping our students to
attain higher levels of both knowledge and skills?
- What steps should we take to establish or improve a rigorous
curriculum requiring core knowledge and competences of our
students?
- How have we tried to integrate curricular offerings for the benefit of
students and faculty? Is "course sprawl" contributing to our
budgetary problems and making it more difficult for students to
register in courses required for graduation? What might be done?
- To what extent are our educational programs, class schedules,
registration, and other administrative and support services
organized around the needs of learners rather than the convenience of the
institution? What improvements can we make?
- How do we encourage and assist students to develop the basic values
required for learning, e.g., self-discipline, perseverance,
responsibility, hard work, intellectual openness?
- In what ways are we assessing learning to diagnose needs and
accomplishments? How could we improve feedback to students and faculty on
student performance in order to enhance both teaching and learning?
- How does our institution assure that students have demonstrated a high
level of achievement, consistent with our published standards for acquiring
both knowledge and skills, as a basis for receiving our degrees or
certificates? Can we raise our standards?
- In what ways are we applying what is known about learning to the
teaching practices of our faculty and graduate students? How do our
pedagogical approaches enhance learning, and where do they fall short?
- How do we support faculty initiatives to improve learning and
teaching? In particular, is our faculty well grounded in the available
research concerning adult learning? If not, what will we do to improve our
record?
- How could we do a better job of helping students learn at lower
overall cost to our institution? How would we reinvest the savings?
- What other related questions should we address at our institution to
improve the quality of learning?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATING A NATION OF LEARNERS
"The fixed person for the fixed duties, who in older societies was a
blessing, in the future will be a public danger."
---Alfred North Whitehead
We must redesign all of our learning systems to align our entire education
enterprise with the personal, civic, and workplace needs of the 21st
Century.
In the last generation, higher education has been swept up in the tide
of social and economic change. The horizons and aspirations of women and
members of minority groups have expanded. Older students have arrived on
campus, many for the first time, seeking help to improve their skills,
develop career prospects, and respond to new developments in technology.
Family mobility is on the rise, and with it mobility from campus to campus.
The modern workplace, open to global competition, requires levels of
knowledge and skills beyond anything we have aspired to in the past, and
well beyond what our schools and universities are now producing.
These changes demand that American education transform itself into a
seamless system that can produce and support a nation of learners,
providing access to educational services for learners as they need them,
when they need them, and wherever they need them.
This is not an argument for merger or homogeneity. But colleges and
universities need to understand that their business is ALL of
education--learning. they can no longer afford to concern themselves
exclusively with HIGHER education. They must address themselves much more
effectively to the other key pieces of the education enterprise. Americans
and their educators are now handicapped by an education legacy from the
past when what they need is a solution for the future. Our current
educational institutions worked reasonably well in a society that had
little need for large numbers of educated adults. Why question that structure when 90 percent of the population left
school after 8th grade (the turn of the century); when only 50 percent of
the population graduated from high school (1940); or even when only
one-third of high school graduates enrolled in higher education (1950)? Now
the need has changed. There can be no justification for such a system in
today's world with its growing demand for better-educated people.
In this new environment many more educators must be prepared to say:
"All of us, from pre-school to post-graduate, are in this together. It is
not enough to complain about each other's failings. It is time to stop
addressing the problem piecemeal. We must begin to work collaboratively on
the system as a whole." It is no longer tolerable for so many in higher
education to complain about the quality of those they admit, but do nothing
to set higher standards and work with colleagues in K-12 schools to help
students attain those standards. Our education system is in crisis;
business-as-usual is a formula for national disaster.
Assessment and achievement are critical components of an enhanced
education system. Experts today are thinking about the need for summary
educational documents, not just grades, attendance records, and test
scores, but data representing genuine learning achievements across a
lifetime of educational and training experiences. The Educational Testing
Service, the American College Testing program, and the American Council on
Education are already piloting initiatives of this kind--Work Link, Work
Keys, and the External Diploma Program respectively--which aim to revise
quite radically how we think about and use assessment. These efforts
deserve encouragement from everyone interested in improving the quality of
learning, and in particular from the American business community. They will
increasingly assure that learning, wherever it occurs, is valued and given
credit; they will, in and of themselves, help to create a national culture
encouraging lifelong formal and informal learning.
We are aware that a number of institutions work with local schools, and
that some are very serious and effective in these efforts. But as one of
our essayists put it, "the sum of it all adds up to considerably less than
a response to an urgent need that is grounded in both self-interest and
national interest."
We join others in calling for a simultaneous renewal of both higher
education and the nation's K-12 schools. A serious, sustained dialogue
should start by identifying shared needs and problems:
- a clear public definition of what students should know and be able
to do at each educational level;
- standards of entry AND EXIT for higher education;
- increasing the use of assessment to diagnose learning needs and
enhance student achievement;
- improving both the theory and practice of teaching and learning;
- recruiting and educating more effective teachers at all levels;
- bringing education's resources to bear on issues of character and
its development;
- reducing the barriers to inter-institutional transfer among
institutions of higher education; and
- exploring the implications for college admissions practices of the
six National Education Goals established in 1989, and the potential
for collaboration with K-12 schools.
The entire education establishment has a self-evident interest in this
kind of collaborative dialogue and action. If a community college has
developed an outstanding student support system, even the most prestigious
research university should consider it as a benchmark. If a public school
system has created a successful school-within-a-school to relieve the
negative impact of size on students, public mega-universities should
consider the possibility that they have something to learn from it. Any
educational institution should want to practice existing, innovative,
research-based approaches for applying to teaching what is known about
learning. Where innovations in self-paced and distance learning are
succeeding, any institution concerned about productivity and cost containment should examine
them carefully as potential contributors to its own efficiency and
effectiveness. Every campus has an interest in emulating those colleges and
universities that have extended a collaborative hand to elementary and
secondary education. Such collaboration can enhance course content and
standards across the board, and raise the motivation and confidence of
students who might otherwise not be considering postsecondary education.
Nor is the opportunity to learn from others restricted to the
traditional world of education. Where a corporation has developed effective
educational innovations, campuses should investigate the implications for
their own work. Many museums are currently developing innovative and
effective approaches to teaching and learning about science, history, and
art. But all of these advances--and many others--are taking place
independently of each other at a time when America needs a more
collaborative, cost-effective and better-articulated way of responding to
the lifelong learning needs of growing numbers of its citizens.
Creating A Nation Of Learners
-----------------------------
- In what ways have we organized our programs to develop and support
a capacity for lifelong learning among our students?
- How might we provide the same level of service and support to "non-
traditional" students, and students in non-traditional learning programs,
as we do for traditional full-time students? Within our mission, when have
we examined alternative, more flexible, and student-oriented ways to
provide for student learning?
- How often do we survey employers of our recent graduates--and the
graduates themselves--to discover how and under what circumstances
graduates succeed or fall short? How can that process be improved?
- In what ways do we work with K-12 systems to enlarge our
understanding of their difficulties, encourage teachers and administrators
to see us as resources, and enlarge our own competences? In what ways have
we relegated this effort to our school of education? How have we tried to
involve the entire campus?
- How are we working with high schools and other educational
institutions both to communicate to them the knowledge and skills that
students will need to be successful in higher education and to help
students meet those requirements?
- How do our departments provide graduate students and professors with
training in how people learn and what that means for teaching? What needs
to be done to make this institution-wide and to set institution-wide
standards?
- How is our campus working with local schools and other colleges and
universities to bring teaching and learning to state-of-the-art
standards from kindergarten through the undergraduate years? What more can
we do?
- How might we bring our teacher recruitment and teacher education
programs into better alignment with the real needs of both society and
students? What are our benchmarks?
- What provisions might a statewide compact contain if we wished to ease
student transfer between institutions?
- In what ways are we organized to make use of educational achievements
from non-traditional organizations and settings?
- What other related questions should we address in an effort to reduce
the institutional barriers to learning and to make our institution more
responsive to the needs of others, e.g., K-12 education, employers, and
other institutions of higher education?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIRST STEPS: CHALLENGES FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
"For every right that you cherish, you have a duty which you must fulfill.
For every hope that you entertain, you have a task that you must perform.
For every good that you wish to preserve, you will have to sacrifice your
comfort and your ease. There is nothing for nothing any longer."
---Walter Lippmann
Our wake-up call places a heavy burden on the shoulders of the men and
women in higher education. It will require rethinking the assumptions of the education enterprise and reinventing many of its ways
of doing business. Educators, particularly faculty members, must
demonstrate that they have noted the warning signs, understand the
potential for institutional and national decline, and are ready to act.
Solutions for the problems we have described will require vigorous,
creative, and persistent leadership on campus, in the community, in state
capitols, and in Washington. On the other hand, the problems of
undergraduate education cannot effectively be addressed by bold strokes of
state or national public policy. They can best be solved campus by campus
with the active involvement of faculty, staff, students, trustees, and
their friends and supporters off campus including, notably, state
legislators. Hence, our solutions are cast not as recommendations for
policymakers to impose from on high, but as challenges to be taken up on
each of the nation's 3,400 campuses. Diversity and autonomy are among the
great strengths of American higher education, as they are of American
society itself. They are strengths to be respected and drawn upon as each
institution decides for itself how it will respond.
As first steps in what will be a long journey, we issue five
challenges.
For colleges and universities:
------------------------------
- WE CHALLENGE you to evaluate yourselves against the questions in the
attached "Self-Assessment Checklist," and to commit yourself publicly to an
institutional plan that builds on the strengths and remedies the
deficiencies you identify.
- WE CHALLENGE you to define and publicly state your standards of entry
and exit in terms of the knowledge, skills, and abilities you expect from
both applicants and graduates, and to put in place measures to assure
student and institutional attainment of those standards by a fixed date.
- WE CHALLENGE you to develop a curriculum that will assure all
graduates--our future citizens, employees, and leaders--the benefits of a
liberal education.
- WE CHALLENGE you to assure that next year's entering students will
graduate as individuals of character more sensitive to the needs of
community, more competent to contribute to society, and more civil in
habits of thought, speech, and action.
For trustees, regents, legislators, alumni, and funders in particular:
- WE CHALLENGE you to respond to institutions that take up the first
four challenges by giving them the regulatory and financial flexibility
they need to get the job done. Institutional creativity, not
micro-management, is the essential precondition to change. But we do urge
you to urge them on. One of the best ways to do so is to insist that the
campuses for which you have stewardship responsibility undertake the
attached self-assessment.
We understand that some institutions will believe it unnecessary to
respond to the challenges above. Perhaps they are correct, although we
suggest that even the best can be better. Institutions hesitant to
undertake a comprehensive self-assessment might consider administering the
National Adult Literacy Survey instrument to a representative sample of
graduating seniors. By permitting comparison of institutional performance
with a nationwide sample of graduates of either two- or four-year
institutions, the NALS instrument can provide a minimally acceptable
performance benchmark for any institution. No campus has anything to lose
by turning to NALS, and it is difficult to imagine that most would not want
to know where they stand. Some may be satisfied with the results, but many
will be surprised.
Finally, we issue a challenge to the broader public, specifically to
students, parents, employers, and citizens. This agenda for higher
education is ambitious. It will not be accomplished easily or soon; nor can
it bear fruit without your participation and support. All of us have
contributed to the situation in which higher education today finds itself;
we too must play our part in responding to the imperatives of the future.
Every American must accept the fact that in an open, global economy, education is a critical national resource.
A generation ago, we told educators we wanted more people with a college
credential and more research-based knowledge. Educators responded
accordingly. Now we need to ask for different things. Students must value
achievement, not simply seek a credential. Students (and parents) should
look to the value added to their lives, not simply to the prestige of the
institutions they attend. Employers must make clear to educators what they
value in new employees. Without new public attitudes, higher education will
find it difficult to persevere in the task ahead.
One of these difficulties is financial. Higher education's claim on
public and private funds increasingly competes with a growing list of other
compelling claims. One consequence is that after rising every year since
the end of World War II, total state support for public higher education
declined for two successive years as the 1990s began, and there is little
reason to expect net new resources for the foreseeable future.
Since at least World War II, higher education's growth has been made
possible by an expanding national economy. However, the post-World War II
surge in productivity which fueled remarkable growth in our national wealth
will not repeat itself unless educational institutions make a determined,
successful effort to enhance the knowledge and skills Americans bring to
the workplace. Thus, higher education's best financial hope rests on
helping itself by helping expand the nation's wealth, by providing the
knowledgeable and highly skilled workforce that can enhance our
productivity, revitalize our communities, and rebuild our sense of "we."
We are convinced that those colleges and universities that demonstrate
that they are doing more with what they have--those doing the best job of
preserving strong, core programs and eliminating the less essential--will
find not only that they have freed up resources to reinvest in themselves,
but they will also have made a compelling case for additional external
support. We also believe that institutions that defer change until new
resources are available will find themselves waiting for a very long time.
Financial salvation will begin on the campus, or it will probably not begin
at all. But as campuses begin to respond to the kinds of challenges we
issue, there must be solid public and financial support for higher
education. It IS a critical national
resource.
Finally . . .
-------------
Higher education and the society it serves face a fork in the road.
Either educators and other Americans raise their sights and take the
difficult steps described in this open letter, or we all face the certain
and unpleasant prospect of national decline. No one can look squarely at
the quality of our undergraduate education, and its graduates, and come to
a more optimistic conclusion.
We are guardedly hopeful that higher education will respond positively
to the kinds of change we believe essential to our national well-being.
That hope rests on the active participation of faculty members,
administrators, and the public, many of whom understand the need for change
and are working to effect it.
That hope rests on the fact that so many Americans understand how
critical a productive and affordable system of higher education is to the
American future. Even the most severe critic of higher education
understands its importance and wishes it well.
Most significantly, there is hope, because when the nation has called on
colleges and universities to adapt in the past, higher education has always
responded.
We cannot believe it will hesitate now.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) Results of the NALS survey, conducted by the Educational Testing
Service for the U.S. Department of Education, were released in September
1993. The largest effort of its type ever attempted, the survey offers a
comprehensive analysis of the competence of American adults (both college-
and non-college-educated) based on face-to-face interviews with 26,000 people. We note with concern
that the 1993 survey findings reflect a statistically significant decline
from those of an earlier survey conducted in 1985.
(2) Questions taken from Howard Bowen, "The State of the Nation and the
Agenda for Higher Education." San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1982.
(3) Donald Kagan, "Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy." New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
(4) John Hope Franklin, et al., "The Inclusive University: A New
Environment for Higher Education." Washington: Joint Center for Political
and Economic Studies, 1993.