Interviewed by Deborah DeZure, Contributing Editor, Change Magazine; Assistant Provost for Faculty and Organizational Development, Michigan State University
Topics:
*Broad Trends Confronting Higher Education *Trends in Liberal Education
*The Role of the K-12 System in Preparing Students for College
*The Role of Higher Education Associations Like AAC&U
*New AAC&U Initiatives
*The Role of a Liberal Education in the Future of Our Economy and the Success of Our Democracy
BROAD TRENDS CONFRONTING HIGHER EDUCATION
DeZure: Dr. Schneider, you’ve been president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) for a decade. During that time, you have been able to witness, study, and assess the trends in higher education. Would you share your sense of the broad trends that are confronting higher education now and in the future.
Schneider: The trends that we focus on are those that affect learning: that’s our focus as an organization and that’s my concern as the president of AAC&U. I think there are a half-dozen trends or big themes that have ramifications for higher education in general and for undergraduate learning in particular.
The first is that we are in a knowledge economy. It is increasingly obvious that U.S. prosperity is going to be dependent on what happens in the global community and especially on our ability to compete through high-end innovation in different industries and through the added value that we bring in particular markets and other areas of the society.
The second trend follows from that: we are increasingly in need of people who have been to college and who have gained from college high-end intellectual skills, creative skills, problem-solving skills, communication skills—a whole set of capabilities that used to be thought of as necessary only for a small part of our society. Today they are important for almost everyone.
A third equally important [trend] is the pressure to get more students into college. Although an increasing percentage of our society has been going to college, the actual percentage of those who finish college in some measurable period of time has remained flat for about a generation. About 40% of our population actually finished a college degree. Economists who are looking at the long-term trends are saying that to keep up with that demand for high-level skills—that is, BA-level skills—in the economy, we need to double the numbers. We need to have not 40% but 60% of our students finishing college degrees. So that is a very big theme, and, of course, it moves higher education to the center of national dialogue.
The fourth trend [is that] the fastest growth in the college population is coming from low income groups and from communities of color. Those are the groups that had been least likely to enter college in the first place or to succeed in college and to finish degrees while there. If you look at the 2005 figures on college degree attainment among 25 to 29 year olds, 34% of white students have finished a four year degree while only 18% of African-American students and 11% of Hispanic students have finished a degree. The percentages are dramatically different by ethnic and racial groups. If you ask the same question about family income, you’ll see that in the top income quartile, 70% of students have finished a degree by age 24. But in the second income quartile, it dropped to 27%; in the third income quartile, it is down to 13%; and the bottom quartile is only 8%. So access and success are highly stratified by income and by race in our society.
The fifth trend focuses on the implication of this disparity: we have to focus with much greater intensity and intentionality than we ever have before on how we help many more students to enter college, succeed in college, and finish college with high-level capabilities that I talked about before.
The final trend is the intense pressure on us to show how well we are doing because it is pretty clear to employers, policymakers and increasingly to higher education leaders that in fact we aren’t yet achieving our goals in educating graduates with a high level of readiness to participate in the global community, the global economy, and global citizenship.
Those are the big trends that I see in terms of high priorities for American higher education.
TRENDS IN LIBERAL EDUCATION
DeZure: One of the hallmarks of AAC&U has been its commitment to quality, vitality and public understanding of undergraduate liberal education. What are the challenges and opportunities of these broad trends for liberal education?
Schneider: To answer that question I really need to clarify what liberal education is and isn’t. One of the issues we face as an association and as a community is that there is a lot of confusion, even in higher education, as to exactly what are we talking about when we refer to liberal education?
Working with the higher education community, we identified four hallmarks of a broad liberal education. A student who is liberally educated has achieved a broad cross-disciplinary knowledge of human culture, of science, of society, of the wider world. She’s developed a set of intellectual and practical skills that she can transfer from one situation to another to make her capable of what we call life-long learning. A third hallmark [is] a strong emphasis on personal and social responsibility or citizenship and ethics. It’s not just that the student knows how to do something, but she has also thought hard about what is wise to do. [The final hallmark] is the ability to integrate from multiple sources over time so that students are integrating, connecting, learning from many different sites and experiences---engaging in big-picture thinking, critical thinking, personal and social responsibility, and the ability to apply these to real-world problems. That’s what we mean by liberal education. It can happen in small colleges. It can happen in universities. It should happen everywhere. That’s our position as an organization: every student needs this kind of education.
What you can see going back to your question about trends is that there is now a growing set of voices saying that to be prepared for the global economy, students need this big picture thinking and high-level analytical problem-solving skills. It matters that students ask ethical questions, even if they are figuring out technical solutions. We wish that more ethical questions had been asked about sub-prime mortgages and the wisdom of giving mortgages to people who couldn’t pay for them and then packaging up these mortgages and re-selling them in pieces through an opaque marketplace. That is an ethical question and not just a financial question for our society.
We need people who are capable of continuing to learn as our society evolves very rapidly on every possible front. When you ask economists, they will say the economy rewards people who have these kinds of capabilities. If you ask employers, they say we can’t find enough people with these kinds of capabilities. We see lots of people with college degrees, but who don’t write very well, who don’t think very well, who are too narrow in their focus. We want more 360 degree thinkers. We want more people who will try every angle to solve a problem and we do in fact want ethical responsibility in the kinds of solutions that people create. The evolution of the knowledge economy has created more demand for those hallmark characteristics of a liberal education. They challenge us not to just get more students into college and out of college, but to make sure that they in fact have gotten that big picture, full menu education.
So the biggest trend is the increase in and demand for precisely what a liberal education offers.
A second trend that I think is equally exciting is that we are beginning to have an emerging consensus between educators on the one hand and employers on the other hand on that portrait of a well-prepared graduate that I just talked about.
But this emerging consensus doesn’t mean that the outside community is happy with our graduates. If you were to ask a faculty member whether most of the students who get a degree from their institution can write well, are good at integrative learning, or have grappled with significant ethical questions, the faculty would say we aren’t doing as good a job as we would like to do. If you look at students’ self report on their gains in college, you’ll see that only about half of the students made great gains in college on ethical reasoning, civic engagement, and social responsibility. About three-quarters of them think they made significant gains in writing. But national testing says that only a very small percentage of them are really good at writing. So even if there is consensus that they want more of the characteristics of a strong liberal education, the fact of the matter is we have not succeeded in helping students achieve the outcomes of a liberal education.
That has brought pressure on us to do a better job of being accountable for assessing whether or not the students are making progress, reporting and making public the findings from that inquiry, and being more transparent on the ways we are working to improve performance.
So the good news is that people want more liberal education. The challenging news is that even as they ask for it, they are not satisfied with the quality of what we are providing. So those are some of the big trends related to liberal education that are coming from the economy.
I want to add one more that is really coming from the higher education community: a very strong focus on civic and ethical responsibility as essential (rather than optional) outcomes of a good education. AAC&U has almost 1200 colleges and universities as members and a great majority of them are trying to educate students as citizens and not just as people who will be employed in a volatile economy. We see lots of emphasis across higher education on getting students to work on real complex problems related to sustainability, social justice; racial reconciliation, poverty, literacy -- to all of the unfinished social agendas that we still face in our democracy. We see institutions integrating these activities not only into the formal curriculum, but also getting students out into the community to do research, to do projects, to get them involved in the challenges that they will face as citizens who are responsible for the quality of our democracy.
DeZure: As we endeavor to bring more students into higher education, is there a way to use the increased emphasis on ethical development and civic engagement as a vehicle to recruit and retain more students from diverse backgrounds?
Schneider: One of the things that we have learned from our efforts over the last twenty years with under-served communities is that these students feel a very strong sense of responsibility to their communities. The more they can see themselves working to help solve the urgent problems that many of them know firsthand, the more likely they are to see the point of their education, to feel connected to it, and to want to succeed. Community-based efforts often benefit students who may be at risk of dropping out of college. We are finding that high-impact practices -- such as service learning, community-based learning, and connecting courses to big societal themes-- help students who might have had a fragile relationship to college to connect to their work, stay in school, do better in school and graduate at a higher rate.
THE ROLE OF THE K-12 SYSTEM IN PREPARING STUDENTS FOR COLLEGE
DeZure: Is there anything you would like to address about the K-12 system and the way we prepare students for higher education?
Schneider: We need to think in terms of P- 16 [preschool through college] and even a P-20 [preschool through graduate school] arch. Let me be very specific. AAC&U does a lot of work with institutions to remap their general education programs, including their goals and curricular designs. Invariably they tend to assume almost nothing in terms of what students are bringing out of high school. It’s as though we have to start fresh to provide entering students with a good education. I think that will increasingly be seen as a counter-productive way to approach the common elements in the higher education curriculum.
We are going to have to think harder about the arch that leads from middle school to high school to college and to think about some of those big goals for a liberally educated graduate in terms of what middle school, high school and college each contributes. So for example, the economy is looking for students who have high-level intellectual and practical skills. You don’t start on that when you just arrive on your college campus. You should have started on that back in elementary school. We should have some ascending notion of what it looks like as a student gets progressively better at writing, thinking, research, investigation, using complex knowledge and making judgments about evidence in the context of solving a problem.
We really haven’t done that work as well as we should have. Our standards and level of work are all over the place. We need to zero in on a few big outcomes for societal learning and map the expected progression along ascending levels of confidence and achievement to guide students and our institutions along a common path.
Another point that is important is that today the majority of students who get a four-year college degree will have attended more than one college or university. Some 47% of our students start in community colleges; if they want to get a four-year degree, they will have to transfer, and a large number of them do. There is also “swirl,” which is movement among four-year institutions, from four-year to two-year, people stopping out, and/or dropping out.
The pathways through college are increasingly complex. It is not enough for each institution to be clear about what it wants to do educationally, what its goals are, and how it helps students meet those goals. We really need a shared sense as a community of what matters in college and of the complimentary roles of schools, community colleges, and four-year institutions in helping students achieve those expected outcomes.
That’s really been a big piece of AAC&U’s work, to try and promote that emerging consensus on some shared expectations that students may achieve in very different ways. Nonetheless, it is a common framework that says wherever you started, wherever you finished, whatever you studied, we expect you to achieve big picture knowledge and thinking capabilities; an understanding of science, society, and the wider world; stronger intellectual and practical skills; an examined sense of personal and social responsibility—and you need to apply your knowledge to real problems. But those expectations will confront you wherever you started, wherever you finish, whatever your major. I think that is the long-term direction for higher education. We have to work as a community and not as 4000 separate—each on its own bottom—institutions that have no shared understanding of what we are doing in common.
THE ROLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION ASSOCIATIONS LIKE AAC&U
DeZure: Let’s segue to the role of associations like AAC&U in framing the conversation to promote this vision for what higher education can be and how it can address some of these challenges. Please tell us about AAC&U as an organization, its role, and how it is similar to or different from other higher education organizations.
Schneider: AAC&U has a few characteristic features as an association. First, we are what I call “a big-tent organization.” We draw our members from secondary education; two-year, four-year, public, private, and liberal arts colleges; master’s institutions; and research universities. We draw them in representative numbers through all parts of higher education. We created an effective meeting ground for all of these types of institutions to come together to explore that shared set of responsibilities that they have to prepare students for a volatile, turbulent, and demanding world.
Second, we are an association of institutions, so it is not just individuals who are interested in these questions, but it’s also institutions that come to join this dialogue. We’ve thought very hard about how to reach into an institution and bring not only the president into this dialogue, but also the provost, individuals with broad responsibilities for undergraduate education, key faculty members and those responsible for student life, for diversity, for all those success initiatives in which many institutions are engaged. So that makes us a big-tent organization. We bring together the entire community, or at least representatives of it.
The third feature that distinguishes us is we are not a lobbying organization. We are not on the Hill. We are not trying to get more money and less regulation, although we are very supportive of other organizations that do exactly that. Everything we do is focused on the quality of undergraduate learning. We work characteristically through two kinds of activities: funded projects on the one hand and continuing programs on the other. Funded projects are opportunities for us to bring together sets of institutions. Michigan State University, your own institution, is in one of these projects at the moment. That particular project is exploring how we become more intentional about ethical, civic, and intercultural learning so that students’ progress and capabilities are intentional and discernable. They know they are working on it. They know it is part of a college education. There is a set of institutions that are working together to identify how we can get better at this.
We have certain strengths across different institutions. How do we make this pervasive for all students rather than optional for those who are not interested in it? At any given point, we may have 15 funded projects that are working at the frontier of emerging good practice on issues that higher education needs to solve as a community.
In addition, we have a set of ongoing programs, including summer institutes for leadership teams from colleges and universities that are working on general education, assessment, supporting student success—or how to get our departments engaged with broader purposes of education so that they are just not turning out historians, for example, but they are also turning out verbally educated historians.
Summer institutes are an opportunity for institutions to work together and learn from one another on key problems. They are also a vehicle by which we can transform the learning from our funded projects into ongoing, self-sustaining educational opportunities for all of our members. Each year, we also hold a set of topical conferences that build on the work of our projects. For example, the project on ethical and civic responsibility is going to be the intellectual resource for one of our open conferences next fall, and the work that the leadership institutions are doing on that project will flow directly into an open conference that everyone can attend. Typically our open meetings are drawn from our funded projects.
Our web site is a rich mine of information, examples and evidence related to virtually all of our concerns: liberal education, general education, the curriculum, faculty leadership, institutional change, diversity, global warming, science and health, women’s issues, and extensive material on assessment for institutions working on those issues.
We have a series of publications, including several quarterly publications that come out multiple times a year and topical publications as well. Everything we do is based on drawing insights from the higher education community and providing knowledge back to the higher education community about its own aspirations, its own best practices, its own emerging evidence of what works well and what doesn’t work so well and, above all, how we can better serve those students who need college but who may not yet receive the full benefits it has to offer.
DeZure: As you think about the work of an association like AAC&U, how do you frame success?
Schneider: Success for an association comes in two dimensions. On one hand, an organization like ours needs to service members. We need to be working on issues that provide significant value to our members in light of their priorities. As a service organization, we have to be very close to the ground. We do a lot of work on campus. Virtually every idea AAC&U is promoting as an organization came to us from some institution, faculty member, or evidence of effective practice.
But technically and equally important, we have to translate all of these little bits and pieces of evidence into interpretation, into trends, into judgments about where the community wants or needs to go as a whole. And that’s really what we’ve been doing for the last ten years.
It was very clear to me 25 years ago when I was still on campus that something was happening in higher education. The student population was changing. We were all struggling, trying to figure out how to better serve students who are coming from more diverse communities -- increasingly from under-prepared backgrounds. It is estimated by various studies that only one out of five students who actually enrolls in college or goes to college took the right kind of curriculum in high school to really be prepared for college. This means that four out of five students were not well prepared to succeed in college—which, in a nutshell, is the problem that we are all struggling with.
For a quarter of a century at least, higher education has been experimenting with new practices and new programs to try and better serve the students that we have, as opposed to the kind of students who might have been in college in the 1950’s. So we have seen a whole set of reform movements in higher education, including first-year seminars, first-year experiences, learning communities, service learning, undergraduate research, field-based learning, internships, vertical design for general education rather than focusing on the first two years alone, and much stronger emphasis on topical, theme-based webs of learning at the advanced level, not just at the introductory level. All of this has been done to better educate the students who are actually coming to us.
When I became president of AAC&U in 1998, I was well aware that all these experiments were going on. I asked myself and my colleagues were asking, what does it all add up to? What is the emerging vision for the kind of learning that students need that these multiple agendas represent? Our first year initiative called “Greater Expectations: The Commitment to Quality as a Nation Goes to College” and more recently through “LEAP” (Liberal Education and America’s Promise), we have been synthesizing what we are learning from working with literally hundreds of different colleges and universities. So, on the one hand, an association like ours offers service, but on the other hand, it offers leadership by learning from and through and on behalf of the communities, enabling us to hold up a big picture, sharing that this seems to be where we want to go, these seem to be our best practices, these are the commitments you are making as a community. How well are they working? What can we learn from our collective experiments and endeavors?
NEW AAC&U INITIATIVES
DeZure: Are there some new AAC&U initiatives that we may be hearing more about in the next few years?
Schneider: An important focus for us is going to be on equitable participation in practices that support student success. You will be hearing about our LEAP initiative (Liberal Education and America’s Promise) for at least ten years, because the Association has made a commitment to stay focused on the broad themes, purposes, and outcomes of liberal education for the next decade. But it is one thing to define the intended outcomes and it is something else to say what practices help you actually help students achieve those intended outcomes.
Recently, in partnership with George Kuh and the incredible database that has emerged through his NSSE research, we’ve been able to identify particular practices that are clearly linked to liberal education outcomes but that also seem to have special benefit for student persistence, higher grade-point average, and graduation from college as well as self-reported gains on certain education outcomes. But the question is, who is actually participating in this practice?
We know, for example, that undergraduate research contributes to both the quality of student learning and the likelihood of finishing college. We then have to ask, how many of our students are doing undergraduate research? It turns out that only a small number are participating, and students are much more likely to be engaged in undergraduate research if their parents went to college. We are now zeroing in on the whole question of whether or not our best practices are reaching the students who need them the most.
The goal is making excellence inclusive. We have already begun some work on these issues in partnership with three state systems: University of Wisconsin, the California State University system and the Oregon State system. We hope to expand this effort in the years ahead. The focus of all of these is taking a fine-grained look at which practices support student success and whether or not participation in them is equitable.
A closely related question is, how do we scale up? How do we go from your boutique program of undergraduate research or service learning or learning communities to broad-based participation in these kinds of high-impact practices. That is one issue that we are funded to work on and we will be continuing to work on in the future.
We certainly want to continue the work that we have been doing on curricula and social responsibility.
A third area that is a high priority for us is the globalization of general education, which in the 20th century had a largely western focus. In recent years, most institutions added at least one required non-western course to the menu. Sometimes, there is one non-western course and one U.S. diversity course or a variation of that theme. These are gestures.
As a society we are not well prepared to participate in and to contribute to the emerging global community. The majority of American students don’t know enough languages, have not been to other countries, and have not taken more than one course about another part of the world. We are really at the starting line in terms of globalizing the college experience.
Obviously general education is only part of it. You want to make sure that each major is also emphasizing global cross-cultural themes in ways appropriate to their subject matter. So, for example, history may recast itself as a global study with more emphasis on comparisons. Business will be preparing people to work in a global economy. Nurses are going to be seeing patients from all parts of the world with very different notions of what good medical care looks like and what some of the ethical issues are involved in what treatments they will or will not accept. Every profession is going to have global and cross-cultural challenges. The question for us is how we recast the entire educational experience, starting in secondary school and continuing through general education and the major in ways that prepare people to be globally savvy and interculturally aware, committed, and confident.
The other issue that AAC&U is exploring is the future of the teaching profession in higher education, although we don’t yet have a funded project. More of those entering the teaching profession are now in a contingent role; tenure-track positions are becoming harder to come by; and we are making a career in college teaching less attractive to talented people. So here we are in a society with a high degree of dependence on bringing 60% of the population to the level of college achievement, but we are disinvesting in the profession of college teacher at the very time we most need an infusion of talent.
It is not yet a crisis, but I think it is an emerging issue, and it is one of the things that we want to work on in society because nothing I have identified can possibly be done without high-quality, committed faculty who know how to reach students from different backgrounds and to help them make the most of their college experience. We have a big project before us. We need really talented and committed faculty with us through this journey.
THE ROLE OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION IN THE FUTURE OF OUR ECONOMY AND THE SUCCESS OF OUR DEMOCRACY
DeZure: Do you have any parting messages for our readers, many of whom are our current and future educators?
Schneider: First, the work we are doing in higher education is absolutely essential to the future of our economy and to the success of our democracy. We talk a lot about the ways in which the economy is driving participation in higher education, with greater focus on how well we are doing. We have an equally important role in our democracy, and it is a very high priority of this association to focus as a community on the importance of civic learning and engagement as a necessary—not an optional—goal for college.
We need to recognize that unless we are successful in educating people who want to take responsibility for the quality of our democracy and for global citizenship abroad, then even as they may succeed economically, we will be depleting the most fundamental source of the quality of our society. We have to recognize that liberal education has always had a key role in citizenship.
Second, we have this extraordinary opportunity now as the majority of the population heads to college to help American citizens think in new ways and with new sophistication about the challenges that we face in the global community and the challenges that we face as a democracy still struggling toward full participation and full equity for every one of our citizens. So there is nothing more important that we could possibly be doing.
We have to keep our mind simultaneously on the democratic challenge and democratic opportunity even as we recognize that liberal education has become a requirement in today’s global economy.
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