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Hechinger Report
When ‘business as usual’ is no longer defensible in the liberal arts
A college president asks if key parts of the liberal arts experience can be made 'more widely available at lower cost'
By Carol Quillen
March 2, 2020
Liberal arts education has two problems. First, no one agrees on what
it means — some even think it’s about political indoctrination. Second,
the public is skeptical of the value of a liberal arts education.
Never mind that the liberal arts delivers what employers seek — as well
as what graduates later say helped them build satisfying lives.
My touchstone for a satisfying career and life is shaped by the
Gallup-Purdue polling that found graduates who, years after college,
expressed high satisfaction with their careers and life. They
attributed some of that satisfaction to their college experience —
specifically:
A mentor who nurtured their hopes and dreams.
Professors who cared about them as a person.
A sustained project that connected classroom learning to work in the world.
If we take such insights seriously, we’ll question our focus on
expanding access to subject-matter content. Our collective goal instead
can be to create more — and more affordable — educational opportunities
across the postsecondary sector that offer access to the elements above.
As a part of this broader collective goal, we can identify key
components of the liberal arts experience and make them more widely
available at lower cost.
Start with a definition. In addition to field-specific knowledge in,
for example, computer science or history, sound liberal arts education
delivers the development of transferable skills, such as “critical
thinking.” It aims to cultivate attributes — empathy is one —
associated with leadership and civic responsibility.
It’s the total liberal arts package — deep subject-matter knowledge
plus other, sometimes hard-to-define skills and attributes — that makes
these graduates so marketable.
As currently offered, it’s labor-intensive, expensive, very dependent
on philanthropy and designed for young adults doing it full-time.
We’ve effectively offered this package at selective four-year
residential institutions through a rich combination of coursework,
research, mentoring, internships, community engagement, student-led
organizations, athletics and international experiences.
And, despite widespread public skepticism, demand remains high at these
institutions, as measured by the ever-growing number of applications
and the oft-falling acceptance rates. Individual outcomes, however
measured, are generally good. So there is little incentive for the most
successful institutions to question the business model, or to examine
concretely how liberal arts delivers or which experiences cultivate
specific skills or attributes.
This “business as usual” is no longer defensible, not because we’ll all
go broke but because, given our context, strengths and new tools, we
can do so much more. And it’s precisely the most successful,
sought-after, financially stable institutions — those with the least
incentive to ask questions — that have the greatest obligation. How
does liberal arts education actually work?
What about it, really, is most valuable after graduation? How can we scale some parts of it to serve more people at lower cost?
One example: Among the distinctive components of “critical thinking”
that repeat employers of graduates from Davidson College, where I am
president, routinely mention is creative problem-solving. When pressed
for specifics, they say things like: “your grads never give up” and
“they come up with approaches I’d never think of.”
In short, these students know how to navigate the unfamiliar. They’re
not intimidated by unprecedented situations. When known approaches
fail, they invent new ones.
Students on our campuses may develop this through any number of
experiences: defining their own research project, playing a new
position, working with a community partner, studying internationally
and/or trying out for a musical for the first time. Yet surely there
are other ways. How can we affordably give more people the chance to
quickly develop this skill?
Institutions like mine have claimed correctly for a long time that we
educate students for life, no matter what they’re going to do, and for
far more than just a specific job or narrowly focused career. They may
not get everything on Day One, but they have what is needed for every
day thereafter. Our branding problem, then, may be the result not of
ineffectiveness but of a perceived self-serving elitism.
Many people now want what we do. Let’s figure out how to offer it to them.
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