The Aims of College Education

I am slowly working my way through Derek Bok’s comprehensive tome Higher Education in America. The book has five parts. Part I provides the context by first analyzing the nature of the different types of institutes: research universities, comprehensive universities, four-year colleges, community colleges and for-profit institutions. This diversity of institutions (in their goals and governance) and the role of government is addressed, as are the strengths and weaknesses of the system as a whole.

Part II, the largest section, is directly concerned with undergraduate education. I just finished it and my post today will highlight some of the things that caught my attention. Parts III and IV are concerned with professional education and research respectively, and there is a wrap-up Part V. I will try to comment on these latter parts in a subsequent post when I finish reading them.

My focus today is on Chapters 8 and 9, “What to Learn” and “How to Teach” respectively. Chapter 8 opens with the aims of a college education. I’m going to quote Bok here (and in other places) since my paraphrasing does not do justice to his very clear prose.

“For almost a century, undergraduate education in the United States has pursued three large, overlapping objectives. The first goal is to equip students for a career either by imparting useful knowledge and skills in a vocational major or by developing general qualities of mind through a broad liberal arts education that will stand students in good stead in almost any calling. The second aim, with roots extending back to ancient Athens, is to prepare students to be enlightened citizens of a self-governing democracy and active members of their own communities. The third and final objective is to help students live a full and satisfying life by cultivating a wide range of interests and a capacity for reflection and self-knowledge.”

Bok goes on to list specific goals that have broad consensus among faculty members, the highest (with 99% agreement) being that that “teaching students to think critically and to evaluate the quality and reliability of information” is essential or very important. Coming in second (at 90%) is “increasing students’ capacity for self-directed learning, mastering knowledge in a discipline, and developing an ability to write effectively.” There are several other goals listed (you can read the book!) but then Bok addresses the disconnect where much of the public thinks that courses and skills taught in college (particularly the liberal arts rather than a vocational approach) do not prepare students sufficiently for employment in a competitive global economy.

After more discussion (read the book if you’re interested!), the section concludes with a question: “Are colleges that claim a wide variety of aims actually pursuing them all with sufficient seriousness to warrant the requirements imposed in their name?” This is followed by an apt warning, that I have certainly felt as my institution has been going through a core curriculum review: “As a growing number of goals vie for space in a crowded curriculum, it is possible that some of the requirements agreed to by the faculty are uneasy compromises that threaten to produce the worst of both worlds – making enough demands of students’ time to represent a burden but not enough to afford much chance of actually achieving the hoped-for results.”

Bok then lays out the traditional curriculum in its three parts: the major (40-50%), electives (~25%) and general education (~30%). The rationales: (1) The major allows students to explore an area in sufficient depth, (2) electives allow students to explore different individual interests, and (3) general education “was originally designed to provide the breadth required to prepare enlightened citizens and to awaken intellectual interests that could endure and enrich one’s later years. More recently, it has expanded to become a kind of curricular catchall for courses designed to nurture the growing list of specific competencies that faculties believe students need in order to function well in the contemporary world.”

He then goes into the problems in each area and the tensions among them, the most serious in my opinion being general education. The problem is that as newer competencies are added, the curriculum must be increased or something must be cut to make room. For most institutions, breadth of knowledge is often satisfied via a distribution requirement in contrast to a common curriculum. My opinion is that coherence is lost for the sake of practical compromise and avoiding turf wars over what should be in the common curriculum. Bok writes that “it is much easier for individuals to insist on their particular version of the ideal college curriculum than it is to persuade a large body of highly educated scholars with widely varying educational views to agree on how to accomplish a long list of worthy goals within a limited number of classroom hours.”

In the next chapter, “How to Teach”, Bok first surveys the decline in academic engagement of students. Considerably less time was spent on coursework by students. A University of California survey found that “undergraduates at highly selective colleges spent three times the number of hour engaged in recreation and socializing as they spent preparing for class”. Shocker! It seems that “college authorities have unwittingly contributed to the problem by organizing all manner of absorbing extracurricular activities, many of them wholesome and worthwhile, but all of them tempting diversions from the intellectual work of the college”. Worse still, demands placed on the students (pages read and written) decreased. And to compound this, grade point averages have risen. Particularly crazy is the survey results from chief academic officers. According to Bok, while 72% think this decrease in academic rigor is a serious problem across institutions, only 16.5% think it applies to their own campus. Similarly while 65% think grade inflation is a serious problem across institutions, only 35% think their institution has this problem.

Bok goes on to tackle the criticisms of undergraduate teaching head-on. Apparently the claim that faculty neglect their teaching in favor of research is not well justified. He cites Schuster and Finkelstein’s book The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers but I haven’t read the book to see the data so I’m skeptical (suggesting I should put that book on my reading list). Similarly Bok states that the increasing use of part-time or adjunct faculty does not necessarily decrease teaching quality as critics have claimed. A slew of studies are cited in this case. My limited experience suggests that teaching quality is highly variable, some adjunct faculty are very capable, others less so. Maybe it’s a wash.

The next criticism is the use of the lecture. Bok writes: “Lecturing appeals to instructors because it is the most efficient way to cover a lot of material. The catch is that students retain very little of what they hear.” While the traditional lecture may still take place, my experience in the sciences is that instructors are injecting a variety of methods into their “lectures” to increase student engagement. Could more be done? Probably. But teachers will only take the time to change their approach if they strongly believe that their current method is failing. If most professors think their teaching is above average (Bok cites 90%), then why change? Bok then discusses some examples where teaching may be improved without costing too much, and the role of assessment – a can of worms. He then devotes Chapter 10 to discuss “Prospects for Reform”. Let me briefly quote one section that jumped out at me from this chapter and a concluding thought.

“Discipline-based majors have existed for so long that as a basic element of the curriculum that their objectives are typically accepted without discussion or passed over briefly with a sentence or two about such things as the importance of giving students the experience of learning what it means to think deeply about a subject. Surely something more than this is required to justify a requirement that occupies up to half the undergraduate curriculum. The goals should at least be defined more precisely and student progress, if possible, tested empirically. If the state aim is truly to help students learn to think more deeply, what does think deeply really mean? To what extent is such a capacity transferable from the discipline of the major to other fields of thought and experience?”

I must admit when reading this that I hadn’t thought deeply about what it means to think deeply in my discipline nor whether that skill of thinking deeply is at least partially transferable. I need to spend some time doing that, and hopefully it will be the subject of a subsequent post.