I recently read Joanna Williams’ Consuming Higher Education: Why Learning Can’t Be Bought. I decided
to read this before tackling her latest book (on my to-read list), Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity.
While Consuming Higher Education is
about the rise of viewing higher education as a commodity, especially with the
introduction of university fees/tuition (previously practically free in many
countries outside the U.S.), what struck me most were the author's clear and
incisive comments on three trends: (1) assessment, (2) the social mobility
argument, and (3) the increased language surrounding personal transformation.
I would not do justice to her prose by paraphrasing;
so this blog post will be mostly quoting from her book along with some minor
comments from me. If you find any of this interesting, I recommend reading her
book in its entirety to experience the strength of her arguments. The author is
based in the U.K., but the book covers both the U.K. and the U.S. in detail,
with occasional mention of other systems. Let’s dive in first with Assessment
and Accountability.
The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) was established in the
U.K. as part of the 1998 Teaching and Higher Education Act. The QAA is involved
in “regulating institutions’ teaching and assessment practices. In the process
of such regulation, the student experience inevitably becomes homogenized, as
individual lecturers are expected to comply with demands for courses to be
taught in credit-bearing modules with predetermined learning outcomes… Perhaps
more damaging is the assumption that lecturers cannot be trusted to provide students
with an appropriate educational experience without outside regulation.”
[UK lecturer = US college-level instructor]
The conclusion is damning: “Yet there is little evidence,
anecdotal or otherwise, to suggest that academic standards have risen in British
universities since the establishment of the QAA. Despite academics expressing
disgruntlement at an increase in bureaucracy, there is relatively little
criticism of the aims of the QAA, as the need for regulation is accepted…”
In the U.S., there are increasing calls for
‘accountability’. As chairman of the House Committee on Education and
Workforce, John Boehner asked over a decade ago: “What are students, parents
and tax-payers getting for their money?” The author quotes an academic
administrator who asks “How can we measure in a valid and reliable way, the
nation’s investment in higher education? […] What benchmarks should we use to
signify the value of higher education?”
The conundrum here, as the author discusses, is that “there is
an assumption here that the value of education can be measured, and that the
only issue is determining the correct tools to carry out this assessment of
inherent worth. When education is conceived as more than just employability
skills or a service to business, it is inherently unquantifiable. There is a
risk that the focus on measuring the worth of education fundamentally alters
that which is important about its content.” This reminds me of the Copenhagen
interpretation of quantum mechanics, where the act of measuring a particle
affects its motion leading to a potentially different end result. But it’s a
scary thought; that the introduction of assessment measures, with attached
carrots and sticks, may fundamentally alter educational aims.
Modular design coupled with learning outcomes “may encourage
students to adopt a ‘shallow’ or ‘surface’ approach to learning which focuses
upon the need to meet course requirements and fulfil assessment criteria in a
way that circumvents the need for a deeper understanding of content… The need
to meet learning outcomes encourages students to approach assessment tasks in a
formulaic manner, providing sufficient information to demonstrate
accomplishment without necessarily having developed a deep understanding of
intellectual content… Students start to expect knowledge served up in easily
digestible bite-sized chunks… A modularised structure promotes the idea that
higher education is about collecting module credits, almost like stamp
collecting, rather than developing a coherent intellectual overview of the
chosen discipline.” Reading this has made me a bit more circumspect about praising the robustness of modular design, and reminded me about the importance of larger-scale coherence when teaching chemistry.
Social mobility is touted as a key benefit of higher
education, and the language of equal opportunities can make it difficult to
start a reasonable conversation about whether something else is being
sacrificed. The typical argument made is that opening access will provide
“opportunity for socially disadvantaged groups to enter the professions and
other high-paying jobs, and that this will lead to income redistribution and
the creation of a more socially just society.” It would be political suicide to
question such statements.
However: “Such political consensus comes at a price… an
erosion of the broader purpose of the academy in relation to the pursuit of
knowledge, truth or scientific advance. There is a danger that a narrow focus
upon social mobility may deny education a sense of purpose beyond employment
prospects and income differentials. When universities downplay the importance
of subject knowledge, students are left with little choice other than to
position themselves as investors in their future employability and consumers of
an educational commodity. When academics no longer exhibit a desire to struggle
intellectually with challenging new knowledge or, importantly, to inspire the
next generation to seek to do this, students instead seek satisfaction in the
short term. Seeking both future financial returns and short-term satisfaction
consolidates the student experience into a consumer experience.”
“More worrying to those concerned with academic standards is
the assumption that what matters… is not students’ achievement but the progress
they have made from the intellectual starting point… This relativises the
concept of academic achievement and further changes the aims of a university.
No longer is there an expectation that the pursuit of knowledge is good for
improving society’s understanding of the world; rather what is important is now
the ‘journey’ individual students have undertaken. This transforms the role of
the university away from… [students] engaging with subject knowledge… [but]
instead a more therapeutic mission to encourage students to participate in
projects of personal transformation.” While I hope that students are
transformed by their education, the language being bandied around these days
(especially as units ancillary to academics have an increased voice at the
administrative table) should give us pause.
All this is to say that we should keep our eyes wide open,
as the ground is shifting beneath us in the world of higher education.
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