Being at a conference can be really exciting -- you hear interesting ideas, get reminded of your enthusiasm for the work that you do and occasionally run into people you haven't seen in ages. But it also means drinking way too much coffee, learning that others nod off more quickly than you do, or realizing that the too much coffee suddenly cannot offset the stuffy room, the none-too-bright lighting, and the soft voice of the speaker whose microphone is just a week bit too far from her mouth.
I am in Washington for a conference on higher education this week, the first of three conferences in three months I have this semester (and there is one this summer as well). This one is largely deans, although there are some regular faculty like me (most of whom are involved in one way or another with assessment and/or program development). It is a good one (or "good" one) for those who are really nervous about the future of the liberal arts in a world that increasingly sees that traditional approach impossible, even going down to the most basic things (with "liberal" in the title, how could it be good?).
Follow me below the orange cloverleaf pathway to the future for a few thoughts...
The first session I went to after the plenary had "apocalypse" in the title. I find the concept of an apocalypse fascinating. I read books about disasters, love movies about the end of the world, and teach about such things as Pompeii and Thera and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. The concept is a useful one because for the most part the end of something has the beginning of something else embedded within it. So it was with this session.
The two presenters had very interesting ideas and suggested an environment where the current model of higher education does not exist. In some ways, although they had selected the model of a yoga studio, where people contracted with an individual and paid them directly for the education and practice of their discipline, but it seemed to me that the model was actually not moving into the future, but moving back into the past, the long ago past, where Oxford and Cambridge started as groups of acolytes gathered around single scholars, often religiously trained, who were supported by their students. This grew into the colleges at these universities (it is not necessarily the model of the non-European universities’ growth). So back to the past in a very interesting way. I am not sure the 12th century is something I particularly want to repeat, but that was kinda the point.
The next session I went to had many of the same attendees, and was working with the same idea – what is the future of residential liberal arts education? It was an interactive session with a nearly impossible task set by the moderator.
The interactive exercise (it was designed for groups of faculty and admin sitting around round tables to discuss and develop a plan) took as its starting point that higher education in the future was very limited, that online programs had convinced people that what they provided, for $20,000 over four years, was quite sufficient for a degree qualification and/or professional certification equivalent to a Bachelor's degree, and that any brick and mortar college had to justify someone spending more than that.
Fair enough. I do think this is necessary. There are things that traditional residential learning communities do that other settings might not. In a MOOC, for example, no one really cares if you finish. It is challenging to work your way through such a program if you don’t really understand why you might want to put in the effort. A peer community you see every day does tend to lift everyone to a shared goal, I think. It certainly works that way for a vast majority of my students. Developing peer learning communities is easier if you are sharing that experience with others, and face-to-face interactions seem to work better with at least some people (among whom are my students, who, granted, have chosen to attend a traditional residential education program). But if the assumption is that far and away the majority of students cannot experience this, but are limited to a very low-expense and low-investment program. The assumptions this was designed to have was that the $20,000 was the tuition, and residential expenses were $10,000 a year. So each of four years would be $15,000, or $60,000 total. What would make it worth getting a residential experience for that money?
I am afraid my table was stuck. You can do the online course and live somewhere cheap and spend $20,000, or you can live at college and then spend only $20,000 for instruction , and you will get the same sort of instruction, won’t you? Some of the tables suggested making it a three year program, thus clawing back about $2000 per year to go to instruction. Or if you take the residential fee and apply it to education, you get a bit more. But it still isn’t that much, and what do you sacrifice? What do we value and find unable to sacrifice? Others designed programs where students spent a year abroad (working in internships that were sponsored by businesses so it didn’t cost the students as much). My table took the assignment to say that students were residential all four years, and got stuck with what we would be losing in teaching. Evaluating writing and training writers takes time and effort, and is very difficult to do in high student/faculty ratio classes. One on one instruction? Undergraduate research takes lots of effort on the part of faculty and if you ask for one faculty member to mentor too many students in this that mentoring quality will undoubtedly suffer (I do not claim to know the ratio for anyone other than myself and for me it depends on how independent the student’s project is – in humanities a research model generally requires more independent work than some laboratory models in sciences). Do you discourage or not admit students with learning disabilities who will need to sit exams separately from anyone else? Or do you completely cut full time faculty and rely on underpaid adjuncts to keep your costs down?
Yes, you can do things cheaply, and there are always ways to economize. I can take five more students in a research-intensive or writing-enhanced class. But when I am asked to double the size of a class to 50 it becomes impossible to do what I would like to do, what has been shown to produce good outcomes. So do we decide we cannot afford good outcomes? Sadly I think that is the direction we are going if we focus on this approach to education (students must bear the complete cost of education and a family will not support someone for more than $20,000 in instruction over four years).
Depressing session, but fascinating. Those who seemed to have “won” the game we were given were those who abandoned the assumptions of a four year residential education program. They made it shorter (which does not allow students to develop the maturity or change their trajectory as students, both of which might be acceptable in some universes).
I wanted to attend sessions on the future of higher education. I do not believe they are as dire as the two I have identified here, but there is something sad floating in the air here this weekend. I have to believe in my field’s future, and I do believe that things will get better. But the idea that we will move to the cheap version of education except for the elite universities and make things much more stratified based on ability to pay is very discouraging.
So, are you discouraged? Or do I just need to get more fresh air and sunlight? Will I feel better in April?