3. Can interdisciplinary work be the key?

3. Are there ways that interdisciplinary work can help us achieve both goals? That is, to ensure students access to a high quality liberal arts education with coverage of a sufficiently broad and deep curriculum, while also ensuring that the college is on sound financial footing?

4. Can the white paper help? New programs? Revenue growth possibilities?

4. Can the White Paper help us to think about this: Are there other ideas for programs, collaborations with other colleges, etc. that can help us ensure that we remain true to our mission and values while we do this restructuring work?
1. Are there new programs, majors, collaborations, etc. — noted in the White Paper or not — that folks would like to work on developing? Short term? Medium and long term?
2. Where do we reasonably see revenue growth possibilities in the next year? The next 2-3 years?

5. Other conversations we need to have?

5. What other conversations do we feel the faculty and board need to be having about how to address these budget concerns?
   
   For example: How can we carry out our goals of shared governance during a time with looming budget cuts?
   
   What else?

Four Modest Suggestions for General Education Reform

Tell Them Why I

Develop coherent and persuasive description of why we have a GE program and what it is supposed to achieve.  Address it to the students who will study in the program.

Tell Them Why II

Build into orientation each year an academic address in which a faculty member is charged with coming up with a creative and compelling explanation of, argument for, the GE program both in principle and in particular. A few years of this will provide us with some internal dialog on what it means and why it is there as well as providing a foundation for all subsequent advising around GE.

Collect data

Write a short bit of code which would count ALL gen-ed fulfilling courses to see how the distribution is. In other words, take as given that we have a set of areas and we have a set of courses that relate to them. Apart from meeting minimal requirements, what does the distribution of "general education" actually look like for a class of graduates? (coding note: need to filter by major so we do not bias results based on distribution of majors).

Use Design to Change Attitudes

Move away from the "check box" mentality by re-configuring Banner and MAPs so they don't simply indicate that a requirement has been fulfilled, but rather track and document how and how many times each requirement has been fulfilled, providing both student and anyone who looks at the transcript a visualization of her general education. Include the rationales described above in the transcript/MAP.

Thus, instead of this…

They'd see this:

(Not 95) Theses on General Education Reform, etc.

General Education reform has a long history in higher education of being a no-win zone. Correct that: in any given GenEd campaign there is often a player or group of players who manage to get something out of it (e.g., an administrator or administrator want-to-be who gets credit for shepherding the program through to approval (and to be fair, it's probably good training) or a department that gets a influx of resources it will never lose (even when GE is next revised) or sometimes a group of faculty who have opted out of discipline-based work and now rise to institutional importance).

The kudos and benefits, though, are almost never dependent on whether the program actually works and there is never any accountability for problems associated with the diversion of time, energy, and resources required by the program.

I share the Camelot-esque urge to champion the life of the mind, to fight against the forces of mediocrity in the modern world, really educate our students for the 21st century, and just generally to work for a better tomorrow, but I've seen this windmill tilted at too many times not to offer some ideas, collected over the years, about GenEd revisions. Offered partly in the spirit of provocation and healthy debate, but mostly on the (naive) optimistic belief that it IS possible to do better at higher education reform than is usually the case. The problem is that the ruts in the road are deep ones indeed.

1. IT MAY JUST NOT MATTER


1. Almost no one will ever select a college on the basis of a general education program unless the program is that there are no GE requirements.
2. The process usually begins with someone saying "everyone knows the current system is broken and needs to be updated." Ever was it so. Ever will it be.
3. After the program is in place, students and faculty will invest a lot of time and energy "getting around the rules" to make individual educations make sense.
4. GenEd gets revamped every decade or so. Neither the stuff of GenEd nor the nature of students really changes THAT much. Thus the "new" is mostly recapitulations and recombinations of old. 
5. Where is cost-benefit analysis when you need it? How much goes into the process? How much does it cost to implement? What's the outcome? Listen and you'll hear that the value can't be measured.


2. DECIDE ON FUNDAMENTALS


1. GenEd is an introduction to the breadth of inquiry in the university?
2. GenEd is a set of skills and areas of knowledge that every graduate should possess?
3. GenEd should inculcate a set of values that specialized training in majors omit?
4. GenEd is basic skills that are necessary to succeed in specialized training in majors?
5. GenEd should inculcate ideas students need as citizen but not taught in the major?
6. GenEd should insure that students do not graduate as narrow vocational specialists?
7. GenEd should be material common to all/most majors to make education more efficient?


3. ORGANIZATIONAL DECISION MAKING IS ORGANIZATIONAL


1. The design of a GenEd program is an organizational process, not an intellectual one.
2. GenEd rules shape/channel resources (enrollment, FTE, budget); much of the conversation is actually about that.
3. No GE program worth doing will please all. A compromise no one opposes is likely crap. 
4. Who is GenEd for? What is GenEd for? Who benefits? Who pays? Write the answers out.
5. The problem with the current program is usually implementation, not concept.  "GE is a mess" is unhelpful starting point; it's a mess because of implementation, and the same people will implement the new one so it likely will have the same implementation failures.
6. Least Common Denominator is very weak conceptual foundation for GenEd. Be skeptical about "what EVERY student should have."


4. PROJECTION AND PROCESS


1. Many proposals for GenEd translate as (1) students should have my (our!) values (2) every student should study what I teach.
• General rule: if it's my pet peeve or my pet project, it's not general education.
• Leaders should discourage "my 'baby' is the be all and end all" talk. 
• Perhaps a simple rule that you cannot advocate for your own area as part of GE.
• Keep track of which disciplines' are most certain their subject is essential.
2. Alternatively, use bottom up approach. Ask each "major" to write down: "A student of X needs some W and Y as foundations for, extensions of, and complements to X." Encourage inventive thinking. Then build on that database.


5. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE


1. Look to history: GenEd as contrasted with major course of study. 
2. Liberal arts is not same as humanities and fine arts.
3. How come it's not a crisis that art students can't do math?
4. "The Core" and related terms mean different things in different institutional contexts. 
5. The "outside the course" rhetoric in higher ed discourse is sort of "anti-professor." 
6. When did "community engagement" become a fundamental responsibility of educational institutions? Why did this happen? Ask questions; don't take things for granted.


6. REQUIREMENTS 


1. Let's be at a little skeptical about imposing morality/ideology via "requiring everyone to take a course on X." Very hard to find examples in history of this working well.
2. Best test of a GE concept might be thought experiment: would it work if not required? 
3. All of the "values," "mindsets," "orientations," etc. that one is inclined to require courses on because they are institutionally important should be a part of everything we teach. If not, then they are NOT actually institutionally important, you are just wishing they were.


7. CRITICAL THINKING


1. Nobody knows what critical thinking is. Perhaps start by figuring out what we mean by it.
2. Ask anyone who says "it's a problem that..." to explain how they know that it is a problem and how we could detect when it was not a problem anymore.
3. Purge all documents of "red herrings" (things that might very well be true and good but which distract from matter at hand). For example "faculty need support for digital technologies and data management in the classroom" or "need to acknowledge how hard faculty already work blah blah blah."
4. Perhaps outlaw any sentence that included the phrase "we used to..."
5. "Competencies" is a buzz word. Interrogate buzzwords; don't parrot buzzwords.


8. LANGUAGES AND GLOBAL LITERACY


1. Arguments for foreign languages often amount to (1) other schools do it; or (2) it's good for you (plus, usually, unsaid, "it was good for me"). Maybe, but, as champions of critical thinking, we should do better at motivating what would be a really big student and institutional investment and diversion of resources. 
2. Studying a language or going on a study abroad may not provide "global literacy" - it often turns one into a fan of one country, region, language, etc. It may transcend localism, but it's not necessarily "global" per se.
3. Do students currently chose to take foreign languages? Have the foreign language departments managed to enroll to capacity? Find out why before trying to accomplish this with a requirement. 
4. Ask why would we require, say, four semesters of this one of area of learning but not others?


9. GET EMPIRICAL


1. What is the actual evidence that things like "community engagement" are really something that we are not doing enough of? How do you know?
2. The future of higher ed for small second tier institutions will be strongly based on transfer students. Almost all GenEd will of necessity be something we accept as already done as a part of the transfer articulation agreements. This is likely simply part of the physics of the future of higher education in the US for many schools.
3. Every time someone suggests "X" is our core value, ask two things. First, does X really distinguish us from other places? Second, can we ethically have students on average incur $30k in debt for an education based on X? Is that what families sacrifice for?


10. BUILD ON GOOD IDEAS


1. Is your accreditation agency dominated by people from institutions you admire?  Are its publications ones you look to for inspiration?  What good is likely to come from basing a curriculum on their concepts? The answer is one thing: it is a path to a "compromise" that would not be a mere medley of all the competing ideas we faculty have. This might be important, but be clear about it.
2. Are you impressed by the ideas of the folks who are pushing assessment nationally? Do they strike you as the right sources of new GE ideas?
3. Are the thought leaders from American K12 education who have started to work in higher ed space the ones you would turn to for ideas on improving college and university education?


11. BOLDNESS


1. Institute multiple general education requirement schemes. See which ones students opt for. See which ones seem to deliver best results.
2. Have a fully articulated general education program but don't make it required. Can you persuade students it is a good idea.
3. Structure your requirements as "do at least 4 of these 7 things" and keep track of what people do and engage in some serious research about why they make those choices.
4. Provide a strict, cohort based option (you are given a schedule of GE courses when you start and the group takes them together over a few years) and see how many students sign up for it and what effects it has.

Hi My Name is Dan and I'll be Your Server

In a talk on October 14 blogger Audrey Watters described a dystopian future in which there were only 10 universities in the world.  The narrative arc of her provocation was that the rest of the "industry" would be replaced by variations on MOOCs and distance learning.  The real point of her talk (spoiler warning) was that this was not a necessary future, but one that some contemporary educational visionaries' ideas are pointing that direction, whether they know it or not.

I envision a different dystopian higher education landscape.  In my version, the rest of the institutions do not disappear.  Instead, they become "outlets" or "franchisees" of a small number of education "suppliers."  The business model analogy that's most apt, I think, will be chain restaurants.  Think about the food court at the airport or the restaurants in a strip mall or scattered around either suburbia or most city centers. This will happen because small colleges and universities will face the "make or buy" decision and everything will point in the direction of buy -- that is, to outsource the core educational content functions.

The entrepreneurs who run these establishments deliver a dining experience to customers who more or less beat a path to their door.  For better or worse they get a dependably consistent product.  It's challenging for others to compete with them because they have all the advantages of scale and name recognition and proven processes of food preparation.

If you look around at the contemporary practices of the big education companies (mostly publishers) and countless education startups, what you will see are the seeds of an industry that will (or want to) capture the entire constellation of things that happen in colleges and universities with the exception of student faculty contact, student-student contact, and research.  Before long we will likely see a separating out of education per se and research (for better or worse, well underway), then we can move toward a future in which colleges and universities partner with the education franchisors.  The colleges will be able to put a local wrapper on the experience and they'll have faculty and staff to "deliver" it, but the actual content, practices, and raw materials will be provided by the supplier.

What role will faculty and staff play?  Hard to say.  But if the best we can muster in defense of the ways we do college education is some variation on "relationships matter" then we might well find that that's the only part we (the we now is "we faculty") will play will be to serve up the corporate content and help students to get the most out of the experience.

Like Watters' narrative, not a necessary future, just a possible one.  To avoid it, I think we need to pay attention to efficiency and productivity within our institutions.  Otherwise, we'll get lapped by entities that are so much more productive that our claim to difference in kind will be drowned out.

CLAIM: Credit Hours as a Basis for Educational Accounting Will Disappear

There's lots of talk about competencies versus seat time as a means for tracking educational achievement.  I'm not sure if I think of this more as a prediction or a recommendation, but I suspect credits and credit hours will fall by the wayside over the next decade.

This is tricky business for a number of reasons.  Post-Bologna Process European higher education has actually moved more in the direction of a credit system (ECTS) motivated by the principle that students should be able to move around among institutions and across national borders.  Similar concerns exist in the US system where maintaining the pathway from junior colleges to four year institutions is a priority.

The credit hour is also intimately tied to the tuition-driven business model.  Measuring learning in terms of inputs translates easily to designing the college or university in terms of easily tracked outputs and tying these to the main factors that go into producing them: teaching and classrooms.  We can depend on a degree amounting to about 4 years of tuition paid to somebody and it helps to regulate the flow of people through the process.  A side benefit of this is that it also ensures an average level of maturation during the process -- regardless of the effect of the education itself, students are at least about four years older  Accounting for education in terms of credits also makes it possible to avoid the actually difficult tasks of comparable evaluation and certification.

But there are a number of things that weigh in favor of this outcome:

• For better or worse, conversations about the bottom line quality of degrees shifts the focus from time spent in school to what was learned there
• An ever widening distribution of levels of academic preparation will require more and more remedial and introductory level instruction unless the entire model shifts to simply "value added" (as in, the students know more at the end than at the beginning but with varying levels of achievement depending on the starting point)
• The availability of alternative learning venues will undermine our capacity to say, in effect, "you have to learn it from me."
• In the extreme our monopoly on the credential itself could easily be threatened by alternative certification processes.
• The trans-disciplinary nature of the problems of the next fifty years will almost certainly require graduates to solve them via intellectual "mash-ups" that combine knowledge that may or may not come in 14 week sized chunks.
• Organizationally, most institutions of higher learning are not nimble enough to respond to changes in their environments using courses, majors, and traditional departments.  Abandoning credits is one way to acquire some nimbleness without dismantling the entire system.

Of course, the conversation will go nowhere in the absence of a viable alternative.  Contemporary views vary, but there seems to be an emerging consensus that we have not yet figured out what might replace the credit hour.  The ECTS and the United Kingdom's Qualifications and Credit System and Lumina Foundation's Degree Qualifications Profile all manner of "badges" proposals are among the frameworks that are out there.  Missing from all of them, I think, is an exploration of their impact on the organization of our institutions.  That would seem to be a necessary component if we want to move the conversation forward.

See also

1. Carey, Kevin. 2012. "Who Will Hold Colleges Accountable?" New York Times December 9, 2012
2. European Commission. 2013. European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) 
3. Fain, Paul. 2012. "More Cracks in the Credit Hour." Inside Higher Ed December 5, 2012
4. Schneider, Carol Geary. 2012. "Is It Finally Time to Kill the Credit Hour?" Liberal Education Fall 2012, Vol. 98, No. 4
5. Tsigelny, Igor F. 2011. "Educational Credits in the USA and Credit Transfer from the UK and European Union." Analytical Reports in International Education Vol. 4. No. 1, November 2011, pp. 87-93
6. WES staff members. 1999. Working with ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) 
7. Young, Jeffrey R. 2012. “‘Badges’ Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8.