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From the General Secretary: Measuring Education
By Ruth Flower
The U.S. Department of Education hosted a series of "negotiated rulemaking" sessions this year, to iron out some of the complexities in regulations that affect colleges and universities. One of the issues on the table was the "twelve-hour rule," a financial aid rule that essentially defines full-time students as those who are in class twelve hours each week. A student carrying a typical twelve-credit load usually meets this standard.
But higher education doesn't necessarily come in twelve- to fifteen-unit packages any more. What about the weekend student who packs an intensive course load into Saturday mornings? What about the online student, whose time "in class" is difficult, if not impossible, to measure? These questions prompted the Department of Education and some members of Congress to challenge "seat time" as an appropriate criterion and to look for another standard. The lengthy and tedious negotiated rulemaking sessions, themselves marked by plenty of "seat time," failed to produce agreement. Nevertheless, the department is charging forward with a recommendation that the current twelve-hour rule be abandoned.
The dilemma is both simple and inescapable: to choose the right tool, there must be agreement on what is being measured. So far, such agreement has eluded not only Congress and the Department of Education, but also higher education administrators and faculty. For example, what standard would best measure the changes in the lives of students when they move beyond the confines of high school to an academic environment that entertains all ideas and perspectives, and demands rigorous study and exposition? The experience of "going to college," coveted by generations of families for their children, has traditionally provided passage among social and economic classes. The exposure to ideas and cultures different from one's own, and the gradual acquisition of the ability to appreciate the unfamiliar, invite the student into a larger world. This tradition still holds in colleges that introduce students to new explorations in the sciences, new literary and artistic experiences, and new modes of inquiry and commentary.
If higher education has to do with sharpening the ability to think, what rule would be appropriate to measure it? The college curriculum typically includes courses that exercise critical, creative, synthetic, and analytic capacities. Artistic, imaginative, computational, and proportional thinking are also encouraged. The successful graduate of a comprehensive liberal arts program will be able to approach problems in industry, in the community, and in public service, with well-developed skills in many types of thinking. Is this what we're measuring?
If, on the other hand, higher education is simply a matter of job preparation, the measures must be specific to the job. Potential employers should be invited to describe the specific skills needed for the jobs that they anticipate filling after the next four years. Curricula should then be set to match those requirements. Though the Department of Education and many politicians allude to this model in the rhetoric of partnership, corporate involvement, and economic readiness, the model itself is limiting. Jobs are not static in our economy. Industries grow and decline and individuals make an average of five to seven career changes in a lifetime. Employers need people who know how to adapt to new situations—how to learn. Employers look for leaders who show imagination, initiative, creativity, and the ability to seek and apply new knowledge.
Using the college degree as a proxy for the experience of learning, employers often require certain academic credentials in hiring and promotion processes. Responding to demand, commercial companies have formed in order to offer the credential without the education. Under current minimum rules, academic degrees actually can be awarded for minimum effort ("get your degree in eight weeks!" advertisements crow). Ultimately, employers themselves will draw the line on these offers. When a degree can no longer serve as a proxy for education, employers will seek other indications of academic experience and accomplishment.
The faculty, collectively, has the primary responsibility for defining the content and the measure of higher education, including what goes into a degree and what goes into a course. Ties to scholarly disciplines and professional experience in research, learning, and teaching provide faculty members with the necessary insight and judgment to carry out this responsibility. The Department of Education is now prepared to suspend some of the minimal measures of education, perhaps clouding accepted definitions of terms such as "college degree." This step makes it all the more important for faculty to strengthen their role and their voice in academic decision making, in order to preserve the integrity of higher education.
Ruth Flower is serving as interim general secretary of the AAUP while Mary Burgan is on sabbatical leave this fall.
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