Higher Ed GPS: How Will We Get Where We Are Going?

I interrupt my  current rant on the liberal arts for the following commentary: The recent audit of Western Governors University by the U.S. Department of Education Office of the Inspector General is a perfect illustration of what is wrong with regulation in higher education in America.   The audit concludes that WGU failed to meet requirements related to student-faculty interaction and so should return some $700 million it received in federal student aid.   The details of the audit are less concerning than the basis for the findings.   WGU has been a leader in providing distance education and in employing Competency Based Education to assess student progress.   The curriculum is largely self-paced, and students are assessed based on achieving specified outcomes.   This approach greatly reduces traditional semester-based time constraints and burdensome seat-time requirements that are unrelated to, but are used to measure, student success in traditional ...

Historically, the liberal arts were intended to provide a set of foundational skills and a theoretical framework that students could apply in the real world. This comes from the function of higher education in early America to provide education to an elite population in an agrarian society to prepare them to lead within that society.   Education was organized by basic knowledge units—professors and libraries. Over a span of centuries American society progressed from an agrarian to an industrial to a knowledge base.   Accordingly the need arose for higher education to prepare a labor force with an increasing variety of specialized skills. To accomplish this, the liberal arts foundation of higher education needed to be supplemented by curricula that prepared students to become productive members of a new order.   This cultural evolution led of necessity to a democratization of higher education, making it accessible to the masses through systems of public higher educati...

Overall, we tend to look in the wrong place for how to fix remedial education.   The real problem does not lie with remedial education itself.   Remedial instruction is doomed from the start because it is part of a larger problem.   A brief exercise in critical thinking is illustrative.   Students do not receive the instruction in our K-12 system that will align their exit skills with the entrance skills required by higher education.   This leads many to the conclusion that there is a problem with the K-12 system and its teachers.   However, the situation begs the question of why high school exit skills do not align with college entrance skills. The answer to this question is deceptively simple.   Teachers in our K-12 schools are prepared in teacher training programs at our institutions of higher education.   Higher education influences everything in the K-12 system from course content, to expected student outcomes, to teacher behavior, to, o...

Remedial education is hotly debated within the ranks of higher education in America, as well as in the general public.   The basic premise is that many students graduate from our K-12 system without requisite skills in writing, math, and critical thinking to ensure success in college.   Consequently, these students must receive instruction to improve these skills prior to entering into college-level coursework.   There are a number of variations on this theme, but this is the situation that remedial studies address. There are a myriad of studies examining the efficacy of remedial education.   The overwhelming conclusion from all of them is simple:   Remedial education does not work.   Here are a few reasons why. *You can’t fix 12 years of inadequate preparation in one or two semesters.   *The problem is not just with content *The underlying assumptions of many remedial programs are flawed To begin, skills like writing and math are cumu...