American academics often like to talk about how the higher-education system in the United States is the best in the world. I'm not quite sure how this status is determined -- especially given our declining position in the OECD rankings -- but we seem to have adopted the belief that the problems in the U.S. education system reside in elementary and secondary schools, not on college campuses.
Perhaps it's just a sign of the times in which we live. Modesty, it seems, is out of style. In a thought-provoking talk at the Washington Ideas Forum this week, The New York Times columnist, David Brooks, maintained that we live in an era of "expanded conception of self." That attitude, he believes, results in the trends we have witnessed in recent years toward increased consumption, polarization, and risk.
"We have moved from a culture of self effacement to one of self expansion," Brooks said.
In some ways, the Brooks lecture was a fitting end note to a conversation earlier in the day at the forum where I gathered with a dozen education, business, think-tank leaders for a spirited discussion on the state of the American higher-ed system.
After two hours of talking, there was no more agreement on how to improve the system than when we walked into the room. Indeed, the diversity of constituencies represented in the room couldn't even settle on what the system should be doing. (That was despite the best efforts of the moderator, Clive Crook, who as a Brit admitted at the outset how confusing and complex the U.S. higher-ed system is.)
Higher ed is feeling good about itself these days because it remains in demand. Why offer classes at more convenient times when you're getting a record number of applicants? Why hold the line on rising costs when students are willing to take on more debt? Why collect better job-placement data to provide to prospective students when they're still flocking to mediocre graduate programs?
As Brian Kelly, the editor of the much-maligned rankings at U.S. News & World Report put it, "colleges seem immune to the pressures facing every other sector of the economy."
If the current economic crisis is teaching us anything, it's that we have a serious mismatch between the "traditional" student of today and what much of higher ed is offering. Too many colleges are chasing after a shrinking pool of 18-year-olds. The smart and even somewhat smart ones are enticed by generous financial-aid packages, and the rest are getting in despite not being college ready. As a result, too many of the latter ones become the dropouts of tomorrow.
The group not being served, at least by the vast majority of colleges (except for two-year institutions and for profits), are older students, many of them college dropouts or just high-school graduates. "Too many adults out there are ill-equipped for the 21st-century economy," says Dennis Jones, president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, a nonprofit research group based in Boulder, Colo.
By one estimate, a lack of skilled labor is keeping three million jobs unfilled. Indeed, the work-force needs that most worry hi-tech companies are not the high-end jobs in engineering, design, and technology, but the manufacturing jobs that today require a specialized education. "We can secure all the grads we need from elite schools," says Thomas Bowler, a senior vice president at United Technologies. "That's not a challenge. It's the other half of the work force that I worry about." He sees a wave of retirements coming in manufacturing without a pipeline of highly-skilled workers to replace them.
Of course, in the absence of any big ideas or leadership from within the higher-ed establishment to reform entire institutions and transform how colleges do business, policy makers try to dictate solutions, which then puts colleges on the defensive. "There's a move to standardize outcomes, and that isn't the way most of our colleges see their mission," says Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education.
Indeed, the debate over the purpose of college -- career vs. intellectual development -- is often a false one, forcing us to pick between them when in reality the answer depends on the student. And employers like United Technologies need both types of graduates -- the designer from a liberal-arts college and the line worker with a certificate from a two-year institution.
In so many of the articles about the death of Steve Jobs this week, a famous quote from him was often repeated: "It's not the consumers' job to know what they want." Jobs revolutionized so many industries through his leadership of Apple because he tried to understand how technology could solve problems and then created the products to do what was needed. He was always at least one step ahead of the consumer.
The problem facing much of higher ed is that it's unsure of the problems it's trying to solve and unclear about who its customer is. Much of our conversation at the Ideas Forum round table this week focused on data. The belief by some was that if we just offered better information to students, they would make better choices and colleges would be forced to change because the market would shift. That is, of course, a big assumption that students will act on better information.
As Joanne Conroy, the chief health-care officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, sat in the room listening to the debate, she was reminded of similar conversations medical colleges had a decade ago as they grappled with changes to their curriculum. "We came to the realization that the real customer of medical colleges is the patient, not the learner."
Maybe the customer of colleges is not the student, but the job market of today and the economy of the future. Maybe if higher ed was to think for a moment that it wasn't the best in the world, it would focus less on how it's doing and more on how well it's serving American society.
Follow Jeff Selingo on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jselingo
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Assuring Civility or Curbing Criticism?
By Nicholas Stix
Earlier this month, Jeff Selingo, a Chronicle of Higher Education staffer who describes himself as an “Award-winning journalist and thought leader on higher education worldwide,” approvingly quoted Dennis Jones, president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, as saying, “Too many adults out there are ill-equipped for the 21st-century economy.”
Unfortunately, neither Jones nor Selingo explained what skills equip one for the 21st-century economy.
Let me jump into the breach….
Skills
How to be unemployable.
How to network among other unemployables….
http://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2011/10/necessary-skills-for-21st-century.html
The brilliant minds and exceptional talents within higher education are locked into a system that speaks and listens only to itself. The academic system trains, models, sustains and enforces a culture that requires compliance and conformity in form and reason. This is understandable. Most academics share the same or similar mental type. Their mental comfort zone may happen to be in the majority, but this makes for a system that is resistant to change and slow to acknowledge that there are other types and better ways out there. They function in a closed world that insists that anyone who enters their hallowed spaces must become just like them. They have tossed away their magic wand in favor of narcissism.
The problems in our society are a result of a citizenry that has embraced the notion that education is equal to training. And that the most important thing to learn in college is what one needs to get a job. I would argue the most important thing to learn in college is how to think. How to think critically, how to evaluate information, and to understand what knowledge is, where knowledge comes from, and how knowledge can be used.
Indeed, I would ask, where have all the intellectuals gone...
There is no ointment more conducive to creating around oneself that magical imaginary halo of divine blessing than one's own self-anointed conviction into divinely blessed inspirations and wisdom.
It allows everyone who imagines that ointment and then, rubbing it throughout his or her consciousness, persuades himself or herself of that divine-appoinment has now been sealed in the sacred center of his or her own otherwise very petty being.
It is otherwise known as the tenure system.
David Brooks is off by far more than half. Like those whom he would criticize if he could get over his own self-annointment, he has also forgotten or failed to have ever learned that the most "expanded conception of self" was long ago revealed and cultivated through repeated prophetic revelations from God. But, alas, like too many of the fractionally correct divine clerics, Brooks apparently forgot or never learned that God was something somewhat different than his own expanded consciousness of himself.
To learn about that conception of God, one need only turn to the prophets, Eastern as well as Western, and ancient as well as modern. The study early on enables one to discover humility, first in one's own mind, where imaginary self-inflation begins in early childhood, a state most never pass beyond. To learn of the linguistic trickery with the self, visit Peggy Rosenthal's book, Words and Values.
The comm colleges are where the local employers interface.
Going to "higher ed." assumes one wants to "try out" for the always competitive tenure track arena and that's bringing home the bacon (probably securing a grant in the millions now for a science or engineering tenure slot in a state university system). Most poo-pooh a Masters and want you to go for the Ph.D. nowadays.
Universities should expand students minds; community technical colleges should expand student's applied skill sets. Both of which are important for society.