It's About Learning

The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) survey “It Takes More Than a Major: Employer Priorities for College Learning and Student Success,” reveals that most employers don’t think colleges are doing a very good job of preparing students for work. In response to the survey results, 160 employers and 107 college presidents agreed to sign a compact and work toward helping the public:

understand the importance of a “21st-century liberal-arts education,” comprising broad and adaptive learning, personal and social responsibility, and intellectual skills.

While I admire this initiative I am somewhat skeptical of its impact. Why? It was only 6 years ago that AAC&U conducted a similar survey that revealed similar findings. In the 2008 report How Should Colleges Assess and Improve Student Learning?) Peter D. Hart Research Associates revealed the following 6 Key Findings:

1. When it comes to preparedness for success at the entry-level, one-third of business executives think that a significant proportion of recent college graduates do not have the requisite skills and knowledge.
2. When asked to evaluate recent college graduates’ preparedness in 12 areas, employers give them the highest marks for teamwork, ethical judgment, and intercultural skills, and the lowest scores for global knowledge, self-direction, and writing.
3. Most employers indicate that college transcripts are not particularly useful in helping evaluate job applicants’ potential to succeed at their company.
4. Few employers believe that multiple-choice tests of general content knowledge are very effective in ensuring student achievement. Instead, employers have the most confidence in assessments that demonstrate graduates’ ability to apply their college learning to complex, real-world challenges, as well as projects or tests that integrate problem-solving, writing, and analytical reasoning skills.
5. Employers deem both multiple-choice tests of general content knowledge and institutional assessments that show how colleges compare in advancing critical-thinking skills of limited value for evaluating applicants’ potential for success in the workplace. They anticipate that faculty-assessed internships, community-based projects, and senior projects would be the most useful in gauging graduates’ readiness for the workplace.
6. When asked to advise colleges on how to develop their methods for assessing students’ learning, employers rank multiple-choice tests of students’ general content knowledge and institutional scores for colleges as conspicuously low priorities.

This report focused on assessment and learning and offered some very specific and practical recommendations that, if followed, should have resulted in a different findings in the latest AAC&U survey. Why hasn’t higher education made any progress in this area over the past 6 years? Theodore Sizer, the former Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean and Educational Reformer, argues in his book, The Red Pencil, that little has changed in education since his experiences in the information and test based classroom he endured in 1946. Why does higher education perpetually find itself in a state of paralysais by analysis?

We need to heed the advice often attributed to Albert Einstein. Although he never actually offered the following quote this notion of challenging conventional thought is still useful:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

We can stop this insanity only if we stop hiring so many traditional risk adverse leaders and faculty. As I detailed in my post Pick Two – Innovation, Change or Stability we need to search out individuals who are outside-of-the-box thinkers with entrepreneurial spirits and unconventional career paths if we really want to bring about the changes we so desperately need in education.