If we want more students to succeed in college, we have to turn full attention to the craft of university-level teaching. What’s at stake is not only increasing graduation rates but providing a quality education for those who, a generation or two ago, might not have seen college as possible.  

This article originally appeared at the  Christian Science Monitor . 

Right after I gave my opening lecture on Oedipus the King to the 30 employees of Los Angeles’s criminal justice system, I handed out a few pages of notes I would have taken if I were sitting in their seats listening to the likes of me.

They were taking my course, Introduction to Humanities, as part a special program leading to a college degree, and I knew from a survey I gave them that many hadn’t been in a classroom in a long time – and some didn’t get such great educations when they were. So we spent the last half hour of the class comparing my notes with the ones they had just taken, talking about the way I signaled that something was important, how they could separate out a big idea from specific facts, how to ask a question without looking like a dummy.

I taught that humanities course more than 30 years ago, but I was thinking about it as I read the new report from the National Commission on Higher Education Attainment, “College Completion Must Be Our Priority.”  The report is a call to leaders in higher education to increase graduation rates by scheduling courses and services to accommodate working adults, developing more on-line learning, easing the ability of students to transfer, and implementing a host of other sensible solutions to the many barriers that are contributing to America’s stagnating college graduation rates. 

But if we want more students to succeed in college, then colleges have to turn full attention to teaching.

To their credit, the authors of the college completion report call for better professional development for college faculty; however, most reports of this type have little to say about teaching, focusing instead on structural and administrative reforms outside the classroom. It is a glaring omission.

Perhaps the authors of these reports believe that teaching is such an individual activity that not much can be done to affect it.

Another reason has to do with the way college teaching gets defined in practice. Faculty become experts in a field, and then they pass on their knowledge to others through college courses. Some teachers get very good at this delivery – compelling lectures, creative demonstrations, engaging discussions, and useful assignments. But professors don’t usually think beyond their subjects to the general intellectual development of the undergraduates before them, to enhancing the way they learn and make sense of the world.

Finally, I don’t see much evidence at the policy level of a deep understanding of college-level teaching or a respect for its craft.

The problem starts in the graduate programs where college instructors are minted. Students learn a great deal about, let’s say, astrophysics or political science, but not how to teach it. They might assist in courses and pay attention to how their professors teach, but none of this is systematic or a focus of study or mentoring.

And there is rarely a place in the curriculum to consider the difficulties students might have as they learn how to think like an astrophysicist or political scientist. And then there are the reading and writing difficulties that can emerge when encountering a discipline for the first time.

The majority of new college faculty wants to teach well – and many do. But they won’t find on most college campuses an institutional culture that fosters teaching. To be sure, there are rewards for good teaching – awards, the esteem of students – and most institutions, even research universities, consider exemplary teaching as a factor in promotion. And some campuses have programs that provide resources for instruction, but they tend to be low-status and under-utilized operations.

Teaching has special meaning now, as the authors of the report on student success point out, because close to half of American undergraduates are a bit more like those students in my humanities class than our image of the traditional college student fresh out of high school.

Particularly in the community colleges and state colleges where the majority of Americans receive their higher education, students are older, they work, and many have children. A significant percentage are the first in their families to go to college; somewhere between 40 to 50 percent need to take one or more remedial courses in English or mathematics.

To do right by these students, we need to rethink how to teach them. This does not mean rushing to electronic technology – a common move these days. On-line instruction of any variety will only be as good as the understanding of teaching and learning that underlies it.

We can begin by elevating the value of teaching and creating more opportunities to get better at it. For those students who need help with writing, mathematics, and study skills, there are tutoring centers and other campus resources. Faculty should forge connections with these resources but realize that they, too, can provide guidance and tricks of the trade – like taking good notes – as well as an orientation to their field.

In my experience, students at flagship universities and elite colleges could also benefit from this approach to instruction. Just ask them.

Doing such things does not mean abandoning our subject area but rather enhancing it and opening a door to it.

Working with those humanities students on their notes helped them develop better note-taking techniques. But as we studied technique, we also thought hard about how to determine what’s important – and how to make someone else’s information your own. All this involved talking further about Greek tragedy, about literary interpretation, and about what the humanities can provide 

What’s at stake is not only increasing graduation rates but also providing a quality education for those who, a generation or two ago, might not have seen college as possible.

Mike Rose  is a professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies and author of Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education.  

Image by Alan Levine, licensed under Creative Commons.

The physics of fiction, or literature as a moral vehicle.

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Would you let your school login to your Facebook account? In an alarming new trend, universities and employers are asking to login to students' and employees' Facebook accounts.

American higher education is on the cusp of change. Figures for average tuition and cumulative debt are skyrocketing, while the value of degrees is deflating. Newcomers to the job market are defaulting on their loans more than ever. At the same time, disruptive new technologies and educational strategies are usurping the dusty, sprawling, bureaucratic, green-fisted university system. Solving the large, complex institution’s problems has proven thorny (at best). How to best serve the students? The faculty? The university? The country? Humanity?

“Education has one salient enemy in present-day America,” writes Mark Edmundson in an essay for Oxford American’s education issue, “and that enemy is education—university education in particular.” As a teacher, Edmundson understands and takes issue with the profit motive of higher education. He doesn’t say that American education is categorically “bad.” For example, of professors he writes that “[t]he people who do this work have highly developed intellectual powers, and they push themselves hard to reach a certain standard.” Fair enough. One problem: “That the results have almost no practical relevance to the students, the public, or even, frequently, to other scholars is a central element in the tragicomedy that is often academia.”

Edmundson’s catch-all solution goes beyond the usual Hail Mary defense of liberal arts, a panacea partly pragmatic and partly delusional: memento mori. Remember that you only live once and that most people only have one chance to attend college.

He recalls a formative episode sitting at the dinner table and telling his father—a hardscrabble, near-dropout, middle-class, by-the-bootstraps man—that he was thinking about pursuing a “pre-law” education. As Edmundson tells it, that’s when his father “detonated”:

He told me that I was going to go to college only once, and that while I was there I had better study what I wanted. He said that when rich kids went to school, they majored in the subjects that interested them, and that my younger brother Philip and I were as good as any rich kids. (We were rich kids minus the money.) Wasn’t I interested in literature? I confessed that I was. Then I had better study literature, unless I had inside information to the effect that reincarnation wasn’t just hype, and I’d be able to attend college thirty or forty times. If I had such info, pre-law would be fine, and maybe even a tour through invertebrate biology could also be tossed in. But until I had the reincarnation stuff from a solid source, I better get to work and pick out some English classes from the course catalog.

As is often the case with this type of essay, Edmundson only obliquely confronts the issue of rampant unemployment among recent graduates. Rather than littering his conclusion with reassuring statistics about the job prospects of a liberal education, he defers to Robert Frost:

If you advance in the direction of someone else’s dreams—if you want to live someone else’s life rather than yours—then get a TV for every room, buy yourself a lifetime supply of your favorite quaff, crank up the porn channel, and groove away. But when we expend our energies in rightful ways, Robert Frost observed, we stay whole and vigorous and we don’t weary. “Strongly spent,” the poet says, “is synonymous with kept.”

Source: Oxford American 

Image by Carnoodles, licensed under Creative Commons. 

My master’s degree is worth less than my husband’s bachelor’s degree, according to a survey report by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Of course, I don’t need the survey to tell me, since I know it from our paychecks, wherein I earn 79 cents for every dollar he earns. Hey, I must be doing something right: That’s one generous penny more than the national average.

Yes, the most recent census reveals that women workers are still paid a scant 78 cents on the dollar earned by men. If I wanted to make as much money as my husband, the Georgetown report says, I would need to earn a PhD. “All told,” writes Kristina Chew on Care2, “over their lifetimes, women with the same educational achievements as men earn about a quarter less than their male counterparts.”

Naysayers argue that these statistics are skewed by women with advanced degrees who exit the workforce for years to be stay-at-home moms. But the survey accounts for the time-off disparity, and the report makes clear that its numbers are actually a conservative estimate of the gender wage gap, concluding, “The findings are stark: Women earn less at all degree levels, even when they work as much as men.”

Solutions, anyone? Mine is to move salaries out of the realm of used car haggling and into that of a modern and healthy transparent business model, wherein each employee’s wages are listed in the employee handbook for all to see and shared with new hires during the interview process. Just one dreamy step toward equal pay for equal work.

Source: Care2 

Image by j.o.h.n. walker , licensed under Creative Commons.

Loitering usually has a negative connotation as an act that authority figures frown upon. But at Harvard University students can sign up to loiter—in fact, there’s an entire class dedicated to it that we can all learn from.

In Art Lies, Carlin Wing explores the value in learning to loiter through professor Stephen Prina’s course in which students are given a number of tasks requiring them to break out of their usual patterns and explore new things—and then share their observations with classmates. “The assignments all involve a certain sort of destructuring of what an assignment can and should be,” Wing writes. “Meanwhile the acts of collecting evidence to present and produce conversation in class help assign serious value to wandering walks and the errant perusal of music and magazines.” Activities vary from listening to a new album you would pass over normally to visiting a new place and collecting evidence on the way there. Anything you wouldn’t gravitate toward on your own. Wing makes some big-picture observations about what results:

What is compelling about this class is less what happens in it and more how it stays with you once it is over. It follows at your heels when you head off to other climes. It bubbles up on street corners in Nashville or freeways in Los Angeles. Instead of defining itself as a space where art is produced, it defines every moment of your daily activity as one of potential research or production. That is the genius in it. It can potentially come off as a fucking around sort of class lacking definition and discipline. But while you are casually browsing the magazine rack and deciding to pick up a copy of antique cars for your assignment to read a periodical that you would not otherwise pay attention to, you are actually changing the way you are going to approach magazine racks and credit card receipts and layovers in the Chicago airport for the rest of your life.

Source: Art Lies (article not yet available online)

Image by borkur.net, licensed under Creative Commons.

Launching today, the Green Report Card website promises to rank 300 colleges in terms of their sustainability, helping eco-conscious high school seniors make the right choice.

Green Report Card was created by the nonprofit Sustainable Endowments Institute, a project of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. The college rankings are formulated using information gathered from the College Sustainability Report Card 2009, which evaluates schools in nine key categories: Administration, Climate Change and Energy, Food and Recycling, Green Building, Student Involvement, Transportation, Endowment Transparency, Investment Priorities, and Shareholder Engagement.

Factors affecting a school’s grade range from the presence of “green dorms and car sharing,” according to the program’s press release, to “shareholder advisory committees and renewable energy investments.” Small liberal arts colleges like Carleton and Oberlin were among the 15 schools that got A grades, joining the ranks of such state schools as the University of Washington and the University of New Hampshire, and Ivies like Harvard and Brown.

Peruse the Report Card to see how your current or former institution fared. (I’m embarrassed to say where I went to college, since my alma mater got a D-minus. Ouch!)

Image by redjar, licensed by Creative Commons.