At no time in recent history have colleges been as open to shaking things up as they are now. Covid challenged the status quo — both in higher education and in the workplace our students will enter upon graduation — and the coming years represent an opening for all of us to try new ideas. Yet given all the financial and demographic pressures facing academe, your first thought might be: Can we afford to experiment?
Sometimes change does begin with a big budget and a multipronged, multiyear strategic plan. But far more often, change is sparked by a simple suggestion and a campus leader who is willing to give it a try. In our new book — Becoming Great Universities: Small Steps for Sustained Excellence, published this week — we offer dozens of free or inexpensive changes that institutions might consider to enhance the student experience.
Our core theme: It doesn’t have to cost much to move a campus culture toward innovation and experimentation. Here we offer five concrete, no-cost or low-cost suggestions from our book that any campus — large or small, private or public, selective or not — could adopt to make the place better for your students.
No. 1: Reward innovative teaching. Lynne Schofield, a professor of statistics at Swarthmore College, has fundamentally changed the way her students learn basic and intermediate statistics. She lectures and assigns problem sets but she also teams up with local Philadelphia organizations such as food banks and blood-donation centers to give students an opportunity to solve real-world problems using their classroom knowledge. The organizations benefit from data and analysis that they may not have had time or bandwidth to collect themselves, and the students see the practical application of what they might ordinarily have perceived as a dry subject.
This sort of innovative teaching style flourishes at Swarthmore in part because of its institutional culture. Valuing teaching innovation — in annual reviews, tenure cases, and other departmental decisions — doesn’t require a huge investment. It mostly requires a shift in attitudes.
No. 2: Solicit ideas from students. A few years ago, a group of students lamented the fact that, during their four years on campus, they learned from roughly only 32 of their university’s hundreds of professors. These students came up with a no-cost idea to do something about that. They met with a dean and proposed a public event called, “10 Big Ideas, 10 Professors, 10 Minutes Each.”
When the dean agreed, the students took the lead on selecting and inviting professors to each present the “most exciting new idea” in their academic field, in less than 10 minutes. It was entirely voluntary: Faculty members did not receive additional compensation for presenting, and students did not earn academic credit for attending. The event was a resounding success, with lines to get in that snaked around the building and thunderous applause after each presentation. Students learned about ideas and fields they might never have explored or even known existed.
Too many of us underestimate how students themselves can enhance the undergraduate experience by coming up with innovative ideas that simply had not occurred to professors, deans, and other campus leaders.
No. 3: Get on the “active learning” train. Active learning — that is, getting your students to be active participants in class rather than passive receptors — is increasingly admired for good reason. Even small tweaks in course design can make a difference.
Here’s an example. For several years, one of us (Light) taught a first-year seminar on higher-education policy. It met once a week for a three-hour session that followed a typical seminar format — with the professor leading discussions about the assigned reading. Course ratings were pretty good, ranging from 4.5 to 4.7 out of 5 for three years in a row. Then, in an effort to involve students more actively in class, I (Light) decided to make a small change: I continued to lead the discussions for most of the class time, but for the final 30 minutes, I asked a team of two students (previously paired up) to take over (with two weeks’ notice). Same books, same format, same room, same table.
How much did that “experimental teaching” change cost my university’s line-item budget? Zero. What did it cost me? Nothing. Any college could do this. Why bother? Because three concrete results emerged from this stunningly minor adjustment in my teaching format:
- Students began coming to class noticeably better prepared than ever before. When I asked them why, this was a representative response: “Even though I didn’t lead the discussion this week, I know my turn will come. And I want my classmates to come well-prepared. So I do exactly that myself.”
- Students spoke up in class far more when their fellow students were posing the questions and leading the discussion.
- Finally, I saw a boost in my course evaluations. This version of the course was rated 4.9 out of 5, the highest “overall class effectiveness” rating a seminar has ever received in my 40 years of teaching. Plus, the students simply worked harder. In the past, students reported on their course evaluations that they had spent four to five hours preparing for the seminar; now they said they prepared for six to eight hours.
No. 4: Capitalize on what students say they need, rather than make assumptions about their needs. Institutions are enrolling more and more first-generation-college students from low-income backgrounds. These students simply don’t bring with them a family tradition of what colleges can offer. And some campus leaders often assume that nontraditional students will take a longer-than-usual time to graduate.
A program at Georgetown University takes a different approach. The Georgetown Scholars Program invites all students from nontraditional backgrounds to join and provides academic advice tailored to their needs, which vary enormously. The program keeps in touch with their families, some of whom may not speak English well or have never set foot on a college campus before. It offers academic tutoring, advice on securing summer jobs and internships, and help with structuring a résumé. Perhaps most important, the program offers a “home” for students where they are confident there is an adult who knows they are there — who has made an effort to get to know them and who is available for a conversation. This approach has paid off. Program officials told us that the overall six-year graduation rate at Georgetown is 92 percent; for the university’s low-income, first-generation students of color, the graduation rate is an even more astounding 96 percent.
Does this kind of support cost money? Unlike our other suggestions, the answer is yes. The staff members do need to be paid. Yet this is not a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Perhaps not surprisingly, it also has served as an unexpected vehicle for Georgetown to raise new funds from donors who value the program’s goals.
Our point here is not that every institution should clone this program. It is simply this: Students who may need a bit of extra help can thrive, even at a highly demanding campus, if a program to meet their needs is thoughtfully developed and inclusive from Day 1.
No. 5: Capitalize on the time students spend outside of the classroom. In Becoming Great Universities, we pose the question: “How many hours are there in a week?” Of course, the answer is 168 hours. Then we ask: “How many hours each week, on average, do most students on most campuses sit in a classroom?” The answer ranges from roughly 10 to 16 hours. So what happens with the other roughly 150 hours?
In our travels to many kinds of campuses, we have found that some offer a long list of extra workshops and programs for students to learn new skills — and not necessarily academic ones. These free events are organized and run by staff and faculty members volunteering their time. Here are some examples we’ve seen of campus workshops on how to:
- Become a reasonably good public speaker.
- Work as effectively as possible on a group project.
- Really “bring it” when giving a speech.
- Give useful advice to friends and colleagues.
- Receive advice, personal or professional.
- Break bad news to a group of people.
- Get past writer’s block.
Such skills are highly useful but not typically taught in chemistry, history, sociology, or other traditional academic courses. These workshops don’t require a great deal of advance planning or resource investment. A 90-minute session offered on a campus of 5,000 students may attract only 2 percent of them, but that still represents 100 students. Students usually rate these workshops extraordinarily highly, even though they offer no academic credit.
How to get started. We have spoken with campus leaders who sometimes say, “There is no way I can get all or even most of my faculty and staff on board to try all these new ideas. It would take me years.” Our advice: Start with a “coalition of the willing” — faculty members who are already experimenting with their teaching, and staff members who have expressed interest in incorporating more student voices when planning campus events. As members of that core group begin to put these new ideas to work, their colleagues will be encouraged to do so as well, and the circle of innovation will expand.
You don’t need unanimous participation from Day 1. Just get started.
