Hi. I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, covering innovation in and around academe. Subscribe here. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week:
Five takeaways from my 24 hours at AAC&U
There’s nothing like the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges & Universities: The rich mix of professors, deans, and provosts among the 1,800-plus attendees. The passionate conversations about teaching. The inescapable torrent of acronyms (HIPs? LEAP? ) and jargon. I love it all. (OK, maybe those last things not so much.)
Although this year my time at the three-day meeting was briefer than usual, here’s some of what struck me:
1. More and more resources are available for serving adult students.
In our session on the adult student, David Scobey, whose Bringing Theory to Practice project advocates engaged learning, emphasized that even though older students may be returning to college to improve their job prospects, many are also interested in the broader benefits of higher education. A new(ish) organization, the Great Colleges for the New Majority, is a small but ambitious network of colleges and programs that aims to foster strong teaching practices at adult-serving institutions. Scobey is one of its founders. It’s a good resource for anyone thinking about how to serve adults well.
2. Colleges must help students find common ground.
In a panel presentation on the challenges to liberal-arts education, Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, highlighted one of the vital roles that higher education needs to play in society. “A huge part of what colleges do is model diverse democracy,” he said.
A few years ago, I spent spent some quality time with Patel while writing a profile of him, and Chronicle readers may also know him from his writings in our pages, including this recent piece, in which he called omitting religion from campus diversity training “educational malpractice.” The interfaith group’s approach involves putting students from different religions together in community projects or “speed faithing” exercises so they don’t gloss over their differences but also find opportunities for common ground.
In these polarized and politicized times, that’s become an even more challenging mission, Patel told me as we grabbed coffee and caught up. To me, that makes efforts like IFYC’s all the more important.
3. Colleges should be “a front porch to our communities.”
In that same liberal-arts discussion, Mary Schmidt Campbell, the president of Spelman College, noted that institutions could increase understanding of what they’re all about if they would invite the community to come in. Spelman, she said, did that during the recent Georgia gubernatorial race, when students organized an event about the candidates. As she put it: “We’ve got to become a front porch to our communities.” I realize that sounds easier in talk than in action — just ask those campuses that have been overrun by protesters when controversial speakers appear. But still, colleges can surely connect better intellectually with the people who live nearby.
4. Internships are changing in a big way ...
At our Chronicle meet-up, two readers of my recent coverage of innovations in internships dropped by with some additional fun facts on the topic. One was Isabel Roche, Bennington College’s provost and dean, who told me that Bennington has required its students to undertake internships or similar experiences in January and February since its founding in the 1930s as a women’s college. Today, that Field Work Term can also include a job or an entrepreneurial experience. Sending women off to work was a radical idea at the time. It may have also been a practical one for a new institution founded in the Great Depression: by having students working off campus, the college could save on heating costs in the dead of a Vermont winter.
5. … but it’s important to make sure all students can access them.
The second tidbit on internships came from a scholar of the topic, Matthew Hora, who told me about a recent trip to China, where he observed an “internship” for engineering students that consisted of 200-plus undergraduates “crowded into a hot, smoky, industrial setting,” all cramming to observe a single technician at work. Not exactly what we’d call an ideal experiential-learning opportunity.
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In a follow-up email, Hora, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, offered a bit more context. He noted that the these “internships” were part of a two-week program of educational lectures in the mornings followed by workplace observations in the afternoons. The students were seniors who, as sophomores had received two weeks of hands-on lab experience. “The faculty generally recognized the limitations of this model,” Hora wrote, but they struggled “because of the large numbers of students, large numbers of competing universities also seeking placements, and the small numbers of employers willing to host hundreds of students at a time.”
Luckily for most American students, the internship opportunities in the United States are a bit more expansive, as Hora and his colleagues at the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions continue to find. The challenge here is ensuring that students of all income levels get the chance to experience them.
Quote of the week.
“If there were a Dow Jones ticker for college degrees, we’d be seeing a market correction today, as the @IBM CEO says we need to hire for skills not diplomas.”
From a tweet by Ann Kirschner, university professor at the City University of New York, reacting to the speech Ginni Rometty gave last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Reports to note.
- For all the talk about competency-based education being the next new thing, only a few colleges have such programs and they serve “relatively small numbers of students.” That’s according to this report that calls itself the the most comprehensive and detailed survey of the field to date.
- Colleges love to brag that their alumni networks can help students with their careers, but the data say otherwise. According to a recent report from Gallup, just 9 percent of graduates reported that their alumni network has been very helpful or helpful to them in the job market. More than twice as many graduates (22 percent) report that it has been very unhelpful or unhelpful. The vast majority of graduates (69 percent) report that it was neither helpful nor unhelpful. That, says Gallup, “means alumni networks are a non-factor for many graduates in the job market.”
Our 5th annual Shark Tank: Edu Edition at SXSW EDU seeks contestants.
Do you — or someone you know — have a new company, a new organization, or even just a good idea to improve higher education? Please consider taking the plunge as one of our Shark Tank contestants on Wednesday, March 6, 12:30 to 1:30 p.m., in Austin, Tex.
If you’re looking for investment capital, this isn’t for you; that’s not in my budget. But if past experience is any guide, you’ll find it a spirited way to highlight new thinking and action on issues like student debt, teaching quality, study abroad, and pathways to careers, to name just a sample of prior topics. This year the “sharks” will again include me and Paul Freedman, CEO and co-founder of Entangled Group, and a newcomer, Catharine (Cappy) Bond Hill, a former president of Vassar College and now managing director of Ithaka S+R. My colleague Scott Carlson will return too, to keep the show rolling.
Interested? Please send a short description of your idea to chronicleevents@chronicle.com.
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past editions, or sign up to receive your own copy, you can do so here.
