Throughout the 1990’s, while writing a book on the impact of big-time college sports on student life, I tried to gauge the quality of undergraduate education at large public universities. Whenever I visited institutions and inquired about it,
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however, I encountered a serious disconnect. Administrators always exclaimed, “It’s great, it’s wonderful.” But when I spoke with students, they often complained about their courses, particularly the multitude of huge, “boring” lecture classes.
After visiting dozens of classrooms, conducting hundreds of interviews, and reading more than 1,900 student responses to a survey I administered for the book, I concluded that undergraduate education at many large public universities is deplorable. Yet how could I prove that, when university officials unanimously praised their institutions’ educational performance? Simply put, it was my word against theirs.
Then I discovered honors programs. Public institutions usually tout such programs by contrasting the instruction offered to honors students with that endured by ordinary undergraduates. When those institutions brag in their literature about their Mercedes-like honors units, the courses that they provide regular students sound like broken-down buses.
In fact, Peterson’s, a publisher of college directories, collects self-descriptions from honors programs across America and prints them in Peterson’s Honors Programs. According to the preface: “In every case, catering to the [honors] student as an individual plays a central role in honors course design. Most honors classes are small (under 20 students) and discussion oriented -- giving students a chance to present their own interpretations of ideas. ... The classes help students mature intellectually and prepare them to engage in their own explorations and research.”
What’s going on? Historically, public universities proclaimed such educational goals for all students. But in the past several decades -- because of budget cuts and other financial constraints, as well as the squandering of billions of dollars on graduate programs in the pursuit of research prestige -- public universities have no longer advertised those objectives for regular undergraduates. Instead, they have reserved them for a small group of honors students.
The separation of honors students from regular students begins with admission. Many freshman honors students perform well enough on Advanced Placement exams that they can skip the huge introductory courses that most regular students must take. A Peterson’s description of Miami University of Ohio’s honors program takes a sarcastic swipe at the entire lecture-course method when it says that the program “empowers students to see themselves as generators of knowledge rather than as passive transmitters.” The University of Maryland at College Park’s honors-program literature makes the same point when it tells potential applicants, “You’ll be creating knowledge with the faculty, not memorizing a zillion facts to throw back on some test.”
If officials at those and other public universities condemn the lecture-course method, why do the institutions continue to teach a majority of undergraduates in mass classes? Many studies indicate, and honors officials themselves admit, the lecture format is pedagogically bankrupt. But large public universities keep it alive for a distinctly noneducational reason: It is the most cost-efficient way to gain maximum tuition dollars from regular undergraduates.
The University of Connecticut provides further insight into how institutions regard regular students. UConn states that its honors program is for “enthusiastic and energetic students who are looking for smaller classes, extensive discussions with professors, [and] more individual attention.” Do the other UConn students dislike small classes, personal contact with professors, and individual attention?
The story is the same across the country. The University of Oregon’s honors college, like many others, boasts that it emphasizes “the development of fundamental intellectual skills: critical thinking, writing, reading, speaking, and listening.” The implication -- and the reality that I discovered during my research -- is that regular courses at many public universities do not teach or even require essential skills, and that an undergraduate’s best chance of acquiring them is in an honors program. That theme recurs so often in brochures and guidebooks that the conclusion is ominous: Various public universities are admitting, de facto, that they cannot teach regular undergraduates to read and write at a college level.
Can the situation change? My recommendations, while logical, run contrary to higher education’s quest for research prestige at the expense of undergraduate education. Yet the time may finally be right for a new approach. In recent years, prestigious higher-education panels, like the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University, have called for a renewed emphasis on undergraduate education. Most important, the public, particularly parents of college-age students, is increasingly unhappy with the quality of the course work and the value of degrees -- and will undoubtedly step up the pressure for change.
My goal is to turn regular undergraduate education into one large honors program. As a first step, large public universities must slim down, losing millions of students. Although it may at first appear unrealistic, especially from a financial perspective, that approach would be far less costly over the long haul. Far too many institutions accept applicants who need expensive remedial help in basic subjects and who simply do not belong in universities at this point in their academic careers.
We should raise admissions standards at our leading public universities and improve community colleges. With increased tuition revenues from more students, community colleges could become even better -- and could give those who aren’t prepared for university work the education that they truly need.
My second recommendation is one that is continually put forth but almost never carried out. Universities must hire, promote, and reward faculty members primarily for teaching undergraduates -- and only secondarily for research. Large public universities, as part of their massive weight loss, must shrink their graduate programs and stop pursuing ever-elusive research prestige. It’s a matter of priorities: Money saved by reducing expensive graduate programs should be shifted into undergraduate education, aiding that endeavor and covering the shortfall of tuition dollars resulting from higher admissions standards.
My third proposal, endorsed by hundreds of studies on the topic, is to abolish teaching methods that turn students into passive receptacles. Instead, universities should emphasize interactive, inquiry-based learning. They should simply end the lecture-course system and establish small classes where students and faculty members constantly interact.
Do all of those ideas seem impossibly radical? They do -- until one realizes that they replicate exactly what is happening in most current honors programs.
Suggestions that others have made for reform also imitate activities already common in honors programs. For example, the Boyer Commission urged an undergraduate education to “Culminate with a Capstone Experience: The final semester(s) should focus on a major project and utilize to the fullest the ... skills learned in the previous semesters.” Currently, most honors programs require each student to develop an honors thesis as a valuable “capstone” of the years spent in the program. But faculty members must spend significant time working with students on their projects. The present honors-thesis system succeeds because individual professors usually direct two or three honors papers each year.
What would happen if a full faculty directed all undergraduates in that activity? The current two to three hours a week that many professors spend on honors theses would escalate to 20, even 30, hours per week. Universities would have to acknowledge what they refuse to admit now: Quality teaching is labor-intensive, and few faculty members can conduct serious research and teach at a high level at the same time. To design a system that serves all undergraduates, we should support and reward faculty members for teaching regular students.
Can general undergraduate education actually become one large honors program? It’s less utopian than it appears. In fact, it briefly happened once before.
In the post-Sputnik era of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, taxpayers and government agencies supported the country’s public universities to an unprecedented extent. I attended Purdue University at that time and, like all other undergraduates, took freshman English in a class of 15 students, taught by a tenure-track faculty member. At Purdue and most other institutions in that era, honors programs for undergraduates did not exist. Public universities, smaller then than today and with higher admissions standards, treated all students equally, and tenure-track faculty conducted most classes. Some undergraduates ignored those educational opportunities, but they were available to every student who wanted them.
Now, as a professor at Indiana University, I teach freshman English in classes of 150 students each, and I cannot begin to help students acquire the reading and writing skills that I and my classmates learned at Purdue. I do have the option of teaching English in the Indiana University Honors Program, but I prefer to work with regular undergraduates, pushing the Sisyphean rock up the steep hill.
Purdue and Indiana are representative of similar institutions across the country. If quality undergraduate education could once occur at public universities, why can it not return, particularly during the greatest era of prosperity in the nation’s history?
Murray Sperber is a professor of English at Indiana University at Bloomington. He has published four books on college life and sports. This article is adapted from his new book, Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education (Henry Holt).
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