Higher education in the United States has gone through many transformative changes over the centuries, but the pace of innovation is accelerating rapidly. The core question is how to determine whether these new innovations are well designed to prepare graduates for success in work, civic participation, and their own lives. Which new programs or institutions successfully intertwine high-quality learning and inclusiveness? And which ones only reinforce higher education’s longtime habit of providing an empowering liberal education to the fortunate while steering less-advantaged students toward narrower training, keyed to immediately available jobs but stripped of the higher-order learning needed for both economic mobility and further education?
The good news is that educators, in dialogue with employers and civic leaders, have created contemporary frameworks for quality in postsecondary learning. The new frameworks provide guidelines — design principles, in effect — that people can use to evaluate the worth of new programs or to assist the improvement of long-established educational institutions and departments.
Colleges are increasingly offering three-year B.A.s and other accelerated programs in response to a growing market of money-conscious go-getters and career changers.
These frameworks help us ask not just whether an innovative design is more affordable, but also whether it can provide high-quality learning for all students, including or even especially those who have been historically underserved by higher education.
These new frameworks include the Lumina Foundation’s Degree Qualifications Profile, the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ LEAP initiative (both of which I helped shape), and the Competency-Based Education Network’s Quality Framework for Competency-Based Education Programs. Each provides guidelines for the entire degree and can be supplemented by comparable guidelines for specific areas of study, such as history, engineering and technology, and business.
Taken together, these new frameworks usefully cut through the self-defeating debate over whether students need a broad liberal-arts education or a career-related education. They combine the big-picture knowledge and thinking that characterize the liberal arts and sciences with the applied learning and hands-on experience that are central to career learning.
Here are the central elements of these quality-learning frameworks:
Inclusive excellence. Recognition that all students, not just some, need and deserve the most empowering forms of learning. A commitment to prepare graduates to thrive and contribute in diverse environments, in college, at work, and in the wider society.
Learning outcomes. Descriptors of the aims and intended learning outcomes at both two-year and four-year levels. These include broad and integrative knowledge — of science, society, cultures, and histories; deep and cross-disciplinary learning in a specialization; strong intellectual and practical skills, such as analytical inquiry, written and oral communication, and engaging diverse perspectives; faculty-guided experiences in integrating and applying knowledge to complex problems; faculty-guided experiences in ethical reasoning and civic problem-solving, in the curriculum and in diverse community settings.
Purposeful program design. Both within and (for transfer) across institutions, programs that are aligned with the intended learning outcomes, and rich in assignments and projects that build the needed knowledge, skills, judgment, and practical experience. A path to graduation that is clearly designed and well advised so that students know what classes they need either to finish the degree on time or to transfer. Supplementary programs that provide both academic assistance and culturally relevant support that takes students’ own circumstances into account.
Learning by doing. Pedagogies and practices that both challenge and teach students how to grapple with complex questions and open-ended problems. Multiple opportunities for students to equitably participate in such high-impact practices as first-year inquiry seminars, undergraduate research, internships, service learning, collaborative projects, e-portfolios, and final projects.
Meaningful assessments. Good evidence based on students’ own work, evaluated using rubrics that describe the component elements and proficiency levels for such fundamentals as writing, quantitative reasoning, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and intercultural learning. Disaggregation of data to discern whether different groups of students (e.g., low-income; first-generation; adults) are persisting and equitably achieving the intended learning outcomes.
Transparency. New forms of transcripting that go beyond grades, course titles, and credit hours. E-portfolios and digital transcripts that showcase students’ distinctive accomplishments, including curricular, co-curricular, and — for the millions of students who combine study with employment — work-related.
Perhaps most important, a high-quality educational experience should provide continuing opportunities for students to work closely and constructively with highly qualified, knowledgeable, well-compensated faculty members in both general and specialized studies. One of the most dangerous ideas that has taken root in this era of disinvestment in higher education is that we can hand it over to digital programs, especially those profit-driven vendor programs in which the main activities are reading a text (or watching a video) and completing “find the right answer” quizzes on the material. Instead of learning with faculty members, those students get coaches — generalists who provide support but no content expertise.
In order to be ready for a complex world, college students need to work on complex, challenging, and high-effort problems and assignments. Faculty members have devoted their lives to the exploration of such problems. If an innovative program provides limited or no access to qualified instructors, then it’s one from which we should encourage students to stay away.
Carol Geary Schneider is a fellow with Lumina Foundation and president emerita of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
