The movement to expand the number of people enrolling in and graduating from college—known as the completion agenda—often raises concerns from faculty members who say the rush to move more students through college will lead to the lowering of academic standards.
That argument has played a role in recent controversies in Colorado, New York, and Texas, where administrators have pushed through curricular changes over the objections of many faculty members. Those making the changes often cite the need to streamline course offerings, ease student transfers, and improve academic success.
Alamo Colleges, a five-campus district in Texas, is among the institutions where recent curricular changes have sparked controversies. Administrators there are replacing one of two core humanities courses with a course on leadership that is based in part on a self-help book by Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People.
The new leadership course is an augmented version of a one-credit, student-success course that helps students set goals and understand their learning styles, said Jo-Carol Fabianke, the district’s vice chancellor for academic success.
“This is just taking it to a different level and making it a college-level course,” she said. “Certainly, we want more students to graduate.”
That change and others were approved this month by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board despite the objections of faculty members and administrators at Alamo’s five community colleges. Texas’ 42-credit general-education standards still require students to take courses across nine categories, including American history, communications, and the visual and performing arts.
Alamo Colleges wanted to add the leadership course and didn’t have many options about what it could remove, Ms. Fabianke said. “If you’re going to replace either speech or a second humanities course,” she said, “it’s more logical to replace the second humanities.”
But faculty members fear that the course based on Mr. Covey’s book will crowd out courses in which students might also read Plato or Immanuel Kant.
Getting through Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is tough even for talented students, said Charles C. Hinkley, a professor of philosophy at Northwest Vista College, which is part of Alamo Colleges. They will find Mr. Covey’s book to be far less rigorous, he said.
Mr. Covey’s book explores ideas like finding ways to reach agreement that confer mutual benefit, or what he refers to as a “win-win.” It’s a facile notion, Mr. Hinkley said. After all, what do you do when resources are limited?
“Part of what’s great about the core curriculum is that it’s challenging to you as a person,” he said. “Seven Habits is a bunch of platitudes.”
‘Completion at Any Cost’
The curricular changes in Colorado and New York are technocratic, in comparison to those at Alamo. The changes in those states were intended to smooth the transfer of credits between institutions but also ran into faculty objections.
At the City University of New York, faculty members have protested a new core curriculum called Pathways, voted no confidence in it, and sued unsuccessfully to stop it. Under the new core, students take 36 to 42 courses that are organized around themes instead of a more prescribed set of 39 to 63 courses.
CUNY administrators said the change was needed to fix an intolerably opaque system of transfers that stymied students and needlessly increased their costs—and that faculty members had failed to fix on their own.
Administrators have also touted the support of their own curricular experts, some of whom praise Pathways as an approach that puts “learning outcomes and academic rigor at its core” and that would lead to “better educational outcomes produced in a more efficient way.”
Faculty members don’t fault the goals. “We support college completion,” Barbara Bowen, a professor of English at CUNY’s Queens College, told The Chronicle in an interview last year. “What we don’t support is reducing the quality of education.”
Ms. Bowen, who is also president of the Professional Staff Congress, the union that represents the CUNY faculty, added that Pathways reflects what she sees as a larger shift in higher-education policy, from stressing access to emphasizing completion.
“On the face of it, that’s a laudable goal, to focus on completion,” she said, “but not completion at any cost.”
Courses and Credits
At Fort Lewis College, a public liberal-arts institution in Durango, Colo., administrators courted ire when they decided, over the recommendations of a faculty task force, to limit core courses to three credits instead of a system that allows some to be set at three and others at four. The change was needed to help students transfer more easily, administrators said.
Faculty members are split on the idea, said Charles R. Riggs, an associate professor of anthropology and president of the Faculty Senate. Many are sensitive to the fact that students coming from other institutions in the state arrive having taken a three-credit course that, at Fort Lewis, would count for four credits.
Mr. Riggs said his department resolves the discrepancy by recognizing the course, not its number of credits. That practice raises an uncomfortable question, he said: “When you think about that, then why do we have four credits?”
Problems can present themselves when the opposite process occurs, too, he said. When Fort Lewis students transfer to other colleges, the four-credit courses on their transcripts can limit their options at their new institution.
“The state is really, really serious about getting students done in 120 credits,” he said. If a student is majoring in a discipline, like engineering, that requires a high number of credits, he or she may quickly exceed the maximum set by the state. “That’s a big problem,” Mr. Riggs said.
Other faculty members at Fort Lewis say the transfer issue is less dire than supporters of the change suggest. Valuable learning experiences will be lost because of the curricular change, said Janine M. Fitzgerald, a professor of sociology.
Her department’s core courses are for four credits each. The three-credit versions will probably have fewer discussions, exercises in which students bring their personal and family backgrounds into their work, and fewer opportunities for service-learning projects.
“Part of the reason why this is feeling so upsetting is that we’ve had this program for a long time,” she said. “We’re taking out stuff that we know works.”
And, she argued, reducing the number of credits from four to three will have the opposite of the intended effect: It will slow students’ progress because they will have to take more courses. “It reduces the rigor, and it’s harder for students,” Ms. Fitzgerald said.
Defining Academic Quality
Some would argue that completion need not be in opposition to quality. The Lumina Foundation, which is closely associated with the drive to increase levels of college attainment, is also known for efforts like the Degree Qualifications Profile, which stakes out what students should know and be able to do if they earn different levels of degrees.
The debates unfolding at Alamo, CUNY, and Fort Lewis, and on other campuses, point to a larger dynamic and set of priorities, said Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, which advocates for quality in undergraduate liberal education. Completion is easier to measure and part of a well-funded and highly visible agenda, one backed by President Obama. Academic quality is, she said, “a cottage industry.”
“It seems to me that the completion engine has hurtled down the track with a lot of states putting in financial rewards and penalties for speeding up completion and cracking down on excess credits,” Ms. Schneider said. “Then there’s the quality engine, still struggling to get out of the shed.”
