Last summer a National Governors Association survey of high-school students yielded some surprising results: More than a third of the students surveyed said that high school had been “easy,” and two-thirds said that they would work harder if they felt more challenged in their classes.
That information comes as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has focused national attention on the idea of “early college,” by which high-school students take college courses at postsecondary institutions to improve their educational experience. Already more than 40 early colleges have opened in about 20 states, and the Gates Foundation plans to build some 130 new early colleges, serving 65,000 students, by the end of the decade.
The foundation’s commitment to significantly expand the reach of early colleges has raised some fundamental questions among policy makers and the public. What should be the role of early colleges in American higher education? What lessons can be drawn from early colleges thus far?
The concept of early college is relatively straightforward. The typical entrant is 16 years old and has completed 10th grade. The goals are to engage students in rigorous college-level work at an age when they are open to liberal-arts learning, to move students into upper-division college courses with a high degree of mastery, and to respond to the frustrations many students experience by not being adequately engaged in their last two years of high school.
The notion is not new but has been reinvigorated. For years students have entered college before the age of 18, and in 1964 Simon’s Rock College of Bard, where I now serve as provost, became the nation’s first residential college devoted solely to the younger scholar. One of the more compelling cases for early college that has attracted the Gates Foundation — and others — is its apparent adaptability. Besides Simon’s Rock, the other early college for which considerable data are available is Bard High School Early College. Simon’s Rock is a residential, private, selective liberal-arts institution in the rural Berkshire hills of Massachusetts. Bard High School is a nonresidential, public, diverse institution in Manhattan. What the institutions have in common is an educational philosophy that appears to help resolve some persistent issues in higher education. Early colleges can be a strong alternative because they are employing many of the approaches to liberal-arts education that have proved to be most effective.
First, early colleges are often active and rigorous learning communities. For example, some early colleges offer not only introductory courses in specific disciplines but also a demanding core curriculum of seminar classes through the first and second year. All faculty members in the college teach that core curriculum on a rotating basis. Every student reads the classic works of, say, Plato, Charles Darwin, and Jane Austen, but they may be taught these works by a philosopher, a scholar of English literature, or a chemist. The result is a common grounding in critical thinking through the lenses of different disciplines and teaching styles. The rigorous curriculum also transmits a message of high expectations for academic engagement, and students usually respond by putting learning at the center of their college experience.
Second, early colleges demand active advising from faculty members. First-year students are often required to meet with their advisers every week, and that counseling is part of a larger web of support. For example, after I accepted the provost position at Simon’s Rock, I learned that, like all faculty members on the campus, regardless of our administrative roles, I would also have advisees. When one of my first-year advisees missed an appointment with me this fall, I contacted the dean for new students, who set in motion the campus equivalent of an APB on my student. By the time I saw the student three hours later, he had received a note in his mailbox, a message from his roommate, and a reminder from a faculty member that he needed to meet with me. Such a response is not perceived or meant as punishment, but is designed to keep students from falling away from the core college experience.
Third, students enter early colleges at an ideal time, emotionally and intellectually, for liberal-arts learning. When Elizabeth Blodgett Hall envisioned Simon’s Rock College as the first institution dedicated solely to early college, she argued that the ideal time for introducing students to the liberal arts was between the ages of 15 and 20, during the last two years of high school and first two years of college. That is the time when able students have already mastered the basics of pre-college education and are intellectually curious, but have not yet focused on college as a means to a profession.
If retention rates, achievement in the professions, and entrance to graduate school are any measure, Hall’s vision for liberal-arts learning has been successful at the institution she founded. Students succeed in a curriculum that is as demanding as that of any traditional college because they are intellectually curious and not distracted by career plans, and because they receive the necessary support.
Fourth, early colleges challenge us to integrate students’ experiences both inside and outside the classroom. When I began work at Simon’s Rock, a faculty member told me to remember that “our students show their intellectual maturity in class and their emotional immaturity out of class” — a statement that applies to traditional institutions as well as early colleges. The difference is that, with younger students, early colleges do not have the luxury of neglecting the extracurricular experience, lest students fall away from the college altogether.
Thus the effective early-college environment provides avenues for both academic and personal challenges, and thrives on the use of experiential learning, course activities that use the physical environment, and emotional as well as intellectual engagement with the campus. Students at early colleges frequently present thesis proposals that involve working with community organizations. They are actively engaged in campus governance and reinvent campus co-curricular organizations on a yearly basis.
Finally, faculty members at an early college must have academic credentials equal to those found at any traditional institution and also manage additional responsibilities. The expectations for subject and interdisciplinary knowledge are similar to those at other rigorous liberal-arts institutions, yet the demand on faculty members’ time for personalized instruction and advising is significantly greater. The ideal faculty member at an early college is a model of R. Eugene Rice’s vision in Making a Place for the New American Scholar (American Association for Higher Education, 1996) of the “complete scholar": accomplished in the discipline yet with the ability to inquire across disciplines, armed with a desire to connect the scholarship of discovery to the teaching and learning of the classroom. Rice describes such a faculty member as having “a multidimensional sense of the professional self.”
None of the approaches that I’ve described are limited to early colleges, but because of the needs of their students, early colleges are more likely to employ many of these best practices for undergraduate education. And the results, although still limited in number, are encouraging. National studies show that nearly one-third of students drop out between the first and second year of college, and that only half of students who enter college ever complete a bachelor’s, associate, or certificate program within six years. The first-to-second-year retention rate at Simon’s Rock and at Bard High School Early College in New York City is above 85 percent. That relative success in student persistence occurs in highly diverse and vulnerable student populations, which is why the Gates Foundation sees early college as capable of dealing with the patterns of attrition among underrepresented groups.
Is early college a panacea? Of course not. Students who are not able and motivated will not succeed in the demanding academic environment of early college, despite continuous support. The core curriculum and seminar requirements raise the usual debate — evolving, but still unresolved — about multiculturalism versus a “great books” approach to liberal-arts education. The personal attention to students through small classes and active advising is effective but, without further refinement, is also costly and places unusual burdens on faculty members to engage in their students’ lives, sometimes at the expense of other work. Supporting students’ emotional as well as intellectual growth, particularly at a younger age, raises questions about in loco parentis, with its attendant baggage of bright-line rules and lack of student autonomy.
As early colleges begin to proliferate, there is a reasonable fear that structure, rigor, or the focus of the liberal-arts curriculum may be lost as the hallmark of early-college education. Nonetheless early colleges have managed to put into action many concepts that have proved to make higher education most effective for student learning. They also intervene in secondary learning at a time and in a manner that seems to deal with some of the issues of student success.
We in higher education should put the experience of such institutions into context, learn from both the successes and failures, and support the increasing number of students who will avail themselves of this growing educational opportunity. The early-college concept may not be a silver bullet, but it appears to be a strong force in the arsenal of effective approaches to higher education.
Mary B. Marcy is provost and vice president of Simon’s Rock College of Bard, in Great Barrington, Mass.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 23, Page B16
