Our educational institutions reflect the life styles and learning patterns of the times in which they were designed. One of the urgent reasons for finding new forms for American higher education is that the 19th century model still in use mirrors a society that no longer exists.
Consider the social conditions that influenced the university 70 or 80 years ago. At that time, higher education was expected to serve a small fraction of middle- and upper-class men — and very few women — who monopolized the learned professions, the upper reaches of government, and the emerging enterprises of industry and business.
The pool of potential students was small, and the pool of persons qualified to teach them was even smaller. As a badge of social status, a college degree possessed a scarcity value which would have been severely diminished had it become more widely available.
This was a society in which long-distance travel remained a venture not to be undertaken lightly. When the small-town lad from upstate New York went off to Columbia or to Yale, he was expected to stay put, except for a rigid holiday schedule when he dutifully traveled home.
Also, most of today’s colleges were founded in a period when the prime teaching device still was the human voice — not even aided by a public-address system, let alone tape recorders, films, television, or cassettes.
There were, of course, books — expensively printed and bound, and severely limited in supply. But all this was not so serious, because the knowledge thought to be necessary for an “educated man” was limited and fixed — or at least increasing at a slow and dignified rate.
Finally, it was an era which took the phrase in loco parentis with deadly seriousness, because young teen-aged students were away from home and confined for long periods. Teachers devoted countless hours to the moral supervision of their charges, especially in the hundreds of denominational colleges where moral indoctrination took first place and scholarship a feeble second.
Given all these circumstances, is it any surprise that the 19th century reflected a mentality both of scarcity and of siege? Knowledge — in the form of a curriculum, a faculty, and a library — had to be painstakingly accumulated, hoarded behind massive brick walls, and sparingly parceled out to a chosen few admitted for a carefully prescribed exposure period.
While the student was undergoing this four-year ritual, his behavior day and night was carefully scrutinized and regulated, lest he bring ruin to himself and disgrace upon the fragile enterprise of higher education.
Inevitably, this “fortress” approach proved enormously expensive and, in today’s context at least, equally wasteful. In an insular and sometimes secretive way, schools competed for faculty and students, duplicated library holdings, and built up increasingly complex physical plants with classroom and laboratory facilities not only for educating their students, but for housing them, feeding them, doctoring them, and providing them with amusement, religious services, recreation, and — at least since 1910 — parking space for their automobiles.
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Each campus was to be somewhat insulated and totally self-contained. It was to make available through its faculty, its library, its housing arrangements, and its moral teachings, all of the elements needed to “produce the educated man.” Then the campus was viewed as an island, an intellectual and moral oasis, a place which both probed the student and protected him from the world outside.
All this would be merely an exercise in rather curdled nostalgia were it not for the fact that so much of what took shape in that earlier time still survives today. This model of the self-contained campus — well-rooted in the circumstance of the time — has been locked into an iron vise of custom and still forms our image of “the way things ought to be.” And while our world has been transformed around us, we still cling to a mental picture of higher education that would have been entirely familiar to our great-great-grandparents. We are, in short, in one of those periods of lag, in which an institution evolves more slowly than the society it serves.
Millions of Americans are now looking for new educational approaches that reflect the changing realities of our time.
The external degree is one approach that recognizes that changes in communication have introduced new teaching and learning not bound by the confines of a single campus.
- It is an approach that takes fuller advantage of our increased mobility and views the campus as a base of operation, not a place of confinement.
- The external approach recognizes the validity of educational experiences outside the traditional campus setting.
- It is an approach that enables adults in mid-career to begin or resume their college education, to pursue new scholarly or cultural interests, or to develop the skills that our knowledge-oriented society requires for advancement.
- And, finally, the external degree makes a serious effort to relate the cost to actual academic services rendered, not to a myriad of extraneous and unwanted functions.
For more and more individuals in search of an education, the trappings of college life represent an irrelevance or a distraction. Our multi-million-dollar physical plant may have served a useful function when a culturally insecure young nation needed tangible reassurance that the scholarly pursuits were actually going on. But for this generation, the process, not the setting, is the thing.
From what I’ve said, you may have concluded that I believe that the external degree approach will completely replace the conventional four-year campus-based form of college education.
That is highly unlikely in the near future.
There will continue to be the majority of our students who, because of their interests and inclinations, prefer — and indeed must have — the experience of the traditional campus, with all its real virtues and all its fringe benefits.
The point is simply that for increasing numbers of college-age young people — as well as for countless thousands of adults — the external-degree approach offers the alternative they have been seeking, and that, rather than proliferate endlessly the campus model, we should create flexible alternatives to match the need.
However, the campus, in some form, is absolutely essential — both real and imagined — to provide a center for scholarly research and study that is still, and must continue to be, a central mission of any great university.
A general concern that advocates of external degree programs must confront squarely is the fear that such efforts threaten the quality of higher education. Although, perhaps, rooted in the days when the field was dominated by fly-by-night operations, fraudulent diploma mills, and the You-Can-Get-Rich-in-Television-Repair syndrome, the fear is a real one, and needs to be responded to seriously. To do so, we must think most carefully about what we mean by quality in education, and how it is to be measured.
First of all, quality does not depend on the number of credit hours that appear on a student’s transcript. It does not depend upon the number of years he has been physically present on campus, nor on the regularity of lectures he has sat through. It is not guaranteed by forcing all students to jump through an identical and well-worn set of hoops. And it is certainly not guaranteed by pouring millions of dollars into bigger and better buildings.
It seems to me that the “quality” of an individuals’ education depends upon four fundamental conditions:
- A student with a motivation to learn;
- Teachers to channel that motivation toward clear educational objectives;
- The availability of resources adequate to achieve those objectives; and
- Rigorous evaluations of both the students and the institution to determine how well those objectives are being achieved.
Since I believe that each of these criteria can be met outside the traditional four-year residential framework of higher education, I cannot accept the argument that external degree programs are a menace to the quality of the educational enterprise.
Indeed, I would contend that in certain very significant respect, such innovative approaches highlight the true process of education, remove some deceptive crutches, and thus actually enhance the quality of education.
Our thinking about higher education here in America is undergoing some fundamental changes. The old model of a scattered collection of isolated enclaves, each jealously hoarding “its” resources and minutely regulating “its” students, who must remain in confinement for a four-year term, is giving way to a far more complex and dynamic image — a network of learning, resembling perhaps the human nervous system itself: intricate, continually pulsating, and totally interconnected.
The individual campus is coming to seem less a fortress surrounded by its moat, and more of a supermarket of ideas, a library with easy access, or a base of operation to coordinate learning, not control it.
At the time of this writing, Ernest L. Boyer was chancellor of the State University of New York. He later became president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He died in 1995.
