Welcome to Teaching, a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week, Beckie shares highlights from a presentation on high-impact practices, provides a reading list, and asks you what upcoming conferences should be on our radar.
More Than a Diploma
Colleges across the country have identified student success as a priority, but they often define it too narrowly. That observation from George Kuh, founding director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, kicked off the opening session of the inaugural National Student Success Conference in Tampa, Fla., last week.
Yes, it’s important that students “finish what they start,” Kuh said, using the lingo of the moment. But graduating isn’t enough: Students should be different when they complete college than they were at the outset.
That comment positioned Kuh on one side of a debate over the value of college that’s intensified with the recent publication of The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. The book, by Bryan Caplan, a George Mason University economist, argues that the chief benefit of an education is the signal it sends to employers, not the skills and knowledge gained. By that logic, what happens during college matters little, so long as students emerge with a credential.
Employer surveys have long revealed dissatisfaction with college graduates, Kuh acknowledged. But their criticism, he said, is not of colleges’ academic programs per se. Students, in other words, do acquire skills and knowledge. The problem, as Kuh sees it: “We have not yet been able, at scale, to get students to demonstrate they can actually do something with that information.”
Enter “high-impact practices,” like service learning, internships, and learning communities, whose benefits Kuh detailed in a 2008 report. Now that the practices have been popularized, colleges may be tempted to simply stick the “high-impact” label on things they were doing anyway, Kuh said. But continuing research has revealed more about what it really takes to make the practices effective.
Take undergraduate research. There’s a difference, Kuh said, between having students work with a professor from the beginning of a project and having them collect some data for a pre-existing research team. “Students who participate in that entire inquiry cycle,” he said, “benefit a lot more.”
How does your college define student success? How do you help students “demonstrate what they can actually do”? Share your thoughts with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and they may be featured in a future newsletter.
