Higher Ed.'s societal obligations in a globalizing economy

The American Association and Colleges and Universities (AACU) just released a survey of employers that looks at the characteristics employers want to see in the graduates they hire, and a related paper from the AACU Board called The Quality Imperative.   The survey (which does not in any way contradict others that I have seen previously) reports that only one in four employers feel that higher education is doing a good job in preparing students for success in the global economy.  Not surprisingly, employers would like to have graduates who have both in-depth and broad range knowledge and skills   Highest on their wish-lists for learning outcomes are several intellectual skills, e.g. critical thinking, that, as emphasized by Derek Bok in Our Underachieving Colleges, we don’t teach very well.  The learning outcomes that 70% or more of the employers felt should get increased emphasis from higher ed are:

The ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing            (89%)

Critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills                            (81%)

The ability to apply knowledge and skills to real-world settings through

 internships or other hands-on experiences                                  (79%)

The ability to analyze and solve complex problems                         (75%)

The ability to connect choices and actions to ethical decisions    ( 75%)      

Teamwork skills and the ability to collaborate with others in diverse group settings     (71%)

The ability to innovate and be creative                           (70%)

Concepts and new developments in science and technology             ( 70%)

The Quality Imperative jumps off from this survey and the recent national emphasis on access, to make the very pertinent opening point:

The current focus on college-going, while important, short-circuits the core issue of educational quality. Yet both employers and educators know that the quality shortfall is just as urgent as the attain­ment shortfall.

What needs to happen in education can be described in a nutshell as:

To prosper in today’s knowledge economy, in sum, all Americans will need a contemporary blend of liberal and applied learning.

To describe what this might mean, the AACU paper makes a number of recommendations of needed change, focusing on a very useful set of “Essential learning outcomes” to help meet the challenges.  In addition they make a recommendation that I consider to be of paramount importance:

Ensure that all fields of study help students achieve demonstrable competence in the essential learning outcomes, including the ability to apply their learning to new settings and unscripted problems.

In other word, we actually need to measure what we are doing, so that we – and everyone else - can see if we are being successful in doing what we say we are doing.   It will be interesting to see what the AACU does, other than publish these two pieces, to encourage its members to step up to the plate on these vital issues.

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Reading these two reports made me think of a lovely article by Michael Hiltzik that appeared in the business section of the Dec. 31, 2009 LA Times.

Hiltzik’s article was occasioned by the centenary of the birth of Peter Drucker, one of the most interesting business thinkers of recent times. Drucker considered the role of the corporation in society, not just as a creator of wealth, but as a partner in achieving the goals of society.  Quoting Hlitzik, quoting Drucker:

The business enterprise is a creature of a society and an economy, and society or economy can put any business out of existence overnight… The enterprise exists on sufferance and exists only as long as the society and the economy believe that it does a necessary, useful, and productive job.

And quoting Hiltzik again

He also warned that an enterprise that fails to “think through its impacts and its responsibilities” exposes itself to justified attack from social forces…. He held that the purpose of a business is to serve the customer by providing a good or service useful in both personal and social terms.

Thus, a corporation that focuses solely on the chase of profits, to the exclusion of satisfying its social role, will not over time be successful.  And, in doing so, it may stimulate reactive political measures that ultimately will be good neither for the corporation, nor for society.  Sound like what is happening today?

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So what possible rational relationship could exist between these two items? Possibly none, but let me give it a shot.

Essentially everyone in higher education would say – and brag- that we provide a social good.  We are, however, also quite fond of telling society that we know what it needs better than it does –society will think short term, we think long term, ergo, etc.  And we then say that we already are doing what needs to be done quite effectively, and that everyone should just trust us.  

The report described above actually shows an area in which society – or at least employers – wants the same thing as the academy. Eighty one percent of employers want us to do more to teach critical thinking and analytic reasoning skills.  By comparison, according to Bok:” With all the controversy over the college curriculum, it is impressive to find faculty members agreeing almost unanimously that teaching students to think critically is the principal aim of undergraduate education.”   However, even with this pretty complete overlap of goals, it turns out, according to the results quoted by Bok, that we actually do a terrible job in teaching these critical skills. Bok argues that our failure results from our unwillingness to acknowledge and face the changes in our learning approaches that would be required in order to improve critical thinking amongst our students.  So our support of this societal goal actually is rhetorical rather than real.

If one goes down the lists of learning outcomes given by the AACU, one finds numerous areas where many would argue that “we already do that, and well.”  In general, however, there is little actual data to show how well we achieve the desired learning outcomes. Where data exists, more often than not they seriously call into question the effectiveness of our approaches.

I imagine that if Drucker were to look at this situation, he would warn us that unless we can demonstrate that we are in fact doing things that society needs as we move into globalization, we risk suffering some of those political and financial outcomes that he had envisaged only for aberrant corporations.  So we should pay very close attention to the AACU's call for "demonstrable competence" in areas that will be essential for the future health of our society.

Comments

[David Phipps]

Just came across your post now and it still resonates with an emerging trend towards engaged scholarship and research. In Canada we are seeing research programs embracing not only partnerships with industry (a common form of engagement through technology transfer) but with community organizations, international NGOs and Aboriginal communities. Some universities, like those in the ResearchImpact network (www.researchimpact.ca) are actively investing in institutional support services to broker relationships between researchers, grad students and non-academic research stakeholders. Students are taught clear language writing and design principles ("The ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing ") and we engage students on community-based research projects ("The ability to apply knowledge and skills to real-world settings through internships"). All of this is partnered with local United Way organizations ensuring that the research partnerships supported are matching unmet societal, cultural and environmental needs.

What we are learning is that this active support, that we call knowledge mobilization, is a process that leads to social innovation (the outcome). We are re-imagining the role of the university and of a university education in our local and global communities.

Lloyd responds: Thanks, David for your very informative input on some very forward-looking programs in Canada. Thanks, also, for introducing me to ResearchImpact.

[Janipher]

Good communication skill,personality ,and deep knowledge of the subjects have got success.So I agree with you.

[Campusentrepreneurship.wordpress.com]

Thanks for the great post. I will be sure to share and also will show some of those statistics to my students. I am biased as I teach and research entrepreneurship, but I believe that entrepreneurship courses give students a chance to work on all of those learning outcomes. Working in teams, the research, writing, and presenting of a business plan presents students the opportunity to put all those skills to the test. Thanks again for the post.

[Christine Geith]

Thanks for your thought-provoking post. You make the case that the "race to the top" should be a "race to demonstratable competence" in the critical outcomes of the AACU.

Where ARE higher education institutions, or others, doing an outstanding job developing and measuring these
competencies? Where are the models?

Lloyd responds: Thanks Christine for your good comment. I do hope to do a post in the near future on some positive examples in looking at outcomes. Of course, the AACU outcome suggestions are so new that no one has looked at them yet. Bologna process is looking at many outcome competencies, and ways to measure them.