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.
********
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?
*******
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.