By Jon Meacham
Reports on what supposedly educated Americans know—and more
sensationally, don’t know—come along fairly regularly, each more
depressing than the last.
A survey of recent college graduates commissioned by the American
Council of Trustees and Alumni and conducted by GfK Roper last year
found that barely half knew that the U.S. Constitution establishes the
separation of powers. Forty-three percent failed to identify
John Roberts as Chief Justice; 62% didn’t know the correct length of congressional terms of office.
Higher
education has never been more expensive—or seemingly less demanding. According to the 2011 book
Academically Adrift,
by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, full-time students in 1961 devoted 40
hours per week
to schoolwork and studying; by 2003 that had declined to
27 hours. And even those hours may not be all that effective: the book
also notes that 36% of college graduates had not shown any significant
cognitive gains over four years. According to data gathered by the
Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media’s
Marketplace,
half of employers say they have trouble finding qualified recent
college graduates to hire. Everybody has an opinion about what matters
most. While Bill Gates worries about the dearth of engineering and
science graduates, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences frets about
the fate of the humanities.
Rising tuition costs, an underprepared workforce, an inhospitable
climate for the humanities: each of these issues, among others, shapes
arguments over higher education. True, polls suggest that most students
are happy with their college experiences (if not their debt loads),
elite institutions are thriving, U.S. research universities are the envy
of the world, and a college degree remains the nation’s central
cultural and economic credential. Yet it’s also undeniable that
hand-wringing about higher education is so common that it almost forms
an academic discipline unto itself or should at least count as a varsity
sport.
And so wring the hands of many parents, employers, academics and
alumni in the fall of 2013 as the undergraduate class of 2017 begins its
freshman year—and as parents of the class of 2025 contemplate the costs
and benefits of college down the road. “Higher education is facing a
real crisis of effectiveness,” says Michael Poliakoff, vice president of
policy at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a group that
supports traditional core curriculums and postgraduate assessment tests.
At the TIME Summit on Higher Education on Sept. 20, Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan called for more accountability in higher education
through the development of a university ratings system—one that could
include the earning power of an institution’s graduates as a factor.
At a time when virtually every state is implementing new Common Core
standards to increase the amount of general knowledge in math and
English that a typical public-school student must master in K-12, there
is renewed interest in the perennial collegiate argument over what’s
called either general education or, more colloquially, core curriculum.
At issue is whether there are certain books one should read and certain
facts one should know to be considered a truly educated person—or at
least a truly educated college graduate.
At the heart of the debate between traditionalists (who love a core)
and many academics (who prefer to teach more specialized courses and
allow students more freedom to set their own curriculums) is a tension
between two different questions about the purposes of college. There are
those who insist that the key outcome lies in the answer to “What
should every college graduate know?”—perhaps minimizing the chances that
future surveys will show that poor John Roberts is less recognizable
than Lady Gaga. Others ask, What should every college graduate know how to do?
Those three additional words contain multitudes. The prevailing
contemporary vision, even in the liberal arts, emphasizes action: active
thought, active expression, active preparation for lifelong learning.
Engaging with a text or question, marshaling data and arguments and
expressing oneself takes precedence over the acquisition of general
knowledge.
A caveat: the debate we are discussing here is focused mainly on
selective schools, public and private, where there seems to be a
persistent unease among key constituencies—parents, trustees, alumni and
most of all employers—about undergraduate curriculums. The last time
these questions were in circulation was in the 1980s, the years in which
Education Secretary Bill Bennett pushed for renewed emphasis on the
humanities and Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago published The Closing of the American Mind,
a best seller that argued, among other things, that the great books
were being wrongly marginalized if not totally neglected by the modern
university.
That debate reflected larger arguments about the country’s trend
toward the right under Ronald Reagan. What’s driving the core-standards
conversation now is the ambition to succeed in a global economy and the
anxiety that American students are failing to do so. How does the
country relieve those fears and produce a generation of graduates who
will create wealth and jobs? It’s a question that’s fueling the Obama
Administration’s push for a ratings system, and it’s a question that
isn’t going away.
The Roots of the Core
From the founding of Harvard College in 1636 until the Civil War,
American university education was mostly about sending pious and
hopefully well-read gentlemen forth into the world. As Louis Menand, a
Harvard English professor and literary critic, has written, what
Americans think of as the university is of relatively recent vintage. In
1862 the Morrill Act created land-grant universities, broadening
opportunities for those for whom college had been a virtual
impossibility. Menand and other historians of collegiate curriculums
note that at Harvard in 1869, Charles William Eliot became president and
created a culture in which the bachelor’s degree became the key
credential for ongoing professional education—a culture that came to
shape the rest of the American academy. The 19th century also saw the
rise of the great European research university; the German model of
scholar-teachers who educated undergraduates while pursuing their own
research interests moved across the Atlantic.
The notion that a student should graduate with a broad base of
knowledge is, in Menand’s words, “the most modern part of the modern
university.” It was only after World War I, in 1919, that Columbia
College undertook a general-education course, called Contemporary
Civilization. By reading classic texts—from Plato’s Republic to The Prince
to the Declaration of Independence, with the Bible and Edmund Burke
thrown in for good measure—and discussing them in the context of
enduring issues in human society, every student was compelled to engage
with ideas that formed the mainstream of the American mind. The impetus
for the move reflected a larger social and cultural concern with
assimilating the children of immigrants into American culture. Robert
Maynard Hutchins adopted a similar approach at the University of
Chicago. The courses were not about rote memorization; they were (and
are) centered on reading followed by discussion. They were (and are)
required of all students, something that set Columbia and Chicago apart
from many other colleges—and still does.
World War II
helped bring about the Harvard Report
of 1945, an effort by America’s
oldest college to provide a common cultural basis not only for its elite
students but also for the rising middle class. Students were expected
to read, for example, the great books. As the decades went by, however,
the assumption that there was a given body of knowledge or a given set
of authors that had to be learned or read came under cultural and
academic attack. Who was to say what was great? Why not let teachers
decide what to teach and students decide what to study?
There are many cultural reasons for opposing the core. For instance,
faculties generally dislike being told what to do. (Doesn’t everyone?)
The most intelligent argument against a core? That the freedom to choose
one’s academic path will stoke one’s curiosity and fuel
experimentation. At places like Vanderbilt University (where I am a
visiting faculty member) the curriculum alters the Columbia approach in
two ways. First, students choose specific courses that the university
believes provide what chancellor Nicholas Zeppos calls “both
foundational knowledge and critical thinking. In other words, we
encourage more student growth and risk taking in electing how one builds
that foundation.” Rather than mandate a specific set of
general-education courses, Vanderbilt asks undergraduates to meet
distribution requirements, choosing classes in broadly defined fields
including humanities and the creative arts, the history and culture of
America, and international cultures. “So our approach,” says Zeppos,
“allows for more exploration and risk taking.”
Knowledge itself changes, and not only in science and technology,
where change is so rapid and self-evident. Appomattox will always have
happened in April 1865, but one’s understanding of the causes, course
and effects of the Civil War can shift. The prevailing academic culture
puts more emphasis on developing a student’s ability to confront
questions of interpretation by asking them more about why something
occurred than when. But some raise reasonable concerns about this
approach. “At prestigious schools, the majority of students come from
strong backgrounds and will do well even without the core, but that is
not the reality for all students,” says Poliakoff. “The core curriculum
makes sure that all students develop the skills they need to be
successful.”
So what to do?
A Question of Assessment
Page A1 of the Wall Street Journal often brings news that
matters to America’s striving classes. One such story arrived this
August. The headline “Are You Ready for the Post-College SAT?” was
followed by a revealing subhead: Employers say they don’t trust
grade-point averages. The piece explained the imminent arrival of an
“SAT-like assessment that aims to cut through grade-point averages and
judge students’ real value to employers.”
The Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA+, a voluntary test
developed by a New York City–based nonprofit, the Council for Aid to
Education, is to be administered to seniors at some 200 U.S. colleges
and universities, including the University of Texas system and the
liberal-arts St. John Fisher College near Rochester, N.Y., in an
attempt to measure learning by asking critical-thinking questions. “Exit
exams are an excellent idea because they are a quantifiable way of
giving institutions and individuals the measure of the kind of progress
they’re making,” says Poliakoff. And while an assessment like the CLA+
might help employers decide which students to hire, some argue that
students and parents need more information to help choose a college.
When Duncan told Time’s education summit about the ratings system
envisioned by the Obama Administration, he described an approach that
would take into account many metrics, including graduation rates,
graduate earnings and a graduate’s student debt. The basic question,
Duncan said, is this: “How many students at an institution graduate at a
reasonable cost without a lot of debt and get a job in the field they
choose?”
Fair enough, but none of this tests general knowledge. You don’t have
to be able to identify, say, Albert Einstein or explain the difference
between a stock and a bond. Critics of the CLA+ argue that institutions
may be penalized for attracting strong students who score highly as
freshmen and then just as highly as seniors—thus showing no growth.
Others have even more fundamental problems with the idea of a universal
test. “The idea of the CLA+ is to measure learning at various
institutions and compare them,” says Watson Scott Swail, president and
CEO of the Education Policy Institute. “I don’t think that’s technically
possible with such a diverse system of higher education. That’s based
on the fact that all the curriculums are different, textbooks are
different, and you’re expecting to get some measure of—in a very generic
way across all curriculums—how someone learns in one institution
compared to another. All institutions are different, and all of their
students are different.”
So why not make the diversity of American higher education an ally in
allaying concerns about how much core knowledge college graduates take
with them into the world? Why not honor the independence of each
institution and encourage every college to create a required
general-education comprehensive exam as a condition for graduation? Ask
each department for a given number of questions that it believes every
graduate, regardless of major, should be able to answer. Formulate essay
questions that would test a student’s capacity to analyze and reason.
In other words, take the initiative.
Yes, the departmental discussions about what an educated person
should know about chemistry or Chinese or communism would be fraught and
long. The good news, however, is that the debates would be
illuminating, forcing academics to look to first principles, which is
almost always a healthy exercise in any field. An institution might
decide that such an assessment just isn’t for them, but it’s an idea
worth exploring, for colleges could then control the process rather than
cede that authority to yet another standardized national test.
What is heartening to those who believe in the value of a passing
acquaintance with Homer and the Declaration of Independence and Jane
Austen and Toni Morrison as well as basic scientific literacy is that
there is little argument over the human and economic utility of a mind
trained to make connections between seemingly disparate elements of
reality. The college graduate who can think creatively is going to stand
the greatest chance of not only doing well but doing some good too. As
long as the liberal-arts tradition remains a foundation of the
curriculum in even the most elective of collegiate systems, there is
hope that graduates will be able to discuss the Gettysburg Address—in a
job interview at Google.
—with reporting by Eliza Gray/New York and Maya Rhodan/Washington