Over the last year I have spent a considerable amount of time talking with college presidents and inquiring journalists. What each asked is essentially the same — What lies ahead for American higher education?
For each, I have had the same answer. The funk that now engulfs us could be never-ending.
Most of those who ask are, like me, steady consumers of higher education’s morning news reports, which feature failed presidencies, campus closures, campus disruptions and political intrusions. This funk is reflected in the continuing dysfunction introduced by the federal government’s failed FAFSA adventure.
Then I discovered I was dead wrong. The real problem is that higher education, like society at large, is being engulfed by a deluge of righteous anger. My evidence? The nightly parade of commentators and hosts on cable news.
With raised voices, waving hands and pronounced grimaces, they declaim against an abundance of villains, bad ideas and misplaced loyalties. Ultimately, I’ve come to understand that what I read about each morning is but an echo of what I watch each evening on TV.
What is needed as an antidote to offset the righteous anger is something that unites rather than divides our campuses. It is a tough but necessary lesson that I finally understood when I joined a convening of 20 institutions developing three-year baccalaureate degrees, something more and more colleges are adding or experimenting with.
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At that meeting, as before, I was asked what lies ahead for our troubled industry. Only now, my answer was different. What lies ahead is not more funk, but rather a voluntary wading into the darker waters of this righteous anger.
As is my custom, I ended my presentation with a call for questions. First up was a college president who, right on cue, snarled, “All right Bob, we get the message, but what are we supposed to do about it?”
Without hesitation, I told him: “Just do something! Something purposeful solving a key higher education problem. Something of value, a truly good idea that can engage important elements of your campus.”
The need for a uniting, positive force was the lesson the 20 institutions then developing three-year degrees talked about almost endlessly. They now knew what worked, what didn’t and how their effort had come to matter.
It was the lesson Christopher Hopey, president of Merrimack College, learned when he challenged a small group of his faculty to design three-year baccalaureate curricula.
Two months in he told me that his faculty were finding the College-in-3 work liberating, that it had given them a burst of energy and optimism.
Other schools had similar experiences; once they got going, success built on itself. What looked at first to be impossible had proven to be doable. There had been encouragement from their accreditors and a willingness on the part of their institutional friends to help.
Related: Momentum builds behind a way to lower the cost of college: A degree in three years
What makes these results possible is now pretty well understood by the members of College-in-3.
First, nearly every participating institution thought small, offering just a couple of three-year options, not the entire undergraduate curriculum. And while the prospect of an undergraduate degree that costs students one-quarter less was an administrative talking point, the real excitement was generated by the opportunity to design something really new, beginning with what students did their first year.
Old taboos were discarded. New ideas were readily tried and discarded if they didn’t work. The new watchword for effective design became, “Is it truly student centered?”
It became easier to integrate traditional learning outcomes with vocational interests; there was a new willingness to make internships, summer work and learning experiences elements of the new curriculum. That made it easier to consider this question: “What do we expect our students to know and be able to do when they leave us?”
Perhaps the most unexpected development was the feistiness of institutions that faced regulatory roadblocks. The New England Commission of Higher Education, for example, told the first of our institutions to submit proposals for a three-year degree to wait for a while.
Not deterred, the institutions mounted a successful campaign that convinced the commission to issue guidelines for approving three-year options.
In a different region, a public institution sought approval for a three-year degree, and seemingly did everything right, including securing the endorsement of its accreditor. But it ran into a political buzz saw when it sought the required approval of its state legislature: The faculty union declared the idea of a three-year baccalaureate degree dead on arrival. A 25 percent reduction in time to degree would mean fewer faculty jobs in general and fewer jobs in the liberal arts in particular.
The faculty union won. Yet, the institution, refusing to give up, has remained active in College-in-3.
Our push for a three-year alternative is not the only way to do something that matters, to create a uniting force. Still, it neatly illustrates the advantages of what I have in mind, involving both what and how students learn.
College-in-3does not call for protests or other means of acting out, but it can promise success for all students deemed worthy of admission, regardless of their backgrounds.
Not lamentations on a theme. Not the righteous anger of those alienated by a world turned topsy-turvy. Instead, purposeful change designed from the bottom up. That’s the antidote higher education needs.
Robert Zemsky was founding director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
This story about College-in-3 was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.
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