The American higher education
system was born in revolution—the Industrial Revolution that reshaped the world
in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. Today, the system is in the midst of another
revolution—the Global Information Revolution—that has implications as great, if
not greater, than its counterpart. The
question before us is fundamental: What
is the role of the public university in this new environment?
The
original American college was dedicated to the classical curriculum of the
Enlightenment. Students were drawn from
the social and economic elite of the new country. Its purpose, as the famous Yale Report of
1829 described, was “the discipline and furniture of the mind.” However, as the Industrial Revolution matured
in mid-century, it became clear that a new kind of educational vision was
needed if the United States was to make the most of industrial
innovations. State governments began to
fund public colleges and universities in order to prepare young people to take
on new careers in engineering, science, and business; to create professionals
in the new social science fields that had arisen due to urbanization; to train
teachers who were needed to educate the children of immigrants who were
flooding into the new industrial cities to work in the mills; and, not the
least, to improve life in rural America and help farmers improve agricultural
production desperately needed to feed the new urban populations. The combination of new professional education
needs and the emerging research mission re-organized the academy around
disciplines, and that, in turn, re-defined the curriculum.
The
first half of the twentieth century saw the fulfillment of the Industrial
Revolution as nations mobilized industry to fight two world wars. The period also saw the beginnings of the
Information Revolution. Radio and
television revolutionized communications and World War II saw the birth of the
computer age that dramatically changed how we relate to information and to each
other. The wars also transformed
society, bringing longstanding political and cultural assumptions to an end and
setting the stage for new global relationships and social identities. The development—and use—of the atomic bomb
challenged traditional international relations and ushered in a new age. In
response, higher education institutions launched a number of curricular
innovations in the general undergraduate curriculum.
After
the Second World War, President Truman, concerned about the stability of
democratic society in the new age, created a Commission on Higher
Education. In its 1947 report, the
Commission noted the global disruption caused by the World Wars and the rise of
atomic weapons. “It is essential today,”
wrote the Commission, “that education come decisively to grips with the
world-wide crisis of mankind. This is no
careless or uncritical use of words. No
thinking person doubts that we are living in a decisive moment of human history”
(p. 6). One result of the wars, the
Commission maintained, was growing internationalism. “In speed of transportation and communication
and in economic interdependence the nations of the globe already are one world;
the task is to secure recognition and acceptance of this oneness in the thinking
of the people, so that the concept of one world may be realized psychologically,
socially, and in good time politically” (p. 16).
The
Commission recommended several major steps to increase the number of citizens
who receive higher education and to ensure that their education prepared them
to live in this dangerous new world. Over
the next few decades, the Commission’s ideas influenced the development of the
nation’s community college system, along with the GI-Bill and state and federal
scholarship and loan programs that greatly expanded the number of high school
graduates able to attend college. It
also stimulated “area studies” programs that increased understanding of the
emerging global economy. The
Commission’s emphasis on adult education stimulated the development of
continuing education programs and adult degree programs. Several states developed new colleges—Empire
State College in New York, the University of Maryland University College, and
Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey are examples—devoted entirely to
educating adults.
The decades that followed the Truman
Commission report saw dramatic changes. Some—the space race and the war in
Vietnam, for instance—reflected a long-term cold war between western
democracies and communist nations. The
Middle East emerged as a continuing cultural, economic, and military hot spot.
The period also saw the youth movement, the fight for civil rights and equal rights, and the invention of the Internet and personal
computing.
In 1995, the National
Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (now the Association
of Public and Land-Grant Universities) received grants from the Kellogg
Foundation to fund another commission to examine the future of public higher
education in this new environment. Over
the next four years, the Kellogg Commission produced six reports designed to help public institutions
revitalize their public missions. The
first five reports focused on the student experience, student access,
engagement with the public, creating a learning society, and the campus
culture.
The final report
explored the need to reinvigorate the partnership—the “covenant”—between the public
and its universities “in a new and dangerous world.” It noted that, as the nation entered a new
century, “the promise of American higher education must be made in a new era
and a completely different world.” It
noted the growing financial inequality in society, the breakdown of old
disciplinary identities, blurring of distinctions between secondary and
undergraduate education, and the surge of new technologies that “may erase the
boundaries between the university and the nation and, indeed the world.” (Restoring the Covenant, p.33)
These ideas have become
global imperatives. In May 2017, the
European Commission issued a “renewed EU agenda for higher education”
that noted:
Higher education plays a unique role. Demand for highly
skilled, socially engaged people is both increasing and changing. In the period
up to 2025, half of all jobs are projected to require high-level
qualifications. High-level skills gaps already exist. Driven by digital
technology, jobs are becoming more flexible and complex. People’s capacities to
be entrepreneurial, manage complex information, think autonomously and
creatively, use resources, including digital ones, smartly, communicate
effectively and be resilient are more crucial than ever. Europe also needs more
high achievers who can develop the cutting edge technologies and solutions on
which our future prosperity depends. In parallel, countering the growing
polarisation of our societies and distrust of democratic institutions calls on
everyone — including higher education staff and students — to engage more
actively with the communities around them and promote social inclusion and
mobility (p.2).
The EU
agenda reflects some of the same concerns as the Kellogg Commission. It listed four “priorities for action”:
1.
Tackling future skills mismatches and promoting excellence in skills
development;
2.
Building inclusive and connected higher education systems;
3.
Ensuring higher education institutions contribute to innovation;
4. Supporting effective and efficient higher education
systems.
What do
these reports, spanning seven decades from the transition from the Industrial
Revolution to the maturation of the global information society, suggest in
terms of next steps for public higher education? The following possibilities reflect some recent
innovations that have not yet been mainstreamed. Many of them assume that universities will
fully embrace information technology to meet the need. They are, at minimum, a starting point for
transforming higher education to meet the needs of the new society that has
emerged since World War II.
A New Relationship
between Schooling and Higher Education
The Truman
Commission was very clear in its proposal to extend universal high school from
12 to 14 years, thus encompassing the first two years of the baccalaureate
degree. The result would be a great
equalizing of educational benefit as suggested by the Kellogg Commission and
ensuring that more citizens leave education with the higher level of
qualifications needed by today’s economy.
The rise of online learning over the past two decades has begun to
provide a pathway to this goal. The
following examples suggest the potential:
1. The use of college and
university Open Educational Resources (OERs)—in many cases drawn from online
higher education courses—to empower high school teachers to deepen and enrich
important subjects in their high school classrooms.
2. The use of undergraduate online
(and traditional) courses as “dual enrollment” courses that allow high school
students to simultaneously earn high school and university credit, helping
students make the transition to college more quickly and less expensively.
New Approaches to
the Curriculum
A basic
truth of the Information Revolution is that education is no longer about the
transfer of knowledge from the instructor to the student. Knowledge— in the sense of “content”—is
everywhere. The educational challenge is
not simply knowledge transfer. Instead,
the challenge in the Information Age is to help students learn how to find and
evaluate information, turn it into useful knowledge, apply that knowledge to
solve problems, and evaluate the results.
A key
innovation in this area has been the Community of Inquiry approach. Developed at Athabasca University, it builds
on foundational ideas of Charles Peirce and John Dewey. As the Athabasca innovators describe it, a
Community of Inquiry is “a group of individuals who
collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to
construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding.”
The educational experience is the interaction of three
“presences”: teaching, cognition, and
social interaction. While the model is
certainly facilitated by technology, it can be implemented in any group
learning environment.
New
Inter-Institutional Partnerships
When the
model for our public universities was developed in the 19th century,
physical isolation was a problem.
Faculty expertise at all levels had to be on-site for teaching and for
community engagement, if not always for research. This ensured that each institution did its
best to attract faculty who were experts in content areas and research that
mattered most to the local community.
But it also left gaps where faculty expertise was not readily
available. Today, we are beginning to
see institutions use information technology to create new relationships across
institutions and across state boundaries to ensure that institutions can bring
the best resources to bear to meet local needs.
One example is the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance
(IDEA). http://www.gpidea.org/ This consortium of
19 public universities in 18 U.S. states works to develop graduate degree
programs that are delivered at a distance and that include courses taught by
faculty from multiple member institutions.
Students enroll at the institution of their choice and receive their
degree from that institution, but take courses from several different
institutions. The goal is to ensure
that, regardless of location, the student will have the benefit of specialized
knowledge and experience from faculty at multiple universities. The program has operated since 1994 and has
become a model for institutional cooperation in this arena.
Another
innovation is the Big Ten Alliance’s CourseShare, which allows students at member
universities to take courses through technology from other member universities. The advantages are described as follows:
Faculty enjoy the CourseShare
program for the chance to collaborate with respected peers at Big Ten Academic
Alliance universities, expand course enrollments with talented students, employ
new technologies, fill curricular gaps, preserve specialized courses, and
strengthen student recruitment efforts. Students enjoy the opportunity to take
specialized courses offered at other Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions
from a distance, eliminating the need to temporarily relocate.
Such
partnerships, be they within a family of institutions or across sectors, offer
institutions opportunities to prepare students for work in areas that may be
new to their home economy.
Inter-Sector
Partnerships
Similar
partnerships are emerging between public universities and other sectors,
especially employers, to ensure that key employee groups have access to
technical and professional education.
Examples of these partnerships date back to the 1980s, when National
Technological University (NTU) brought together a network of universities and
engineering companies to offer professional graduate education to company
employees via satellite. NTU was
eventually sold and later integrated into Walden University, a for-profit
educational provider. A more recent example is the Energy Providers Coalitionfor Education (EPCE), a collaborative of 2,500
energy-related companies, government offices, unions, and suppliers whose
employees receive online educational services from four public universities
around the country.
As these
examples suggest, information technology makes it possible for sustainable,
long-term cross-sector partnerships that bring sometimes very specialized
expertise to working professionals over a wide range of companies and
geographic locations.
Internationalization
One obvious
facet of the global information society is that it is, in fact, global. The underlying challenge for higher education
is to prepare students to work as professionals in a global community. However, another facet is that we need to
prepare our international students to be successful in their home
communities. Too often, especially at
the graduate level, higher education serves to encourage the brain drain that
takes talented people away from developing countries. Here, again, we are seeing models designed
to reverse brain drain. A good example
is the “sandwich” doctorate. In this
approach, a faculty member from an international university who wants to earn a
U.S. doctorate will (1) take initial courses at her home institution, (2) move
to the U.S. institution for the second year of course work, and (3) return the
home institution to conduct her research.
The result is that the person is able to grow within her home
institution, while creating new research partnerships between the two
institutions.
Mainstreaming
Innovation
The
information revolution has matured considerably over the past two decades. As this posting suggests, there have been
many innovations designed to help institutions be more effective in the new
environment. However, if these are to
help guide the system as a whole in this new environment, they need to become
mainstreamed. We need, for instance,
accreditation standards for multi-institution degree programs, standards for
the mountain of informal credentials—“badges,” etc.—that are being offered by
institutions. We need agreements between
universities and employers for lifelong learning programs that employees take
on new responsibilities. And so forth. The challenge to regional and professional
accrediting associations, higher education institutional membership
associations, and other bodies is to derive from these innovations standards that will encourage
institutions to move innovation into the mainstream of their educational,
research, and service missions.
A New Societal
Engagement
As we
consider these changes, we must also consider a broader, more fundamental
change issue: the nature of the community in which students are being prepared
to live. Many of the early engagement
innovations of the industrial period were designed either to integrate immigrants
into growing urban communities or to “keep’em down on the farm” by making rural
life more appealing in a time when electrification and other services were
attracting people to cities. Today, we
are seeing a dramatic change in our sense of cultural identity. Increasingly, education is not geared to send
young people back to the family farm, the family business, or to take their
place in their home community; instead, the goal is to prepare them for
professions that may require them to move away.
As Wendell Berry wrote in a 1988 essay, “According to the new norm, the
child’s destiny is not to succeed the parents, but to outmode them; succession
has given way to supersession. . . The child is not educated to return home and
be of use to the place and community; he or she is educated to leave home and
earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or
community.” (What are People For, p.
162). In essence, many small communities
across the nation are experiencing their own brain drain in the new economy. The three
reports described above emphasize that our public institutions must not only
prepare individuals for professions, but, in the process, prepare them as citizens
for life in a new global society. This requires
a fresh commitment to the community service mission—a mission that interacts
with the teaching and research functions.
Our definition of “community” is evolving as a global culture takes
root. Our public institutions must not
only prepare individual students for new professions, but also help local
communities find their way in this new environment and help students develop
their sense of citizenship, both in their home communities and in the broader
geographic and economic communities in which local success is increasingly
tied. This is central to the social purpose of public higher education. It should
be part of the context in which many of the recent innovations are mainstreamed.
