State Education Budgets: Stimulate Innovation

            This is turning into a tough year for public higher education in the United States.  Since a raft of new Republican Governors took office in state houses around the nation, cuts in higher education have been seen as a special target to help states deal with deficits.  In Pennsylvania, for instance, Republican Governor Tom Corbett has proposed that the Commonwealth cut the state appropriation for its four state-related institutions—Penn State University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Temple University, and Lincoln University—by more than 50%.  That would reduce Pennsylvania’s appropriation for its land grant university—which maintains 24 campuses around the state in addition to the statewide Cooperative Extension Service—to a mere 4 % of the University’s total budget. 

            My purpose here is not to explore in any depth why Republican Governors seem to be so anti-education.  My purpose is to suggest that this is, at best, a wrong-headed solution.   The challenge to Pennsylvania and other states is not simply to cut costs, but to re-position education so that their economies can thrive in a new era—the so-called Information Society or Knowledge Society.

            Most of our educational system is organized to support the an industrial economy.  In fact, our system of public universities and public schools is a direct response to the Industrial Revolution.  In those days, policy makers felt that 25% of high school graduates needed to go on to a college degree in order to provide society with the engineers, scientists, teachers, and business managers needed to sustain an industrial economy.  And, in fact, public education has done a great job in meeting that challenge.

           Today, however, we no longer live in an industrial economy.  We live in a globalized, information economy. In this economy, education has become critically important not only to provide managers and professionals, but to enable the broader workforce to compete in a global workforce and to help their employers innovate from the bottom up in a very competitive, constantly changing technology-driven economy.

            The federal government has recognized the realities of this new environment by challenging both K-12 and higher education to increase the percentage of high school graduates who go on to get a college degree from the current rate of 39% to 60% by the year 2020.   Within this vision is a two-fold challenge:  (1) to expand access to higher education so that it can absorb an almost 50% increase in undergraduate students and (2) to expand by about the same percentage the number of high school graduates who are qualified to enter higher education.

            While some cuts to state education appropriations may be needed in the short run, the real challenge to state government is not to vilify teachers and public education in general, but instead to engage educators in how to address this and related education challenges that are intricately connected to economic well-being.  Cutting budgets will not necessarily result in innovation.  Without a new engagement in innovation, cutting school budgets just means larger classes and fewer specialized courses—often, the same courses that students need in order to get into college.

            Rather than simply cut budgets or undercut the role that teachers can play in the lives of our young citizens, let’s acknowledge the need to trim in the short run, but balance that by stimulating innovation in several key areas:

1.            Invest in Dual Enrollment Courses – Many students find themselves in school districts that are either to small or too poorly funded to maintain courses that students need in order to get into college.  Dual enrollment courses are courses offered by colleges and universities that can be taken by high school students and that count toward high school graduation and college credit.   A strategic commitment to dual enrollment will mean that more students will graduate from college not only prepared to move onto higher education, but with some college credits already under their belts.   A long-term dual enrollment strategy could also result in accelerated degree programs that combine high school study with summer internships, bringing better educated employees into the workforce faster.

2.            Invest in STEM – The need for renewed emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) curricula has been long recognized at the national and state levels.  These programs are an essential ingredient to creating an Information Age workforce that can attract new industry to a state or help existing companies adapt to the new economy.  A STEM investment could be directly tied to a dual enrollment strategy or could be part of a refocused general education program in the undergraduate curriculum.  It is also an important component to teacher preparation.  

3.            School/Community/Employer Collaborations – One way that higher education can directly serve local communities is by creating collaborative degree programs with local employers in order to build a sustainable workforce.  These collaborations may involve local school districts, employers, and unions and involve a mix of dual enrollment courses, on-campus courses, community service, and workplace internships.  Ultimately, these programs would fund themselves, but state funds would be useful in creating models.

4.            Revitalize Cooperative Extension – The Cooperative Extension Service was created at the height of the Industrial Revolution out of a fear at state and federal government level that the United States would not be able to sustain industrialization—and the urbanization and immigration that went with it—if we could not also improve agricultural production and make farm life more attractive to new generations of farm families.  Today, there is a similar concern that, at the height of the Information Revolution, we need to revitalize our smaller communities in order to bring new knowledge-based businesses that can thrive in smaller communities.  One challenge here is to bring broadband Internet access to our smaller communities so that companies can maintain their global presence while taking advantage of the stability of small town culture.  We need to re-envision the ideals of Cooperative Extension for this new environment.

            In March 2011, we are facing an important turning point.  New governors, brought into power by fear and frustration caused by the Great Recession, have aggressively moved to cut spending as the quickest way to reduce deficits.  With less than four months remaining until the new fiscal year begins, our educational institutions have little time to respond creatively to a significant budget reduction.  The result will be to pull back, rather than to engage around a new agenda.   State governments have an alternative:  engage educators at all levels to save dollars where we can, but also to re-envision the institutional mission of public education in light of the Information Revolution and get us started down the road toward long-term sustainability in a globalized knowledge economy.

Rethinking General Education in Tight Economic Times

Today’s newspaper reported on the second Penn State undergraduate program to be evaluated for closure through the curriculum review process that is now underway.  Both programs—Science, Technology, and Society Program and Integrative Arts—share some important traits: (1) they are both interdisciplinary (STS is also inter-college) and (2) they began as general education initiatives that evolved into undergraduate majors.

It probably is natural that this evolution would take place.  A research university is a highly decentralized culture where the academic department is the basic family unit.  Faculty members who create these initiatives tend to be broad thinkers who identify with the broader culture outside academia rather than with the family unit.  However, after the initial wave of innovation, faculty members in programs like these tend to create a new family unit within the culture of the institution.  Interdisciplinary initiatives become their own departments; once-radical views adjust, however uncomfortably, to the older culture.   Some ideas—area studies programs are a good example—find long-term homes in a college.  Others never quite fit in. 

Perhaps the part of the curriculum that suffers most from this is general education, for which these programs were launched in the first place.   One solution might be to focus more attention on interdisciplinarity in general education.  This has been done at Penn State several times over the years.  As an undergraduate student in the 1960s, some of my best general education courses were interdisciplinary courses in the Humanities.  There were also a series of interdisciplinary courses in the sciences:  Physical Sciences 07 and 08, Biological Sciences 01, 02, and 03, and others.  These courses provided a good overview of the liberal arts and science worldviews for nonmajors.  They were focused on understanding humanistic and scientific thinking, but not necessarily how those ways of thinking could help us live a better life.  The old idea of general education as the “distribution” part of the undergraduate curriculum was reinforced:  general education was about getting to know something about disciplines that were not in your major. 

There is another view of general education.   In this view, the majors and minors prepare students for the professions, but general education prepares students to be productive citizens and happy individuals.   This kind of general education is naturally interdisciplinary, because it is focused on the external world and its problems, rather than on the traditional structure of the institution.  This approach took root in the first half of the twentieth century.  Columbia’s Contemporary Civilizations Program and Chicago’s Great Books Program are two examples.  A truly interdisciplinary general education program would follow in the path of these groundbreaking programs and, at the same time, provide an environment in which new ideas could flourish across disciplines.

As institutions revisit their curricula to find savings, they should also step back and look more broadly at the purpose of the curriculum.  General education serves a different purpose than do the majors and minors.  An interdisciplinary general education, envisioned as preparing students to be productive citizens, would allow institutions to protect some space for innovation while also avoiding the creation of un-productive majors.  Perhaps this economy gives us an occasion for a fresh look at general education.

Logic and Faith

John Dewey once wrote that the worst thing that ever happened to western civilization was our acceptance of the ideas of the classical Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. They believed in the existence of pure, ideal exemplars for “forms” of great ideas. Dewey, on the other hand, believed human beings can never truly understand these ideal forms, assuming that they exist. Dewey advocated for logic in philosophy, but not as a means of finding absolute truth. Instead, he saw logic as a tool of inquiry. In this sense, the means—inquiry—was consistent with the end—true to Dewey’s ultimate test of learning. Since ideal forms could not be discovered, the goal of philosophy was to improve our ability to inquire and to increasingly improve our understanding of what is essentially an unknowable reality.

Everyday science bears out Dewey’s sense of things. The more we learn about the universe around us, the better tools we develop to gather information, the more we understand the limits of our ability to truly know about the world around us. We know from dogs that human beings cannot hear the full spectrum of sound. We know that there is a spectrum of light waves that are invisible to the human eye. We guess that there may be dimensions beyond the three that we can directly experience, and we think there may be a fourth dimension—time—that we sense but that we can measure only in its passing. We’ve invented tools that can sharpen our senses. However, we are not able to invent tools that can help us understand what we cannot otherwise sense. We don’t know what we don’t know.

Is there a “sixth sense?” We debate it. The evidence of our five senses does not give us confidence, but we debate it because there are phenomena that we cannot otherwise explain. Is there a seventh sense? An eighth? If time is the fourth dimension, is there a fifth? A sixth? We don’t know. But we can explore. We can inquire.

We can also have faith. Throughout history, religions have been attempts to explain why things are the way they are. Some seem to hit closer to explaining things than do others. But they are all attempts to understand what cannot be directly sensed. Often, the problem with religion is that it eventually loses confidence in true faith and falls back on literal absolutes. And, given the fact that the religion’s texts often have been translated multiple times through the years, often in quite different cultural contexts, their literal “truths” are sometimes hard to decipher. Regardless, faith is better seen, not as unquestioning adherence to dogma, but as another way to guide inquiry.

Logic and faith work together to help us understand a world that we experience, but that we cannot fully sense.

Blowin' in the Wind

Tonight, to Pandora—the Internet radio application—I heard a live version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary. They introduced the song by saying something to this effect: “This song asks nine questions; our answers to them will determine the fate of this generation.” They then launched into a particularly beautiful, even soulful version of Dylan’s song.

It reminded me of the first time that I hear Bob Dylan sing this song. I was in my early teens. We were at my cousin’s summer campsite at Pymatuning State Park. The radio was on in the background and PPM’s version of the song was playing. Then, the DJ came on and said, with a bit of a smirk in his voice, “Do you want to hear this song by the guy who wrote it?” Then he played Bob Dylan’s version as a joke.

That winter, my mother bought us a stereo for Christmas and, for me, a copy of Dylan’s album, “The Times They are a Changin’.” That Christmas, she introduced me to the voice of my generation. Thanks, Mom.

Penn State's STS Pogram: A Future in General Education?

In September, I posted on this blog a piece about the death of Dr. Rustum Roy, who was, among other achievements, one of the founders of the interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Society curriculum at Penn State.  Recently, I was sad to read in the Centre Daily Times that Penn State is considering closing this program, pending Faculty Senate approval.  I am sad not only for Dr. Roy’s memory, but for the lost potential to Penn State’s general education program.

            A Wikipedia entry about STS indicates that more than two dozen universities worldwide have developed baccalaureate programs in STS.  Since 2005, four U.S. institutions have launched new STS programs.  Penn State’s STS curriculum—a collaboration between the colleges of Engineering and Liberal Arts—is positioned as an undergraduate minor.  Here, perhaps, lies the problem. STS developed in an era that launched a number of “area studies” programs—Women’s Studies, Asian Studies, African-American Studies, etc.  Many of these area studies have become established as academic departments in their own right.  STS, however, might better be structured not as a separate research and teaching area, but as a component of general education.

            Wikipedia defines STS as “the study of how social, political, and cultural values affect scientific research and technological innovation, and how these in turn affect society, politics, and culture.”  It emerged as an interdisciplinary innovation in the 1960s, a time up general social upheaval, but also a time when we were just becoming aware that a new dynamic was forming.  Call it the Information Age or the Knowledge Society, or whatever, this new age required citizens who could see the intricate interactions among scientific research, technological innovation, and social values.  We are now a generation into this new era, but I don’t think we are past the point where we need to educate citizens about the interactions among science, technology, and society.  If anything, this kind of interdisciplinary curriculum is more urgent than ever.

            The ultimate value of STS, then, may not be as a separate research and teaching specialty.  Instead, its real value may be as part of a general education curriculum.   One can imagine (as I suggested in my earlier posting about STS) a complete general education curriculum structured around STS as a theme, similar to the old Contemporary Civilizations program at Columbia.  However, STS is more likely to gain acceptance as an option within a more traditional distribution-style general education curriculum.   It is easy to visualize STS courses that would meet general education distribution requirements in science, social sciences, and humanities.  The interdisciplinary nature of STS courses would facilitate cross-posting over several distribution areas.   In addition, institutions could develop upper-division STS courses that serve as interdisciplinary, issues-focused baccalaureate capstone courses that send new professionals out into the workplace better prepared to deal with STS-related issues in their fields.

            I fully understand why Science, Technology, and Society as a minor area would be considered for closure.  However, re-conceiving the STS vision within the general education curriculum would be a great way to maintain the heart of the program and prepare undergraduates to engage in a society that continues to be transformed by science and technology.

Restoring the Covenant

At breakfast the other day, a British colleague reported that the UK is considering a new funding plan for higher education.  Under the plan, students would pay no fees to attend college; instead, they would pay after they graduate and, one supposes, are employed and making money.  I don’t know the details of this plan.  However, I can imagine consequences—unintended or not—that are worth discussion.

            First, I can imagine that it would further increase the utilitarian bent of most college curricula, since institutions would be rewarded when their students become gainfully employed.   Curricula that cost the student as much as other professional programs, but that do not result in good-paying jobs for most alums (journalism comes quickly to mind), might find a hard time getting internal support, even if there are students who want to study these areas. 

            Second, one might ask what the impact would be on the student’s perception of the general education curriculum?  This part of the curriculum (at least in institutions that take general education seriously) is designed less to prepare one for a career than to prepare one for life as a member of the broader society.  If costs are too closely aligned with the ability of a student to make money, will the student be willing to pay for this part of his/her education?

            It also led me to think more broadly about how about higher education is perceived these days.  Is higher education a “public good” or a “private good?”  When the general population—through tax dollars—invests in the education of individual citizens, are we doing it solely for economic development reasons (to build a professional leadership force that can make us competitive and create jobs for less-skilled workers), or do we provide public funding to higher education because we want our professional and business leaders to be able to function – to make informed judgments, for example – in ways that benefit society as a whole?  Or both? 

            Now I have a bias on this issue.  I believe that higher education and, indeed, all levels of education from pre-school onward, are essential to maintaining a free and democratic society.  This is not just for its relatively short-term economic impact, but because, in a globalized, information-based society, we cannot afford to have separate classes based on educational attainment.  Nor can we afford to have a society in which everyone is trained in a specialty, but with no common culture to hold us together and to make us want to have our work serve the community as a whole. 

Massey: Honoring the Trust

            This is not a new issue.  Writing in 2003, William F. Massey noted, “College may be the ticket to the good life, but its benefits for democracy and culture no longer command a top priority for the public purse.  Higher education increasingly is viewed as a private rather than a public good: very important for those who get it, but something most government officials can safely take for granted” (Honoring the Trust, p. 4).  He summarizes the problem as follows:

Participation rates have soared, but schools have not fully embraced the educational needs and competencies of their broadened constituencies.  Institutional behavior has become increasingly market driven, but the markets generally reward prestige—they don’t gauge the true quality of education, and therefore they produce a perverse set of incentives” (p. 5).  He argues that “Colleges and universities are not all they can be, that they can improve the quality of education without spending more, dismantling the research enterprise, or undermining essential academic values” (ibid.).

Massy posits seven “core quality principles” that can help an institution restore public trust:

·      Define educational quality in terms of student outcomes

·      Focus on the processes of teaching, learning, and student assessment

·      Strive for coherence in curricula, educational processes, and assessment

·      Work collaboratively to achieve mutual involvement and support

·      Base decisions on facts whenever possible

·      Identify and learn from best practice

·      Make continuous quality improvement a top priority

Kellogg:  Returning To Our Roots

            While Massey’s principles focus on basic operational principles, a more far-reaching response was articulated by the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land Grant Universities.  From 1996 to 2000, the Commission studied different aspects of the university’s role in a transforming society and called for a transformation in the relationship between the university and the community it serves.   Like Massey, the Commission noted “growing public frustration with what is seen to be our unresponsiveness” and “a perception that we are out of touch and out of date” (Returning to Our Roots: Executive Summaries of the Reports of the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land Grant Universities, p. 14).   The Commission’s response was that state and land grant universities must go beyond traditional “outreach” and “service” missions and instead aim for “engagement:”

Engagement goes well beyond extension, conventional outreach, and even most conceptions of public service.  Inherited concepts emphasize a one-way process in which the university transfers its expertise to key constituents.  Embedded in the engagement ideal is a commitment to sharing and reciprocity.  By engagement, the Commission envisions partnerships, two-way streets defined by mutual respect among the partners for what each brings to the table (ibid.).

Spanier:  Restoring the Covenant

            Penn State President Graham Spanier, who chaired the Kellogg Commission, recently described five strategies that land grant universities should consider in response to the Commission’s charge to “restore the covenant.”  In remarks delivered at the National Outreach Scholarship Conference on October 4, 2010, President Spanier noted the following:

·      First, focus on activities that play to their particular strengths, pruning those that don’t have a measurable impact or are not aligned with academic strengths.

·      Second, increase access for non-traditional students, who are the most rapidly growing segment of the higher education population.

·      Third, leverage technology to expand the reach, foster new kinds of communities, and engage students.

·      Fourth, push for the inclusion of engaged scholarship in the promotion and tenure process.

·      Fifth, find new ways to engage the public to fund engagement work and become more entrepreneurial in seeking out other sources of support.

            These strategies are especially important today, as public universities struggle to maintain quality and services while living with less public financial support in light of the continuing recession.   While some would see this as a time to pull back from the commitment to public engagement, I believe this is a good time to consider how the university can more effectively reach out, to not only restore the trust and covenant with the public, but to re-invent it for new social and economic times:  to make the land grant university as relevant to today’s globalized knowledge society as it was to the industrial society that gave it birth.  

Getting Started

            Where do we start to implement changes that will not only restore the covenant but refresh it for a new era?  

New University-School Collaborations   Certainly one opportunity is to build new linkages between the land grant university and the K-12 sector.   There is a general agreement that the Knowledge Society will require that a higher percentage of workers have some higher education experience than was the case in the Industrial Age.  With that in mind, the Obama Administration has set a goal of increasing the percentage of high school graduates who earn a college degree from the current 39% to a target of 60% by the year 2020.    This will require not only that we improve the success rate of high school graduates who currently go on to college, but that our high schools produce more graduates who are prepared to enter college.  Engagement between universities and high schools seems like an obvious strategy.

            This strategy might take several forms—none of which are mutually exclusive:

·      We are already beginning to see dual enrollment initiatives in which students earn high school and college credit simultaneously in courses taught by university faculty members. 

·      Universities can create virtual high school programs, directly teaching high school students the skills they will need to successfully enter a university program.   This could be another path toward dual enrollment.

·      These kinds of initiatives not only increase the number of high school graduates who are ready to enter college, they offer an opportunity—especially when combined with service learning and internships—students to complete a degree sooner, contributing to accelerated degree programs that allow students to more quick enter the workforce.

Discipline-based Engagement Strategies   Graham Spanier noted that each institution should build on its strengths in the process of building new engagement strategies.  One way to ensure this would be to ask each academic college (and, in some cases, individual departments) to establish an Engagement Vision that would drive the engagement strategy.   This would help overcome a perception that, within academic units, faculty members tend to define success in terms of academic research rather than societal engagement.  A college/department level engagement vision will provide a means by which to evaluate strategies and to measure progress over time.

Community Engagement Strategies  A key to establishing public trust and creating a true covenant would be for public universities to directly engage their communities (for land-grant universities, this would mean a statewide effort) to identify needs and to collaborate on strategies by which the university can directly engage with the community, using public media—television, radio, the Internet—to address the broad public and partnering with community organizations to help address needs.  

An Extension Service for the Knowledge Society  In the Industrial Era, land grant universities created the Cooperative Extension system to improve agricultural production—a vital issue in a time when we needed a solid agricultural base to support our rapidly urbanizing, immigration-focused industrial economy.   A key element of Cooperative Extension is that faculty members were expected to spend time in the field, directly helping agriculturalists to improve their products.  This concept needs to be re-envisioned for the Knowledge Society.

The Need for an Institution-wide Strategy

            Typically, when ideas like this are raised, the response is:  “We’re already doing this.”  What that usually means is that some individual faculty members or individual units are doing something in one or more of these arenas.   This is wonderful.  These faculty members and individual units should be recognized and rewarded for their commitment to engagement.  However, the real need is for these activities to be part of a visible institution-wide strategy and commitment.   This is the long-term leadership challenge for our public universities.

IACE Hall of Fame: Helping Across Generations

I am just completing my term as Chair of the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame.  This fall, we held our annual induction ceremony at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara.  Below is an article about that event that I wrote for the Hall of Fame Newsletter:

After this year’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Guadalajara, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on the Role of Continuing and Distance Education in the Knowledge Society at the Mexican Association for Continuing and Distance Education. Jose Morales Gonzales (HOF 2002) offered an opening statement that addressed the many ways in which technology and globalization are affecting society and, in turn, education. He then asked each panelist to respond briefly to a question targeted at their special role in the field.

I was asked about how continuing and distance education respond to the needs of the Information Revolution and what role can the Hall of Fame and its members can play in this new era.

I noted that we are already a generation into the Information Revolution. There are many ways to define the beginning of this new era. However, my personal milestone is the publication, in 1970, of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, the book that first planted in the popular mind the idea that things had changed and would continue to change dramatically. The careers of many Hall of Famers span this period. They are the first generation of adult and continuing education scholars and practitioners whose total careers were spent helping our institutions, our students, and our policy agencies adapt to the new reality that was emerging in the first generation of the Knowledge Society. That experience can provide an invaluable roadmap for today’s emerging leaders, who will spend their careers shaping the second generation of the Knowledge Society.

Several of the societal needs created by the Knowledge Society strike to the core competencies of adult and continuing educators. Most will agree that the Knowledge Society will require more individuals to have some level of postsecondary education. This will require that our colleges and universities dramatically increase access to both recent high school graduates and to current workers. This necessity will move continuing and distance education closer to the mainstream of higher education. It will also stimulate new collaborations between institutions—an area where many Hall of Fame members have been innovators.

In short, adult and continuing education has much to offer in the Knowledge Society, and members of the International Adult and Continuing Education can play an important role in helping emerging Second Generation leaders transform the mainstream of higher education in our countries around the world.