Barriers to high quality

Preparing all students to succeed in college is one greater expectation. The other is to provide them all access to a learning experience of high quality. Here, too, important barriers exist.

The fragmentation of the curriculum. The structure of U.S. higher education was not designed to accommodate the large numbers of students who now go to college, their diversity, or their fluid and seemingly chaotic attendance patterns. The shape of the undergraduate curriculum was essentially fixed half a century ago. It combines broad general education common to all students (usually completed in the first two years or out of sequence in later years), more specialized study (a major) to give deeper knowledge of a chosen field, and electives to suit students' individual interests. Although listed in the catalog as part of a curriculum, individual courses are effectively "owned" by departments, and most advanced courses by individual professors. Few faculty members teach to collectively owned goals. The student assembles an assortment of courses, each carrying a defined number of credits and assuming a standard time in class. The degree certifies completion of a fixed number of these often disconnected fragments. There is little internal coherence in curricula or programs, and even less a plan for connected learning. In 1985 the Association of American Colleges report, Integrity in the College Curriculum, concluded, "As for what passes as a college curriculum, almost anything goes."⁴² This remains true on many campuses, and the advent of online courses, accessible from almost everywhere, is accelerating this fragmentation of learning.⁴³

The organization of universities and colleges around disciplinary departments also hardened in a simpler time. In too many institutions, faculty members feel the strongest attachments to their disciplines, the weakest to the institution as a whole. The departmental structure reinforces the atomization of the curriculum by dividing knowledge into distinct fields, even though scholarship, learning, and life have no such artificial boundaries. Through faculty efforts to work across disciplines, multi-disciplinary approaches to learning have gained place and acceptance, altering the nature of the curriculum in the process. However, such integrative approaches still butt against real administrative problems and face formidable obstacles.

Professors prepared as scholars not teachers. The dark secret of higher education is that most college professors are never trained to be teachers. As doctoral students, their dissertations demand research; teaching skills are assumed to be easy for intelligent people to acquire.⁴⁴ Interest in how learning occurs has remained largely confined to psychologists and schools of education. Colleges and universities reward gifted teaching, but rarely assist faculty members in any sustained way to become outstanding instructors. Contributions to teaching theory and practice through scholarly work often are not valued by a professor's institution or departmental colleagues. Academic reward processes (for annual raises, promotions, prestigious professorships) always include recognition of teaching excellence, but in many institutions—and not only the research universities—scholarship consistently outweighs it.

Exclusive definitions of quality. The definitions of a quality college education are still those of an earlier age. Institutions are rated by standards of exclusiveness and wealth, rather than how successfully their students learn. For the general public, and also for many educators, quality equates with prestige, and prestige with college ranking. Such published rankings include a mix of factors like the entering grades of freshmen, the percentage of applicants rejected, endowment size, faculty salaries, and the financial support from alumni. While the rankings report class size (an acknowledgment that small classes can enhance learning), reputation generally substitutes for college-wide measurement of student achievement.

Student success in learning is largely absent from national rankings, primarily because campuses have difficulty providing reliable, comparable data on how much and how well students learn. Prospective college applicants who look for outcome or value-added data from a campus are likely to be disappointed. The existing ranking arrangement values students' profiles at entry more than their accomplishments during the college years. Carried to its extreme, this interpretation of quality could mean a higher rating for a school that selectively accepts excellent high school students and teaches them nothing, than for a school that accepts mediocre students and teaches them a great deal. A campus interested in increasing its prestige will find more incentive to shift resources toward competitive admissions, for example, than to invest in practices known to improve learning.⁴⁵

These criteria of excellence have another negative impact: they do little to encourage colleges and universities to create supportive learning climates for the diverse groups now in college. The spectrum of life experiences, ages, ethnicities, races, and worldviews in the contemporary classroom offers a way to learn through and with one another, leading all those involved toward better decisions.⁴⁶ This diversity-enriched learning has only recently entered into the definition of educational quality on campuses,⁴⁷ but still carries no weight in national rankings.

A dearth of meaningful assessment. By and large, colleges are unable to say with any certainty whether students have learned what the professors are teaching. This is particularly true of abilities like critical thinking that develop across the confines of individual courses. The absence of explicit descriptions of the outcomes desired hampers assessment. So, too, do the independent treatment of individual courses and faculty unfamiliarity with meaningful assessment methods. Without knowing how well students have learned, the faculty finds it difficult to improve education in any purposeful way. This lack of assessment data can frustrate the desire to lift performance expectations.

While complicating assessment, student mobility among institutions also heightens its importance. Multiple observations throughout a student's undergraduate career provide the best means of diagnosing weaknesses and taking corrective action.

The heavy financial burden on students. Federal and state financial aid programs, and state-supported public colleges and universities, have been crucial in opening the doors to college, but students themselves still carry a heavy economic load. Even among full-time students, nearly three-quarters work while attending college, most at least twenty-five hours per week. While often necessary to pay college costs, these jobs interfere with class schedules, course selection, and learning. Working students are less likely to graduate and even to finish their first year. Not unexpectedly, the vast majority of part-time students work at least a half-time job (approximately 77 percent).⁴⁸

Demands of personal and family life. Many of today's older adult students balance family responsibilities with their courses. A mature seriousness about education can accompany their life-based experiences, but the needs of children, spouses, and elderly parents can cut into the time available for concentrated study.