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When the academy claims that college is worth it, it means two very different things:
- That a bachelor’s or an associate degree is a job seeker’s union card, an indispensable ticket into the white-collar workforce.
- That the college experience makes graduates more interesting, thoughtful and well-rounded people, contributing to happier, healthier and more fulfilling lives.
The former claim is basically true. A recent analysis by the Institute for Higher Education Policy concludes that for 93 percent of undergraduates, college is worth the investment.
I should note, however, that the institute’s measure is not especially rigorous; it only requires students to recoup their financial investment within 10 years. The institute’s report does not tell us whether the graduates reach the median earnings in their field or earn enough to withstand a spell of unemployment or another financial shock.
The latter claim is certainly true for the minority of undergraduates who attend a residential campus full-time. But for the majority of undergraduates who commute or attend part-time, college is, all too often, a drive-by experience, with very limited interaction with faculty or classmates.
If we truly want college to truly be a developmental and transformational experience for all undergraduates—not just the most fortunate or privileged—a succession of stand-alone courses and distribution requirements ain’t enough. We need to ensure that all students encounter the high-impact practices that change lives.
Those practices are no secret. George Kuh, Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Higher Education at Indiana University and founding director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, has compiled a widely publicized list. These include mentored research, supervised internships, study abroad and participation in a learning community.
However, I’m not convinced that all the activities included under the high-impact experience banner are equally valuable. Electronic portfolios? A common intellectual experience? A capstone course? I suspect their impact varies widely. Implementation matters.
Also, notice what’s missing from the list: close interaction with a faculty or staff mentor. Active participation in a campus organization. Involvement in athletics or theater or band. Attendance at campus lectures and performances and visits to campus museums.
What we have is a somewhat arbitrary laundry list of worthy practices, not, I’m afraid, an inventory based on systematic analysis of postgraduation outcomes.
More worrisome is that the list doesn’t, for the most part, include the educationally impactful pedagogical practices that I believe make the most difference.
Here, I’d like to offer a shout out to a scholar, Thomas Carey, who, in my opinion, is among the most thoughtful advocates for pedagogies that truly do transform lives. A former associate vice president at the University of Waterloo, he is a self-described “serial intrapreneur within higher education.” He’s been an executive in residence for teaching and learning innovation at Monash University, senior research director for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario and chief learning officer for a network of 18 public higher education systems hosted by the California State University chancellor’s office.
Carey has been a staunch advocate for the “innovation humanities.” By this, he doesn’t simply mean hybrid fields, like the digital humanities, the environmental humanities or the legal or medical humanities, which are essentially academic fields of study. He favors the practical application of humanities knowledge and skills, for example, to human-computer interaction, user interface design, video game development, museum exhibition development, documentary filmmaking, narrative understanding, natural language processing, applied machine learning and AI ethics.
Carey’s current focus is on inclusive workplace innovation. Collaborative teams, in close cooperation with industry partners, tackle a current workplace challenge. The goal is to generate new ideas to improve workplace performance and the quality of work life for an organization’s employees.
For undergraduates, participation in a problem-solving or innovation activity is often genuinely transformative. The students address an authentic problem, learn how to work with a team that includes practicing professionals and help develop a solution that creates value. Lest you think that this approach isn’t scalable, 320 students at one of Carey’s partner institutions in Australia participated in the workplace innovation initiative during the fall of 2022, with a target of 600 participants in 2024—when roughly a quarter of the B.A. students will have taken part.
Without engagement in high-impact practices, a college education, no matter how rich the curriculum, is nothing more than vocational training. What makes college transformative is not merely what students study, but what they do inside and outside the classroom.
I worry that we are defining a college education down. It ought to be much more than taking roughly 40 classes and earning 120 credit hours. When my campus introduces a host of asynchronous online classes without regular, substantive interaction with a faculty member or classmates, it’s lowering its academic standards, debasing a liberal education and degrading the college-going experience.
Yet I shouldn’t be surprised. When classes merely involve information transfer, when gen ed classes are regarded as pointless box-checking exercises and when an institution’s top priority is to increase graduation rates and reduce time to degree, why not offer such courses in the cheapest, most convenient form imaginable?
I worry that as more and more students combine academics with competing responsibilities, the overriding temptation will be to accommodate those undergraduates, not by rethinking the education we offer, but by watering it down.
The fact is that the very credential that we tout is in fact losing value. Not at the Ivies and other elite privates or at many flagship or land-grant campuses, but at the institutions that serve roughly 80 percent of bachelor’s degree–seeking undergraduates.
Not only has a college degree’s payoff diminished over time, but our institutions often fail to provide graduates with the skills, including the quantitative, presentation and software skills, that will enhance their competitiveness on the job market.
The answer, I am convinced, isn’t to define quality down. It’s to reimagine the kinds of educational experiences that undergraduates, especially commuter and part-time students, receive. That will require us to:
- Integrate the kinds of hands-on experiences that students receive in campus clubs and organizations (like working on a school newspaper or on the campus’s radio station) into existing courses.
- Incorporate co-curriculum activities, like museum visits or attendance at performances, into core curriculum classes.
- Make problem- and project-based learning central to class-based learning.
- Scale high-impact practices, including mentored research, supervised internships and off- campus study.
- Embrace the innovation humanities, which combine humanistic skills and knowledge with the kinds of problems that STEM and professional fields address.
When critics speak of a watered-down college experience, those naysayers tend to focus on issues that I consider relatively insignificant, like grade inflation, faddish courses or reduced major or graduation requirements. The real problem, I’m convinced, lies elsewhere, in an educational experience that is less immersive and interactive, less enveloping and engrossing, than it ought to be.
Today, too many of my students are disengaged. It’s hard to get them to actively participate in discussions or to devote sufficient attention to their reading and writing or even get them to attend class consistently. That’s partly a legacy of the pandemic lockdown, but it mainly reflects the way that we conceive of the learning experience. Today’s students, less deferential than their forebears, aren’t willing to put up with an education that they consider irrelevant or meaningless or boring.
My undergraduates, perhaps like yours, want to take classes they consider relevant and that address real-world topics. They delight in engaging in activities that they regard as genuinely meaningful.
The true high-impact activities aren’t found on a generic list of best practices. They’re activities that really do transform students’ lives: that expose them to experiences that broaden their sensibilities, that challenge their preconceptions, that make them creative problem-solvers.
Let’s break out of the rut we find ourselves in. Let’s create an education experience that truly is developmental and transformational. Anything less makes college little more than a trade school and a credential engine. That may be enough for some folks, but it isn’t sufficient for you and me.
