Top 10 Changes Colleges and Universities Need to Implement

I know firsthand, it’s really hard to change. I’m not alone in failing to correct bad habits or being slow to adapt to new conditions. The barriers to change are obvious and include a combination of psychological, physiological and environmental factors.

In our personal lives, the key obstacles include inertia: comfort, familiarity, habit and routine invariably obstruct change. Fear of the unknown and loss aversion also contribute to a bias for the status quo. Peer pressure and a lack of outside support make it hard to contemplate or sustain change.

In addition, many of us have a low level of self-efficacy, harboring deep doubts about our capacity to change. Then there’s the lack of a promise of immediate rewards. When the benefits of change aren’t immediate, it’s hard to commit to changes that only offer long-term improvements.

Only by understanding and acknowledging the impediments to change can we take the essential first steps toward successfully modifying our behavior and adapting to new conditions.

Addressing the barriers to change must take place across multiple dimensions: attitudinal, behavioral and social. Popular advice literature tells us to set specific, achievable goals to provide direction and a sense of progress. It reminds us that small and incremental changes are more sustainable than attempting a complete overhaul at once.

We also learn that support from friends, family or support groups is necessary to provide motivation and ensure accountability. In addition, we are told to be mindful: to be aware of the triggers for bad habits and conscious of the reasons that we need to change. Finally, we are advised to seek professional help to provide evidence-based strategies and support for change.

What’s true at the individual level is even more spot-on at the institutional level, where the systemic obstacles to change and adaptation are even more intractable.

Apart from budgetary constraints, what are the biggest barriers to the changes that higher education needs?

Some obstructions are structural, like regulatory and accreditation standards. Some are cultural, including risk-averse, consensus-driven campus cultures. Still others are organizational, as stand-alone, stand-apart departments, schools and colleges inevitably privilege their own interests over and above the institution’s. To this list, I add some others. Misplaced incentives and priorities. Faculty members who identify more with their discipline than their institution and who regard administrators as the enemy.

Not surprisingly, higher education’s conservative critics highlight the tenure system and unionization as blockers of much-needed innovations.

If, on the one hand, college and university personnel are among this nation’s most liberal in their politics, these institutions and their stakeholders are often profoundly resistant to change. The hoary adage that “it’s harder to move a cemetery than to change a college and university” contains more than a grain of truth.

Sure, the nation’s campuses are open to certain kinds of innovation. Schools are happy to add new programs, majors, centers, institutes and student services. But shifts in organizational structure, curricula, governance and campus culture are staunchly resisted. Accountability measures, too, are strongly opposed.

A number of the most important recent books on higher education, including Nicholas Dirks’s City of Intellect, Brian Rosenberg’s “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It” and James Shulman’s The Synthetic University (as well as my own Learning-Centered University), are, at their heart, about the inability of colleges and universities to adapt to a rapidly shifting demographic, economic and political environment and a more competitive postsecondary educational landscape with the agility and speed that are necessary.

Despite repeated calls for innovation, it is very difficult for institutions to reset priorities, redirect resources or redesign practices and policies more than incrementally.

What kinds of innovations are needed? Here’s my top 10 list. Campuses need to:

1. Institute bridge programs, a robust new student orientation and first-year learning communities with a thematic or career focus and an academic success component to better acclimate today’s diverse undergraduates to college life, nurture their study skills, instill a sense of belonging and assist them in major and career exploration.
2. Design a general education curriculum that ensures that all undergraduates acquire the fluencies in the arts and humanities; social science methods, theories and findings; and the frontiers of science expected of a college graduate.
3. Implement block schedules and introduce more highly interactive hybrid and synchronous online classes to better accommodate students who work, commute and care for others.
4. Infuse essential skills development—in such areas as written and oral communication and quantitative and statistical literacy—across the curriculum.
5. Incentivize faculty to prioritize mentoring, engage in interdisciplinary collaboration and adopt innovative pedagogies that involve active, experiential and inquiry-, problem- and project-based learning.
6. Create integrated degree pathways that consist of synergistic courses that emphasize professional identity formation and are aligned with students’ postgraduation career aspirations.
7. Promote assessment practices that are formative and diagnostic, allowing for timely interventions; that foster a deeper understanding of the material and enhance critical thinking skills; that are authentic, asking students to apply what they’ve learned in real-world or simulated scenarios; that encourage students to evaluate their own work against established criteria to foster self-regulation, reflection and lifelong learning skills; and that provide regular, substantive constructive and actionable feedback.
8. Embed career preparation throughout the undergraduate experience to ensure that graduates are job ready.
9. Make a greater commitment to equity by promoting inclusive student success in highly demanding fields of study.
10. Offer more holistic, comprehensive and proactive support services to better address students’ academic success and personal well-being.

It’s far easier to add to the existing model of higher education than to refocus, reallocate, realign, readjust and reorganize. But these changes are essential if colleges and universities are to control costs, improve learning outcomes, reanimate the ideal of a liberal education and bring more students to a bright future.

Let me conclude this piece with some brief reflections on Eric Hayot’s important if unfortunately largely neglected 2021 study, Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. This book is a clarion call for institutions to overcome the departmental and disciplinary divides that have distorted public understanding by privileging disciplines that generate laws, generalizations and data over and above those that emphasize interpretation and contextualization.

Hayot’s goal is to move beyond the distinction that the 19th-century German philosopher Wilhelm Windelband drew between “nomothetic” disciplines, which seek to make generalizations or isolate laws, and “idiographic,” or interpretive and historical disciplines, which are more concerned with questions of values, ethics and aesthetics and that focus on subjective experience and meaning making.

Whereas the social science disciplines seek to explain human behavior, social structure and the construction of social norms and identities and uncover patterns, trends and causal relationships using quantitative and qualitative methods, and the natural sciences seek to understand the natural world through observation, experimentation and mathematical modeling, with a goal of discovering laws and principles that govern physical and biological processes, the humanities strives to provide rich insights into the complexities of human life and culture, past and present, often emphasizing the unique and the diverse.

Hayot proposes that institutions replace discipline-based majors in the humanities with concentrations based on themes (he mentions beauty, conflict, justice and migration but might be better served by referring to such topics as artistic representation, cultural practices and modes of power) and skills like historical, cultural and social analysis. Such an approach, he argues, might better address the quite realistic concern that a major in English or history lacks sufficient value in the marketplace, while clarifying the actual skills that a humanities degree confers.

I share Hayot’s interest in overcoming the nomothetic-idiographic divide. I’d go further and argue that the humanities departments need to show how they can contribute to professional identity formation in the natural, social, behavioral and brain sciences, in engineering, health care and technology.

Better aligning our courses with high-demand fields does not mean that humanists should forsake highly specialized, discipline-based scholarship. Still, colleges and universities need to do more to overcome the insularity that besets the humanities disciplines. We need to do more to prepare doctoral students to participate in cross-field conversations and to place our own scholarship in dialogue with those outside our disciplines who share our interests.

As Hayot wryly observes, it’s a striking irony that the ideas and even the terminology generated by the humanities—growing out of critical, postmodern and postcolonial theory—have never been more pervasive or influential, even as the public deprecates the humanities disciplines as marginal, pointless and inconsequential.