Johann Neem's blog

First published in the Everett Herald, Oct. 15th 2011

As Washington looks toward the next special legislative session, higher education is again on the cutting block. It is likely that new cuts will be forthcoming absent new taxes. As a result, the cost to students to attend college will continue to rise.

A major reason why public college tuition has been rising in Washington is not because it costs so much more to attend college these days, but because the portion of that cost subsidized by the state has declined dramatically. As the state cuts, more of the cost is borne by students and parents.

Commentators have noted the effect rising tuition has on student debt, but few have paid attention to curricular dimensions. As tuition increases, however, legislators have responded by making fundamental changes to college education that threaten to redefine college's very purpose. It is worth pondering whether this is a direction we wish to take.

At the heart of American college is what is known as "general education." In addition to one's major, college students take courses in different disciplines and areas in order to gain a broad education in the arts and sciences -- a liberal education.

General education took its modern form after the 1945 publication of "General Education for a Free Society," by a Harvard committee under its president, James Bryant Conant. Conant argued that specialization and depth must be balanced by general education and breadth. Modern universities and faculty were too focused on their disciplines, and students suffered. In Conant's words, general education refers to "that part of a student's whole education which looks first of all to his life as a responsible human being and citizen; while the term, special education, indicates that part which looks to the student's competence in some occupation."

General education takes time and money. As legislators shift the burden to students, they have sought to bypass general education requirements to make college degrees cheaper, faster to obtain, narrower in focus, and geared more directly to vocational training.

The key two programs are Running Start, which allows 11th and 12th graders to enroll in college courses at the state's expense, and the more recent "College in the High School," which urges high schools to offer college credit courses.

Both programs are designed to save the state and students money. Both send the message to students that general education is unimportant and the more quickly you can get it over with, the faster you can graduate and get on with life. Both erode the campus experience of which general education is a large part.

The last legislative session witnessed a three-pronged attack on general education. The first was the establishment of Western Governors University-Washington, which has almost no general education requirements when compared with other colleges. WGU, instead, criticizes colleges for requiring so much "seat time."

The second was a bill granting Boeing and Microsoft huge tax breaks for a scholarship fund for students majoring in science, engineering, health care and other high-demand fields. Legislators were not troubled by allowing two large corporations to determine which subjects ought to be prioritized. Students majoring in the humanities would be out of luck, as would those choosing to pursue careers that Boeing and Microsoft do not prioritize

The final prong was a bill urging colleges to develop three-year degrees for advanced students, as if avoiding a year of college ought to be a reward for hard work. In fact, advanced students may benefit the most from the arts and sciences. We should give them an extra year for free. The only explanation is that legislators consider college primarily job training and see the extra time required to gain a general education as wasteful.

If colleges wish to respond, they will have to make the case that general education matters. This will require effort. Faculty must become as committed to their general education students as they are to students in their majors, and administrators must fund smaller, more engaging courses and sequences. Students should leave college valuing their general education as much as their major.

Washington's legislators face a dilemma. Citizens want and deserve access to post-secondary education in order to get better jobs. But there are many avenues to this end, including high-quality certification and apprenticeship programs. We instead have sought to make college fit all students without being willing to fund it. In doing so, we threaten what makes distinctive a college education while forcing many students to spend years earning a degree they neither want nor need.

A more balanced approach would preserve and fund college education for students who want it, while offering quality alternatives to those who wish to get the training they need for a better job.

Washington's Senate Bill 5442 authorizes Washington’s colleges to create three-year baccalaureate degrees. (link to bill).

A three-year degree is not necessarily a  threat to higher education. It may even be a good idea. The amount of time it takes to earn a degree is not scientific; it depends on practice, tradition, and the goals of college education. It is up to us to decide what we want students to get from college. Washington's colleges ought to explore what a three-year degree that takes liberal education seriously would look like.

The challenge, however, is that the bill’s stated goal is not improving the quality of higher education, but simply making it easier for qualified students to obtain degrees more quickly.

The opening lines of the bill make clear that it is not concerned with improving higher education:

“The legislature finds that some students are eager to complete a degree in the shortest time possible in order to enter the job market. The legislature further finds that providing  streamlined path to a baccalaureate degree would shorten the time required for students to complete a degree, improve the graduation rate, and improve accessibility for students who have proven academic abilities.”

Of course students want a degree in the shortest time possible. I bet I could conduct a poll that finds that most Washingtonians prefer junk food to vegetables. But higher education is not just another consumer product that must blindly respond to these preferences, for several reasons.

First, although higher education responds to the marketplace, it also upholds other values. Any reform must be true to these values.

Second, like other complex goods in the marketplace (medicine, for example), consumers do not always have the information to understand the “product” they are buying. After all, the goal of higher education is not to sell a widget, but to educate, that is to teach students about things they do not already know.

Polls demonstrate that most Americans do not want higher education to be just another market good. A recent Seattle Times story about the University of Washington recruiting more out of state students reminded Washingtonians that they do not want what they asked for. Having told the UW to act like a business, they feel betrayed when education is sold like other products on the market (see Danny Westneat’s column, UW Gives Us What We Asked For).

Parents and students do not want colleges to treat students like consumers. They believe that education ought to be more than just a product. They want students to be seen as special, not just dollars and cents. They want faculty to care deeply about each student, and to work with him or her closely. They recognize that a real education is about building relationships between teachers and students, relationships that are vital to fulfilling higher education’s mission (see Should Colleges Operate Like Businesses? ). Parents and students alike expect colleges to live up to their trust, not just bow down to their preference.

The bill reduces the authority of colleges and their faculty to determine what constitutes a college degree by mandating that three-year degrees “must allow academically qualified students to begin course work within their academic field during their first term or semester of enrollment.”  Yet one of the core commitments of American higher education is the principle that college graduates are more than just technicians. The bill presumes that the primary purpose of college is the major.

It ain’t so. The goal of going to college is as much to become a more profound thinker, a more thoughtful person, and a more knowledgeable citizen, as to choose a major. In fact, in the arts and sciences, the major is arbitrary. It shouldn’t matter if one majors in English, history, chemistry, or biology. Employers consistently say the same thing. They want graduates who can think, can write, and are creative. All arts and sciences majors do this. The goal of the major is to give students a chance to gain intellectual depth, to foster curiosity, and to develop an approach to the world.

One of the great things about the first year of college is precisely that students do not, and should not, know their major. They take a broad array of courses in different disciplines and fields; they are urged to explore, to discover what might interest them. Students deserve a chance to make meaningful choices about their future, and this ought to be available for all students, including the most academically qualified students this bill targets. For example, most students have no idea what sociology is before coming to college, yet it is one of the most popular majors on campus once students discover how sociology can help them understand the world in which they live.

One of the challenges facing a three-year degree is that many professional programs require more courses than majors in the arts and sciences. The reason is because those programs must ensure that their graduates are credentialed. The problem, however, is that this leaves less space for each student's broader education. Any three-year baccalaureate degree must balance the high credit demands of some professional programs with the equally important expectation that all college graduates are given meaningful exposure to the arts and sciences.

Europe has embraced the three year degree with mixed results. Some studies suggest that it has reduced the market value of baccalaureate degrees, leading more students to seek masters degrees, and thus has extended the time it takes for students to enter the marketplace.

A three-year degree is only as good as the education behind it. A recent Wall Street Journal article, India Graduates Millions, but Too Few Are Fit to Hire, argues that increasing the number of degrees is less important than ensuring that college graduates can do the work that employers and society expect of them. The article details how, despite raising the number of degrees, many of India’s college graduates lack the language and reading skills expected by employers. Fast-tracking college degrees, and increasing the number of graduates through online programs, may offer students a credential but not an education.

If three-year degrees are designed in a way that erodes the ability of students to explore, threatens the broad foundation of liberal education in order to produce more narrowly-focused graduates, and reduces student choice, they may produce more graduates but at a great cost to Washington’s students.

On the other hand, if a three-year degree can be crafted in a way that sacrifices neither the breadth of liberal education nor the depth of a major, we could graduate more people at lower cost. The process must be deliberate. At its best, it would ask faculty to think seriously about what they really want college graduates to know and do. This is no easy task, but it is an important one. The legislature has urged us to explore the idea, and there is no reason to shy away from the task.

Just when you think Wisconsin cannot get any more interesting, it does. The most recent event is, of course, the state Republicans’ freedom of information request to access history Professor William Cronon’s emails. The request came after Professor Cronon wrote a critical piece on Republicans on his personal blog, and an op-ed in the New York Times. As Professor Cronon makes clear, there is no rationale for the Republicans’ actions other than a witch hunt designed to intimidate him and other academics and intellectuals from speaking freely.

Nothing makes the case for tenure more clearly than the Republicans’ actions against Cronon. According to the American Association of University Professors, academic freedom is not limited to the classroom, but includes all research work and writing undertaken by faculty in their capacity as scholars and citizens. As educated members of the community, in fact, professors have a responsibility to be participants in the public sphere, especially when their knowledge and expertise can correct for misinformation. (link to pdf)

At Western we are consistently reminded not to use state-funded resources, including our emails and our computers, to participate in any partisan, union, or explicitly political group. We also cannot use our public computers and emails to advocate a particular candidate.

But these common sense limits are far from what Wisconsin Republicans are suggesting. In fact, even if the Republicans find that Professor Cronon has been critical of their party in his emails, they will have no case. What matters is whether Professor Cronon’s critique was based on evidence and reasonable interpretation. (Professor Cronon claims to be a moderate and a political independent, adding to the irony here.)

We seem to think that objective scholars must remain neutral, but objective scholarship can never produce neutral results. The goal of objectivity is to ensure that one’s research methods are responsible. But no responsible scholar, once he or she comes to a conclusion, ought to avoid stating it.

For example, a scientist convinced that global warming is man-made or, for that matter, not man-made, must and can speak. So long as her methods are objective, the results are never neutral. A philosophy professor engaged in ethical exploration may discover that he is opposed to abortion. He has the freedom and responsibility to make clear that his objective exploration of an issue led him to this conclusion. The results may not be neutral, but they remain objective.

Similarly, a history professor may conclude that Republicans’ effort to promote certain policies are shaped in large part by well-funded interest groups, and that his state’s Republican party has pursued policies that go against both the party’s history and his state’s longstanding public philosophy, as Professor Cronon did in his New York Times op-ed (link) . So long as these conclusions are drawn from the evidence, are argued clearly, and are stated openly, there is no tension between objectivity and conclusions that have political implications.

When critics of academic freedom call for academics to remain neutral, they really mean that they want academics to avoid studying any issue—scientific, ethical, or historical—that has any bearing on contemporary politics. Of course, to do so would make research in all fields irrelevant, and would undermine the role of scholarship in informing public deliberation. It would end thinking itself.

When you hear critics of academic freedom demanding that professors should be objective, please agree with them. They are right: all scholars must be objective to the best of their ability.

But then respond that objective research leads to conclusions, and those conclusions are rarely neutral. Academic freedom ensures that scholars are able to come to conclusions that may be unpopular. That’s the point. The goal of research—in the natural and human sciences—is to find answers to difficult questions.

The bill to make Western Governors University an official state university will probably pass. This blog has been against it for all the right reasons—that it denigrates the value and meaning of a college education, reducing college to a set of simple, easily obtained competencies. WGU’s boosters love to claim that they put student learning first, whereas traditional universities favor the interests of teachers.

We need to make clear, quite simply, that this is a lie.

Faculty at traditional universities spend the bulk of their time working with students-- preparing courses, meeting with students, and evaluating their work. Most of us chose this line of work because we love to teach . And teaching today is much different than when many of today’s legislators attended college. In fact, up-to-date knowledge of how students learn, much of which comes from cognitive science, proves that teachers are more important than we thought precisely because it is extremely difficult for students to learn (see post).

WGU compares all its courses to  large lecture courses-- but students in four-year schools move on to small, hands-on, intense classes and labs where they work closely with faculty and complete challenging work. Upper-division courses require students to be engaged and active, and faculty to work closely with each student. This is the hallmark of higher education.

An earlier Seattle Times story suggested that the faculty union’s primary concern was job protection. While WGU’s labor model is retrograde and dangerous, and will lower quality, this is not our only concern. Brick and mortar four-year schools may benefit from WGU, because the market value of real college degrees earned by students in high-quality schools will go up relative to the flood of cheap, meaningless online degrees. In many ways, WGU offers faculty job protection because it makes more valuable what we do.

The real fraud is that WGU could give our legislature an excuse to continue to underfund pre-k-12 education. According to WGU’s president in the Seattle Times, “Most WGU students would have a hard time getting accepted into a four-year state school.” Perhaps that is because their teachers have not been given the resources to prepare them for college.

Now we believe in making college more accessible, especially to poorer and minority students. But the way to do so is to give all students access to a quality pre-k-12 education so that they graduate ready for college. Instead, Washington’s legislators have discovered a loophole. If they can make the curriculum easier, then they do not need to provide the resources for a real education! Who cares about standards and quality, when WGU will allow students ill prepared by our state’s underfunded schools into “college”?

Such a strategy is insulting to our citizens and violates the spirit of our state constitution’s promise of a real education for every child. Parents who work hard and pay taxes so that their children will have an opportunity to better themselves, will now find that the state no longer feels obliged to provide their children a quality education. Rather than improve your child's education, the state will simply lower the bar for access. It would be funny if it were not so serious.

Western Governors University claims to offer poor and working people access to a college education. In fact, they are giving those students a narrow, technical education that lacks either the breadth or the depth of a real college education.

WGU admits its limited aim in its own promotional literature. For example, I recently received a packet from WGU, which included a 2010 Los Angeles Times story about the school. Among the exciting things that WGU boasted was that it took, on average, only 2.5 years to earn a bachelor’s degree.  In their marketing emails, WGU enrollment counselors ask prospective students “How quickly would you like to earn your degree?”

Students at WGU are also not asked to master complicated material. The LA Times refers to one student who said that although her classes were challenging she completed an entire semester’s work in one week because, after working in her field for thirteen years, “she already knew everything being taught in the course.”

Clearly the course could not have been that challenging, and certainly it did not offer this student new insights or skills.

A real college education takes four years not because every major requires four years. For example, at Western Washington University the history major requires 60 credits, or about 12-15 courses. To graduate from Western Washington University, however, requires 180 credits.

To WGU, these extra credits are a waste of time.

So why do the old-fashioned institutions waste so much of their students’ time? The answer is simple. One of the most important goals of college education in the United States is to offer students exposure to the arts and sciences—what’s known as liberal education.

College graduates are expected not to be just trained technicians, but also citizens capable of making sense of the social, political, economic, and scientific challenges facing their country. College graduates do not simply master a small set of technical competencies, but also learn to be thoughtful, creative, and committed citizens. By asking students to take a broad array of courses, we help prepare them for the issues they will face as adults.

The foundation of liberal education is the arts and sciences. We all know the importance of science to our future. As President Obama made clear in his State of the Union, scientific innovation will prove vital not only in America’s economic competition with foreign nations, but to solving the most pressing issues of the day.

Equally important is ensuring that America’s students are grounded in the humanities and social sciences. Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) and Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and Representatives Tom Petri (R-Wisconsin) and David Price (D-North Carolina), recently urged the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to put together a Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences to remind Americans of how important these subjects are.

“Our nation’s long tradition of research and scholarship in humanities and social science has been the basis for an informed citizenry that comes from many countries, races, religions and cultures, but shares a common set of ideals, such as liberty, equal opportunity, and the rule of law,” said Republican Senator Lamar Alexander, who has served as U.S. Secretary of Education and President of the University of Tennessee. (link)

"As our world becomes more interconnected, building a solid foundation in the humanities is of vital national importance,” Rep. David Price said. “It is the humanities which ground, inform, and shape our civic, cultural, and intellectual lives. Maintaining a robust capacity for teaching and research in these fields will help provide a context and a framework for the most current and urgent policy debates.”

Maintaining “a robust capacity for teaching and research” in any field—whether in the sciences, humanities, or social sciences--  is exactly what WGU does not do. It has no real teachers. Its employees engage in no research. It does not require its students to gain any meaningful exposure to the values and knowledge of liberal education. In short, it does not offer its students access to college.

Why does this matter? From an economic perspective, liberal education creates the kinds of innovators our economy will need. That’s why China, Abu Dhabi, and other countries are trying to import our model—they want to foster creative graduates that will help their nation compete against our own. (see earlier post “Learning from China”)

But liberal education matters in ways that go beyond economics. As Senator Alexander and Representative Price make clear, liberal education also is about making sure that individual citizens and the communities in which they live benefit from college. We need citizens who understand today’s complex problems from multiple perspectives. We need to allow individuals in college to do more than just fulfill a series of pre-existing competencies.

In looking over WGU’s competencies, one quickly realizes that the reason students get through the programs so fast is because WGU demands so little of them. As a teacher I know that students will rise to the expectations you set. If you set them too low, you cheat your students out of their education. They may be satisfied, but they will not be smarter.

WGU’s promotional literature claims to offer students affordable access to college.  The sad truth is that students who enroll at WGU are denied a college education. At some point, we must stop dumbing down the curriculum, lowering our expectations, and exploiting people by giving them a shoddy product and calling it something it’s not. We should call WGU what it is: a certification mill. It is not college. You can put lipstick on a pig...

  
The hardest thing in the world is to change a mind. Just think about how difficult it is for two people from opposing political parties to listen to each other and to learn from each other. You can only imagine, then, how hard it is to teach, since teaching is about changing minds.

And this is where the farce of online learning is really made clear. Changing minds is hard work; it requires ongoing effort by teachers precisely because our brains are structured to make it hard for us to learn new things. At least this is what we learn from cognitive science.

We can learn easier if we think about new concepts via ideas we already have. So let me offer an analogy. We have all studied for driving tests. We know how we do it. We cram. We quickly memorize a bunch of things, and hope that we pass the test. Two days later few of us know how slow we should go when crossing railroad tracks. Our minds haven’t really changed.

On the other hand, learning to drive was a slow, transformative process. To learn to drive our brains had to learn to see and respond to the world in new ways, quite different from walking, and quite different from cramming for a test. We had to learn not just the “facts” of how to drive, but the deeper structures of thought that make it possible for us to be drivers and to make sense of the facts that come before us. There is a fundamental difference between passing a driving exam and being a driver.

It is precisely this kind of deep thinking that true collegiate education seeks to foster. Online education, on the other hand, is more like cramming for the driving exam while sitting in line at the DMV.

Why is this? Well, it’s precisely because of how the brain works. Our brains tend to develop pathways that are hard to change. Real learning requires rewiring, and rewiring requires ongoing interaction between students, course material, and teachers.

The first step is for students to let their guard down. This means that teachers need to earn their students’ trust so that when we start pushing new ideas and concepts, students will be receptive. If their brains shut down, they will resist learning since it’s hard and often scary.

The next step is for students to actually develop new neuronal pathways. This is where the real stuff of education happens. Through discussion, through sophisticated assignments (labs, papers, exams), and through practice, students slowly learn to think more deeply about the material before them.

Take, for example, the challenges I face in my course on the American Revolution. Most students think that the Revolution was about avoiding taxes. It’s deeply wired into their brains. But it’s wrong. The Revolution was about consenting to taxes (“no taxation without representation”). But I can’t simply tell my students this. They would just put this factoid in their short term memory for the test, and then they would forget it. If I want them to know it, I have to help them construct the knowledge in their brains.

This requires real effort. For example, I have my students read James Otis’s objections to the Stamp Tax. We then take apart his argument, step by step, during class discussion. Students focus on passages, struggle through them, and then repeat what they have learned. Because the brain only remembers things it cares about, we then reflect on the deeper significance of Otis’s argument—namely, that a government that taxes without consent is nothing more than brute force. They then write a paper on the topic to help ensure that what they have read and talked about becomes part of their long-term understanding of the Revolution.

When I read their papers I am looking for proof that they have not just memorized what they learned in class, but actually understand whyand how Otis and other Revolutionary leaders came to their conclusions. I want to know that they are thinking in new ways, not just repeating what they heard in class.

But if it takes this much work just to get students to see that the Revolutionaries cared about consenting to taxes, imagine how much more work it takes to get students to develop both the knowledge and thinking habits of a discipline like history or chemistry, or a field such as teaching or engineering. It takes time and the collective effort of many teachers working together to consistently deepen students’ knowledge and skills.

One can tell the difference between a student who has crammed for an assessment—or competency—and one who has actually understood the material. In complex assignments—such as labs and papers—a good teacher can figure out who has gained superficial facts, and who has started to make the deeper connections that characterize actual learning.

Assigning and evaluating these assignments requires teachers who understand their fields and have the time and capability to evaluate how well students are understanding the material. Without such teachers, student learning is at risk.

Old-fashioned conversations are central. When students come into my office to talk, I can push them to think more deeply. I can also assess whether a student is really getting to the structures of a problem, or whether she or he remains at the surface. In short, when I know the students and their work, I can figure out who is actually learning, and help those who are not.

Good teachers seek to transform how students think, not just to develop a predigested set of competencies. Our goals are much more profound, and more difficult. In fact, the best students will often surprise. They will come up with creative ideas that are only possible after much hard work and real learning. But this is good. Creativity is the key to innovation, and innovation is vital if we are to graduate students capable of meeting this generation’s complex social, political, and economic challenges. We do not want all our students to graduate with the same set of competencies; we expect much more from them than that.

This is the kind of work that we do in our brick and mortar old-fashioned classrooms. We take students and slowly, over years, enable them to think more deeply about the subjects they are studying. We encourage depth. We do not get fooled by the right answers (“false positives”), but instead want to be sure that students are actually thinking differently. Getting the right answers is easy; understanding why those answers are right is much more difficult.

In short, we don’t teach students how to pass a driving exam. We teach them to be drivers.
Who would you entrust with your car keys, someone who has mastered the competencies well enough to pass a computer test and sweat through a driving exam, or someone who has learned to drive?

Bill Gates likes to proclaim that colleges are living in the past. Certainly he and others are hoping to make a lot of money off of students. But his brand of technological utopianism is naïve and dangerous. It certainly is not in Washington’s students’ interests.

In reality, changing minds is hard work. There is a fundamental difference between passing an exam or assessment and actually becoming a different kind of person. Our brains resist new challenges. Quick tests can give the illusion of learning, but cognitive scientists have made clear that most of this is just short-term memory. It won’t last. Getting students to think about the world in new ways is not something that can be done easily nor cheaply. Instead, it is a difficult task that takes a lot of time. It is also an act of love, and an obligation that we teachers take very seriously.

To learn more about why teachers matter, take a look at: James Zull, The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning. 
 

So this blogger decided that the future is uncertain, and that perhaps he should return to school. Knowing that the House recently voted to support making Western Governors University an official state school, I looked over their programs. I teach college now, so I thought I’d go back to get my social studies teaching certification. Sooner or later, the market for teachers will pick up, and perhaps I’d be prepared to take on a new career in middle or high school education.

We all know that teachers can have a huge impact on a child’s future.

I e-mailed WGU for more information, and a courteous “enrollment counselor” quickly responded to recruit me. He was kind in his tone, and very supportive of my future.

The only question I had was, “who are the teachers?” So I e-mailed him back asking for a link to find out who would teach me and what their qualifications were. Sadly, he responded, “we do not have such a link.” But, he asked me to call.

On the phone, he was very helpful and kind. I asked again about a link to know who were the professors. Here’s a rough transcript of our conversation:

WGU: “We don’t have a link for professors.”

Me: “So how do I know who is going to teach me?”

WGU: “To know you could try the records department, but that’s not information we have to give out. We’re a private nonprofit.”

Me: “Why?”

WGU: “Because we’re private. We don’t just release that information.”

Me: “So how do I know who will be my teachers.”

WGU: “We don’t have teachers. We have mentors. Mentors don’t teach your classes. You’re learning on your own.”

Me: “So there are no teachers?”

WGU: “There are mentors but they don’t teach you the course. You have your book, your syllabi. You have to pass the final assessment.”

Me: “What are mentors?”

WGU: “They’re like your life coaches through the program. They do not help with the classes.”

Me: “What if I don’t understand the material? Will my mentor help me learn it?”

WGU: “If you don’t understand, you call your mentor, and your mentor will provide you resources—a link, a module, a webinar, something like that.”

In short, Western Governors University is not an institution of higher learning. Earlier we pointed out that online higher education is to real education what online religion and online sex are to real churches and loving relationships. Teaching, like religion and love, is based on trusting relationships.  

But the problem with WGU is even worse than we thought: WGU is not committed to teaching students! Studies make clear that good teachers have a huge impact on student development. Yet, there are no teachers, only “mentors” who have a list of links, modules, and webinars.

Would you send your son to a hospital staffed with WGU’s online health degree graduates?

Would you want your daughter to be educated in a school made up WGU’s teachers, especially given how little WGU values teachers?

Of course, what employer will value a degree from an institution that is ashamed to publicize who will be teaching its students? A degree’s value comes from the confidence businesses have that students have undergone a meaningful process of learning under demanding, qualified teachers.                                                                                                

More important, this sounds like a way for the state to gain more graduates without having to educate. Some of the poorest Washingtonians—those who don’t realize that they’re paying for worthless stuff—will enroll, spend their money, receive their degree, and then realize that they have wasted their time learning little for a degree with low market value. It’s not just cheap. It takes advantage of some of the most vulnerable, who deserve better.

We might as well make Wikipedia an official state university. And if you have problems, the mentor is waiting. His name is Google. This would be even cheaper than WGU.

 
This blog recently came down against BH 1822 and Senate bill 5136 which would establish the Western Governor’s University as an official state university. As the blog noted, when one examines closely the WGU website, one discovers that there are no teachers. All of the material that the WGU would teach is already available on the web, often in much better form, such as through MIT and other institutions. The difference is that real colleges must teach students to understand the material and then evaluate students’ intellectual growth and academic performance. Those two functions require committed teachers.

This is more than a cost issue, which is how it tends to be portrayed. Teachers are of course expensive. The material itself is cheap; it’s already on the web. What’s expensive is having flesh and blood people in classrooms to educate students: to engage with them; to help them when they are struggling; to inspire them; to make them see how the subject before them matters; to use proper pedagogy to help students learn.

But we need to look beyond cost, and here it may help to reason by analogy.

Many of us go to church. Most of what churches offer is also available online. For example, there are no shortage of sites with electronic annotated editions of the Bible. One can access on-line videos and Bible curricula. Almost everything you do in church can be done online, except—and this is a big exception—form meaningful relationships with the church teacher (the minister) and fellow congregants. Religion is a social experience. Religious teachers who develop relationships with their congregants do not just inspire their faith, but challenge people to be better at it. Ministers can point to particular problems in specific congregants, while also pushing every church member to follow the church’s teachings, and to learn how to do so better.

In church, moreover, one is shaped by relationships with fellow congregants. Religion is intensely personal, which is why building trust within a community is vital to ensuring conversion, commitment, and spiritual growth. It’s no different with higher education. When churches are no longer necessary, then perhaps we will no longer need professors in brick and mortar classrooms.

Of course, the Pacific Northwest is notorious for its low churchgoing rates, so perhaps another analogy will resonate more clearly. Internet porn is not sex. Certainly, Internet porn provides the cheap satisfactions of sex, but the deeper meaning of sex, and the long-term relationships that we have with our partners, are substantively different. Similarly, online education can provide the illusion of learning, but it should not be confused for the real thing. When we no longer need sex—or, for that matter, marriage—then we will no longer need professors.

In short, the Internet is a wonderful tool for making information available. Whether that is course material, religious teachings, or images of naked people, Americans have greater access than ever before. That access is also easy. What’s hard is the actual stuff of learning, religion, and sex—the long-term commitments and the ongoing challenges that each involves. True religious commitment requires a difficult process of challenging one’s self and being challenged by both one’s minister and a community of trusted congregants. Real sex involves real people, and also the meaningful relationships we have with our partners. Internet porn does not replace marriage. Higher education is no different. It requires professors and students to trust each other, to build relationships, and to challenge each other constantly if learning is to be meaningful.

The Internet makes information available to people who would never before have had access. This is one its great attributes. But when it comes to education, we must stop confusing cheap and easy thrills with the real thing.

The governor, in her recent State of the State address, made clear what exactly is wrong with the policies being pursued in Washington higher education.

In her discussion of how to close the budget hole given last fall’s election results, she argued that many state services should be paid for solely by its direct consumers. “Why, for instance, do we assume all taxpayers should pay for programs that benefit a few?,” she wondered, a question that her budget proposals raise for state parks, transportation, and tuition rates for college students.

This, of course, makes sense, if the benefits that government provided applied only to the consumers of that particular service. But in most cases, all of us are the beneficiaries of government services, which is why we pay for them collectively.

State parks, for example, are not simply private reserves for a few outdoorsy Washingtonians. They preserve and make accessible Washington’s natural and human heritage for all citizens of this state and, more generally, of the country. Similarly, roads, railroads, and ferries are not simply private turnpikes, but instead they ensure that all citizens can interact across space and, as important, they encourage trade and other economic activity from which we all benefit.

But nowhere are the collective benefits more clear than in education. For starters, it has been shown again and again that access to quality education is the best way to reduce crime (and the soaring costs of imprisonment), encourage economic growth, and promote engaged, thoughtful citizens. All who live in a democratic market society therefore benefit from ensuring citizens access to education.

According to the Governor’s logic, however, only parents in public schools should pay for them since they are the consumers. Parents who no longer have kids in school, adults without children, and parents who can send their children to private schools do not have to share the burden. But if the benefits are shared, so should the costs.

Long ago Samuel Adams worried about just this problem. As governor of Massachusetts following American independence, Adams argued that if private schools proliferated, citizens would no longer be willing to uphold their civic duty by supporting public education and, he feared, “the useful learning, instruction and social feelings in the early parts of life, may cease to be so equally and universally disseminated, as it has heretofore been.” In fact, he believed that the few would be educated while the many were denied access, posing a grave threat to the new republic.

The same concerns exist for higher education. Public colleges and universities are not simply private commodities that students consume. Certainly, college students gain private benefits from attending college, including, over the long term, a higher income. But college graduates are more likely to become civic leaders and to create an economy with high-paying jobs that benefit the entire community. Again, the benefits are shared, and so too should be the costs.

According to the Governor’s logic, the state’s services are no different from Walmart’s products. You want something, buy it. What is forgotten is that the state provides these services to benefit everyone, and thus it is our duty as citizens to pay for them together.

Of course, the Governor in her heart knows this, which is why she understands that the transformations that she is pursuing and which she believes citizens are demanding are, as she put it in December, not moral. But the problem is not just morality but a larger misunderstanding about the purposes of government. Taxes pay for roads, for parks, and for education because the benefits of having them are widespread. A society without educated people and a functioning infrastructure will quickly deteriorate as its civic and the economic foundation falls apart.

At stake are two different views of society. On the one hand, we are all individuals, and there is, as Margaret Thatcher once argued, no such thing as society. The other is the tradition we inherited from the American Revolution in which, as Samuel Adams made clear, individual freedom depends on citizens willing to work together for their common good.

Americans face growing international economic competition. Washington, poised on the Pacific Rim, expects to be one of the beneficiaries or victims of the emergence of powerful economies on the other side of the ocean. It is common sense today that education, and higher education in particular, will determine which economy will emerge victorious in this new global age.

To many Washington policymakers and citizens, economic competition requires technical training—focusing on those specific jobs that are expected to grow. At both the community college and the four-year college level, there is an effort to direct money and students to “high demand” fields that will help Washingtonians develop a vibrant economy for the twenty-first century.

Certainly, we should offer vocational and technical training to our citizens, especially in two-year colleges. But is this enough? Are the more broad, more general, liberal arts and sciences programs that have long defined baccalaureate education a waste of money and time? Are they a luxury we can no longer afford? Are they likely to encourage the kind of economic innovation we need? To answer these questions, perhaps we should look abroad, to the very economies from which we now face competition.

There has been much discussion of Asian tiger economies and the importance of technical higher education in China and elsewhere. For a long time, the Chinese government invested heavily in developing technical experts, hoping that their well-trained workers would compete successfully against Americans and Europeans for jobs. But now, as China emerges as an important economic power in its own right, it is rethinking this strategy. No longer willing to be just technicians, the Chinese wish to be leaders. And, they have discovered, to lead requires investing in the liberal arts and sciences.

China, for example, has recently opened a new liberal arts university to encourage students to be more creative. It is encouraging its students to think outside the box. It is investing in small student-centered classrooms and embracing a more flexible curriculum. In doing so China is moving beyond its traditional vocational focus in its bid to become the world’s economic leader. The Chinese know that the leaders of tomorrow will require a broad education in the arts and sciences.

This is the same conclusion reached by Michigan State University professor Yong Zhao in his book Catching Up or Leading the Way. Zhao, who was born and raised in China but is now living in the United States and raising his family here, argues that Americans are being short-sighted in emphasizing technical education and easily quantifiable results. Observing his young children’s education, Zhao notes that what makes American education distinctive is not its obsessive focus on standardized tests, but the unquantifiable value of programs that promote creativity—the arts, music, theater, and extra-curricular activities. He concludes that even as Americans fall behind on international standardized tests—something, no doubt, we hope to change—they continue to have the most competitive and creative economy precisely because of the broad education their children receive, an education that is overlooked by most international comparisons.

In short, the broad education provided by Washington’s four-year institutions creates the kind of people that our economy and our society needs.

Perhaps no experiment speaks more of this effort to go from being the world’s technicians to its creative leaders than the opening of the new New York University campus in Abu Dhabi. Funded by the Abu Dhabi government, the campus hopes to become the “world’s honors college.” But Abu Dhabi’s government, like China’s, knows that the most creative students would be ill served by a narrow, technical education. The world needs technicians, but Abu Dhabi also wants to educate the next generation of innovators. The core curriculum is oriented around four major areas:Pathways of World Literature; Structures of Thought and Society; Art, Technology, and Invention; and Ideas and Methods of Science. In short, NYU-Abu Dhabi seeks to replicate the American liberal arts and sciences model for the world.

There are places in the United States, too, that are refocusing on liberal education. Business schools are increasingly arguing that their students need to receive more humanistic education in order to be better leaders and thinkers. Medical schools seek students who have a strong liberal arts background because they know that these doctors have not just the creative capacities but also the empathy that future doctors will need. In short, both business and medical schools believe that it is not enough to have technical knowledge; one needs the broad foundation that only a liberal arts and sciences education provides.

The liberal arts and sciences matter for more than just economic reasons. Baccalaureate education prepares people for life. We hope that a democratic society offers its citizens the education necessary to lead fulfilling lives. Moreover, in a tradition reaching back to the Founding Fathers, liberal education is intended to prepare students to be responsible and effective citizens. The nice thing, however, is that the four-year colleges’ curriculum of liberal arts and sciences can do all these things. In helping students prepare for their personal lives and their roles as citizens, it also develops their creative, analytic, and thinking skills—the skills that other countries recognize have been the basis for Americans’ economic global dominance.

Of course, Washingtonians need and deserve more than one kind of higher education. There is an important place in Washington for technical, vocational training. But, as our economic competitors know, we also need the broader, creative education that will inspire new ideas and new solutions to current and future problems. We have tended to focus our resources on the former and forget about the latter. In a competitive global world, however, China, Abu Dhabi, and other countries will claim the ground that we abandon. It’s time for us to reclaim it—both to improve our society and to retain our competitiveness.