"It's time to prioritize what students want and need over what we want to teach"

[mahagonny]

Well, if plenty of jobs for new high school graduates is bad news for colleges, why should the fate of colleges be a matter of general concern? They aren't all going away.

That statement describes the situation well. In the economic cycles, you expect a smaller proportion of high school graduates to go to college when the unemployment rate is low. And vice versa.

That fluctuation is generally accommodated by having many schools that can adjust their capacity a lot. The model would have them appointing temporary instructors when enrollment peaks, and letting those folks go when enrollment dips.

We also have schools that are not able to adjust their enrollment. Some schools have a fixed number of dorm beds and classrooms, and try to run at 100%. They vary their admission rate instead. If they are attractive enough, students' quality and ability to pay will remain adequate.

Another way fluctuation in overall numbers is accommodated is for some schools to close when enrollment dips. New ones open when enrollment peaks (in the previous boom, we saw a lot of for-profits open to supply that demand).

Sorry about the OT reply for this thread.

They could also adjust by cutting tuition and fees to attract more students. They could get rid of bureaucracies that are there to make them look cool and up to date, like diversity and inclusion staff. Or the people that drop in on your department meetings and want to improve our language, i.e. talk about 'persons who identify as female' etc.

[Caracal]

This implicit dichotomy really bugs me. While education can (and should) do more than "solely" prepare them for a job, if 4 years and tens of thousands of dollars don't make them substantially more employable than before, there's something seriously wrong.

Well, the unemployment rate for college grads is more than three times lower than that for people who only graduated high school. https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/yes-even-young-college-graduates-have-low-unemployment/

We don't have control group here, but this is a pretty stark difference. Where people get into trouble is with this idea that if this is why people go to college then colleges need to find some way to have college teach the exact skills needed to get some high paying job. But, colleges will never be able to do that part well, because they were never designed to.

[polly_mer]

That's nice.  So what happens to your job when "everyone" votes with their feet to do something else instead of going to expensive, irrelevant college that takes far too long and still doesn't help achieve goals like finding one's place in the world?

What is happening here is that people are seeing a real problem, but then using it to advance ideas about what colleges should teach which really don't relate to the problem

First, there's the issue of credentialing and degrees. There is a huge wage gap between people who get college degrees and those who don't. The incentive to go to college is quite high, but the price is high too. Basically, students are presented with this high stakes wager. The Expected Value (gambling term) is high enough usually that its a bet they should make, but it a risky bet and if you don't finish college or if you do and aren't able to realize those expected returns in higher wages, you end up in a bad place. Partly this is about student loans and tuition, but really this is about inequality. It would be nice if the bet was less risky, but it also wouldn't be incentivized in the same way if people could get more jobs without a college degree and if those jobs paid better. In this imaginary world, people graduating high school would be able to make reasonable decisions about college that factored in their capacity and desire to go.

What drives me nuts is that you see administrators and others look at this state of affairs and think "ok, students are making this risky bet, so what we need to do is reshape everything to try to make it more likely that the bet will pay off." In theory, that sounds fine, but higher education was never meant to do that and will never do it well. Colleges will never be able to predict and teach the exact skills that will be needed for jobs. Sure, there are certain kinds of pre professional programs where that model might make sense, but not everyone is equipped to be a nurse or a PT and most jobs don't require that kind of specialized training. Colleges are never going to be able to singlehandedly give students "what they want and need" to "find their place in the world," or get a job or any of that. It won't work. What might result is that you make college into a deadening experience where students plod through courses that are supposed to help them succeed in the world, but don't do anything to give them a broader perspective or challenge their thinking.

I agree with much of what you've laid out as the problem and background, but I disagree with the proposed solution. 

From my perspective "What might result is that you make college into a deadening experience where students plod through courses that are supposed to help them succeed in the world, but don't do anything to give them a broader perspective or challenge their thinking" is exactly the current situation with much of the general education requirements that are so heavily weighted towards the humanities for people who are in college to do something else.

Over the years, I've read many articles that insist that current math requirements are too high and are blocking people who could do quite well in some fields with minimal math.  A recent example is https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2019/09/03/california-state-university-considering-adding-quantitative-reasoning.

However, where I live outside the university, the hardest positions to fill are those that require in-depth specific knowledge that builds on substantial fluency in math before we can even do anything in the field.  Calculus I is essentially the same as Greek 101, Latin 101, or French 101 decades/centuries ago when only the clergy, lawyers, and elites went to college.  People who can't come up to proficiency in math on the timeline provided end up with nothing they can take in their major because they are functionally innumerate.  We have prerequisites because people really must be numerate to go on to the next step in the same way that people really must be literate at a high level to benefit from a liberal arts education.  For example, by junior year, someone who cannot think through a problem, set up the relevant partial differential equations and boundary/initial conditions, and then let the computer crank through the actual solution is akin to someone who can't read a whole Harry Potter book.

However, we're not doing the equivalent of dental assistant training to earn a bachelor's degree in engineering.  We can't limit ourselves that way because we need people who can function effectively in changing conditions where only the physical laws remain constant.  However, taking a couple humanities classes is generally far less useful to getting a broader perspective and challenging one's thinking than being on a real project working with people of all kinds of backgrounds and having to square one's textbook knowledge of the physically possible with the needs and desires of actual people who have to live with the results of the project. 

The humanities knowledge from history, philosophy, and even novels can be very relevant to the situation at hand, but a random selection of courses is probably less useful than some targeted reading before shipping out to rural Guatemala or urban St. Louis.  Knowing generically about how power structures work can be valuable if that causes the team to interact with the locals to determine who the real decision-makers are, not just who has the expected title, but that's much less likely to happen if the humanities courses someone was forced to take focused more on a couple specific power structures and how to assign the desired *ist names.

The internships, co-ops, and undergraduate research projects in a good engineering program will challenge people's thinking outside of theory and textbook solutions.  The human aspects of effective teamwork and how to really communicate (what's important?  Who needs to know?  Can it wait for the next scheduled report or should someone hit the stop button now and run to the project manager?) are an integral part of the education.  Again, a humanities class, no matter how fabulous, is no substitute for really doing the work in a situation where theory will be insufficient and one has to have a broad knowledge of all the science underpinning standard engineering practice.

To be clear, we absolutely need people who focus and become experts in the humanities and all fields of knowledge.  My life has benefited greatly from being a voracious reader who continues to read all kinds of things.  However, at some point, people have to be allowed to specialize and go forward in early adulthood on paths that have absolute prerequisites that cannot be sidestepped or waived.  We cannot, as one recent article proposed, make "everyone" get a liberal arts college degree that barely scratches the surface for the mathematics and the math-based sciences to then spend another 4-6 years in a post-graduate program.  That's not going to work out for us as a society.

The inequities about how K-12 education is ripping off many students do drive me nuts as well.  Some of the students who get to college really only have an 8th grade education or less.  Those are the students who need college the most, but are unlikely to finish or to finish in such a way that their investment pays off.  People who have a solid high school education and can choose to not attend college because they have other options by virtue of their social capital tend to do fine.  The problem is exactly the continued ripping off of bringing the 8th grade-educated students all the way up to a high school education by the time those folks finish college.  One of the saddest things I've seen is people who now have that shiny college degree and don't realize they can't get a middle-class job in their hometown nor are they competitive in the national market because they aren't highly educated and they don't have the social networks that will get them into a middle-class job outside of the formal application process.

If anything, I would have more people doing paid internships and co-ops with whatever path a given student thinks they might want to have then continue to double down on more general education classes to have people explore the world.  Ideally, we'd all have done much of that exploration in K-12, as do most other first-world nations.

Someone who is educated with a solid understanding of math, the science that depends on math, and the teamwork, time-management, and other soft skills that one picks up as a successful engineering graduate tends to do well in the world, even if they don't end up in a job with the title of engineer.  Indeed, one of the continuing frustrations all around is how many recent engineering graduates don't go into engineering so that, even with engineering graduation rates up, we're still short on the high-level knowledge that one only acquires through several years of working after school.  Grad school isn't really the same other than the time one racks up on projects doing the actual research as part of the team.

[spork]

[. . .]

make college into a deadening experience where students plod through courses that are supposed to help them succeed in the world, but don't do anything to give them a broader perspective or challenge their thinking.

You've pretty much described the undergraduate business major.

[Hegemony]

"We cannot, as one recent article proposed, make "everyone" get a liberal arts college degree that barely scratches the surface for the mathematics and the math-based sciences to then spend another 4-6 years in a post-graduate program.  That's not going to work out for us as a society."

Polly_mer, I think you must mean a humanities degree?  A liberal arts degree includes math and science.  For instance, my dictionary defines "liberal arts" as "academic subjects such as literature, philosophy, mathematics, and social and physical sciences as distinct from professional and technical subjects."  So for instance math is liberal arts, engineering is technical.

At my university, a mediocre R1, only 13% of our students are majoring in the liberal arts.  For the rest it's business, advertising, engineering, sports physiology, and the like.  Even liberal arts majors, such as biology major, are required to take only three semester-long humanities courses.  That's three courses out of a total of 32.  That doesn't seem like such a high number that airy-fairy humanities requirements are going to disable the potential technical prowess of students at this university.

[polly_mer]

"We cannot, as one recent article proposed, make "everyone" get a liberal arts college degree that barely scratches the surface for the mathematics and the math-based sciences to then spend another 4-6 years in a post-graduate program.  That's not going to work out for us as a society."

Polly_mer, I think you must mean a humanities degree?  A liberal arts degree includes math and science.  For instance, my dictionary defines "liberal arts" as "academic subjects such as literature, philosophy, mathematics, and social and physical sciences as distinct from professional and technical subjects."  So for instance math is liberal arts, engineering is technical.

Yes, I'm aware that a true liberal arts degree includes math and science.  However, the term "liberal arts" as used down at the lower tiers of institutions tends to be very humanities heavy and very light on math and the science that uses math at moderate to high levels (i.e., generally only physics and math itself will clear the bar and the small physics programs have been closing in droves). 

I managed to refrain from laughing and crying during a reprioritization in which the chair of the board of trustees asked if we could get some of those STEM degree programs and the provost waved me over to explain that we'd first have to start offering calculus all the way through at least ordinary differential equations when we weren't even offering calculus at the time.  I see I neglected the link in the quoted post: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/09/24/author-discusses-his-book-purpose-college.  It's pretty damn clear that the author really doesn't mean serious math and the related computer science that now goes with it the way my colleagues and I know math.  He waves towards physics, but he doesn't mean modern physics that is computational intensive (i.e., CS and engineering related knowledge) or experimental intensive with modern equipment that will get someone a job in the field with a bachelor's degree.

At my university, a mediocre R1, only 13% of our students are majoring in the liberal arts.  For the rest it's business, advertising, engineering, sports physiology, and the like.  Even liberal arts majors, such as biology major, are required to take only three semester-long humanities courses.  That's three courses out of a total of 32.  That doesn't seem like such a high number that airy-fairy humanities requirements are going to disable the potential technical prowess of students at this university.

Biology is often held up as the poster child of why the push should not be STEM because a generic biology degree is so very, very light on math (may not even require calculus) and is already so oversupplied at all levels that people can't get jobs.  A very readable article is https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/why-the-s-in-stem-is-overrated/279931/ and the situation has done nothing to improve in the past few years.

The problem I see in higher ed isn't "airy-fairy humanities requirements" so much as the lack of math requirements up to the point of being able to do something useful and then the physics/chemistry/computer science/engineering that are the something useful requiring math.  The problem is more one of opportunity cost (if someone takes one course, then what aren't they taking that same term?).  The social sciences that are an increasing part of the general education requirements that aren't calculus-and-higher-math-based are contributing every bit as much to a lack of people with the math/physics/CS skills we need out here. 

The requirements may only be 3 humanities courses, but I bet there are at least 21 other credits (7ish other courses) that are also part of general education that probably wouldn't be included in the curriculum if the goal were focused on, say, biology knowledge.  I further bet that few to none of those general education credits include 9-12 credits (lab courses are often 4 credits) of a useful programming language, enough math to need that useful programming language, and enough calculations in some course to use that math and useful programming language to become proficient instead of doing a sad march through a handful of problems to check a box related to a nebulous job-readiness goal.

For example, in engineering, the credits required are often well above 120 because of the extra general education requirements.  Some very good institutions have flat out stated their engineering degrees are a 5-6 year program to make the typical semester load reasonable.  Other excellent institutions simply rely on students coming in with enough AP/IB/dual credits that most people will be able to focus on the major instead of the background and gen ed requirements.

My employer has taken to hiring PhDs in math and then teaching them the relevant physics/engineering/computer science because that's been easier than trying to figure out how to get enough H1B holders through the US citizen process to be able to work in the areas we need the most knowledge.  We're recruiting high school students to pay their way all the way through grad school in another effort.

Our competitors are likewise so very short on people with the relevant knowledge that has a background in math, then the science/engineering that needs the math, and then the programming including algorithm development to solve the equations we can now write.

A business degree, sports physiology, or advertising doesn't help us at all when we need people for whom a set of partial differential equations is as easy to read as an English sentence and writing that set is not much harder than writing a decent research article in their native language.

We really, really don't need STEM at the expense of humanities; we do continue to need EM by people who have the ability and interest and the support all the way up so we're not losing people from the pipeline by virtue of being born in the wrong neighborhood or other irrelevancy.  Putting extra barriers in front of those folks because the liberal arts are a different good is a very, very bad idea if the goal is to maintain a comfortable society for all of us.

[marshwiggle]

I managed to refrain from laughing and crying during a reprioritization in which the chair of the board of trustees asked if we could get some of those STEM degree programs and the provost waved me over to explain that we'd first have to start offering calculus all the way through at least ordinary differential equations when we weren't even offering calculus at the time.  I see I neglected the link in the quoted post: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/09/24/author-discusses-his-book-purpose-college. It's pretty damn clear that the author really doesn't mean serious math and the related computer science that now goes with it the way my colleagues and I know math.  He waves towards physics, but he doesn't mean modern physics that is computational intensive (i.e., CS and engineering related knowledge) or experimental intensive with modern equipment that will get someone a job in the field with a bachelor's degree.

Oh, but he does:

I simply think one should go to college to pursue a liberal education. After that, if one wants job training, they should go to a technical college, participate in an apprenticeship or go to graduate or professional school. But college itself is not to prepare for specific jobs.

There you go. All of that "other stuff" can be easily picked up after the degree in one of those other places. How could it be that hard to become a nuclear physicist after getting a history degree? Probably it would take 6 months, tops.

[Caracal]

However, taking a couple humanities classes is generally far less useful to getting a broader perspective and challenging one's thinking than being on a real project working with people of all kinds of backgrounds and having to square one's textbook knowledge of the physically possible with the needs and desires of actual people who have to live with the results of the project. 

The humanities knowledge from history, philosophy, and even novels can be very relevant to the situation at hand, but a random selection of courses is probably less useful than some targeted reading before shipping out to rural Guatemala or urban St. Louis.  Knowing generically about how power structures work can be valuable if that causes the team to interact with the locals to determine who the real decision-makers are, not just who has the expected title, but that's much less likely to happen if the humanities courses someone was forced to take focused more on a couple specific power structures and how to assign the desired *ist names.

Sigh, this is pretty frustrating. You just told us that people in engineering need to know the math or they won't be able to manage, yet apparently if someone wants to go "ship out" to Guatemala or St. Louis, they just need some quick "targeted reading" and they'll be able to figure out everything they need to know. This is basically like telling this engineer that they can skip the rest of the math in college and just read about some quick targeted calculus and then they'll be able to fix that bridge problem once they get there.

The world is filled with people who think they can just do some quick reading and then they'll understand everything they need to know about those pesky locals and they can get on with the building of their bridge. But, without various skills in interpreting sources and understanding them, they won't know how to evaluate whatever they read about Guatemala. They won't know if the arguments make any sense and most likely they'll be given something that just reinforces whatever existing ideas they have about Guatemalans and they won't have developed the skills to think more critically about any of this.

[Caracal]

Oh, but he does:

I simply think one should go to college to pursue a liberal education. After that, if one wants job training, they should go to a technical college, participate in an apprenticeship or go to graduate or professional school. But college itself is not to prepare for specific jobs.

There you go. All of that "other stuff" can be easily picked up after the degree in one of those other places. How could it be that hard to become a nuclear physicist after getting a history degree? Probably it would take 6 months, tops.

That's not remotely what he's saying, of course. You can't become a nuclear physicist in six months with a physics degree (which is also a liberal arts degree) either. You have to go to...grad school. Poly has just been telling us that engineering programs aren't doing a particularly good job of training people to get jobs in engineering fields.  I'm guessing that the reason these math majors might do better is because they are people who have a good grounding in certain fundamentals and understand how to think through problems in a rigorous way. Pre-Professional programs might not be doing that because they are too focused on particular skills and aren't building up the sort of basic competencies which are more important. Seems like a good argument for the liberal arts to me...

[Wahoo Redux]

I had to chuckle at this line, not that it doesn't make sense, but because virtually everyone already thinks they have been doing this all along:

"Instead, it requires the attention of every member of every university community coming together to think less about our own self-interest and more about the common good of our institutions and society."

This is the kind of vague, moralistic, oratorical statement one makes when one has no practical suggestions----which probably reflects the predicament for everyone involved at this point.

[spork]

I work at the kind of institution Polly is talking about, where:

• General education requirements include three credits of math, which doesn't even have to be calculus or statistics. Many students fulfill this requirement with a "math concepts" course (I'm not sure what the actual content is, because the catalog description is word salad). They don't take any other math course as undergrads. (Which means they won't be in any mathematically-oriented field should they go to graduate school.)
• The nursing majors take a single statistics course.
• Biology majors take only calculus I, while chemistry majors take calculus I, II, and III. I don't see any kind of prerequisite in statistics or computational skills for the genetics course.
• There is an Intro to Python course in the catalog, but I have no idea who takes it or what the enrollment is. I think that is it for courses on programming languages.

What I do see is plenty of boutique courses that can fulfill general education distribution requirements where faculty teach their favorite subjects and expect students to be enthralled by them. Yet the students themselves have a very transactional attitude about post-secondary education. They assume that the curriculum in X makes them well prepared for a career in X when, except for perhaps nursing, it doesn't. When a major's webpage says "we prepare you for a career in business, law, government, teaching, journalism, and social services," it really means "we don't really prepare you for any career, if you were motivated and self-directed enough to know how to get what you really needed you probably wouldn't be here, but in the meantime we're happy to take your tuition money."

[marshwiggle]

I simply think one should go to college to pursue a liberal education. After that, if one wants job training, they should go to a technical college, participate in an apprenticeship or go to graduate or professional school. But college itself is not to prepare for specific jobs.

There you go. All of that "other stuff" can be easily picked up after the degree in one of those other places. How could it be that hard to become a nuclear physicist after getting a history degree? Probably it would take 6 months, tops.

That's not remotely what he's saying, of course. You can't become a nuclear physicist in six months with a physics degree (which is also a liberal arts degree) either. You have to go to...grad school. Poly has just been telling us that engineering programs aren't doing a particularly good job of training people to get jobs in engineering fields.  I'm guessing that the reason these math majors might do better is because they are people who have a good grounding in certain fundamentals and understand how to think through problems in a rigorous way. Pre-Professional programs might not be doing that because they are too focused on particular skills and aren't building up the sort of basic competencies which are more important. Seems like a good argument for the liberal arts to me...

As Polly pointed out, at one time it may have been the case that a physics degree would have been considered a "liberal arts degree", in the modern usage physics would be identified as a STEM degree, and a liberal arts degree would refer to something non-STEM.

What I do see is plenty of boutique courses that can fulfill general education distribution requirements where faculty teach their favorite subjects and expect students to be enthralled by them. Yet the students themselves have a very transactional attitude about post-secondary education.

This is the critical point that is ignored: No matter the subject matter, if students aren't engaged with it they will learn next to nothing. Neither a "liberal arts" degree or a "professional" degree will be of any use to someone who doesn't care enough to put in the work. There is no "one program to rule them all", despite what many would like to believe.

[writingprof]

One of the micro-essays to which this thread's first post links begins with the assertion that "college enrollment is down 1.7 percent nationwide."  If that really is the extent of the problem, no changes are necessary . . .

. . . which is good, because none are forthcoming. 

As for me, I have twenty more years of working ahead of me.  Surely my middling, anonymous university can make it that long.  Afterwards, the whole system can go to hell for all I care.

[Caracal]

As Polly pointed out, at one time it may have been the case that a physics degree would have been considered a "liberal arts degree", in the modern usage physics would be identified as a STEM degree, and a liberal arts degree would refer to something non-STEM.

Well you'll have to tell all of the liberal arts colleges around the country that they need to stop offering science courses then. More generally, I think the distinction is really about politics and the attempt to classify STEM classes as useful knowledge and humanities ones as fluff.

[mahagonny]

One of the micro-essays to which this thread's first post links begins with the assertion that "college enrollment is down 1.7 percent nationwide."  If that really is the extent of the problem, no changes are necessary . . .

. . . which is good, because none are forthcoming. 

As for me, I have twenty more years of working ahead of me.  Surely my middling, anonymous university can make it that long.  Afterwards, the whole system can go to hell for all I care.

Hey that sounds like of those examples of long term commitment to the health and success of the institution that characterizes the tenure track, and is so tragically lacking in part time faculty.