The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation ...]]>

In April, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices.

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk about the future of the credit hour; the second featured DiSalvio's interview with Fastweb.com and FinAid.org Publisher Mark Kantrowitz about student debt; the third, DiSalvio’s interview with Lumina Foundation President and CEO Jamie P. Merisotis about Lumina’s commitment to enrolling and graduating more students from college; and most recently, his interview with American Council on Education (ACE) President Molly Corbett Broad about the efforts ACE is making to raise educational attainment in the U.S. and around the world.

In this installment of the series, DiSalvio speaks with Richard Arum, co-author (with Josipa Roksa) of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Arum and Roksa pose fundamental questions about whether undergraduates are really learning anything during their undergraduate experience. For a large proportion of students, Arum and Roksa's answer to that question is a definitive "no."

The context

Drawing upon survey responses, transcript data, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) of more than 2,300 undergraduates at 24 institutions, Arum and Roksa deliver a stark message about the nature of undergraduate learning in the U.S.

Their analysis suggests that more than a third of American college seniors are no better at crucial types of writing and reasoning tasks than they were in their first semester of college. Furthermore, 45% of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college.

Other findings show that, on average, students devote only slightly more than 12 hours per week to studying. Based on students' self-reports, Arum and Roksa suggest that such meager investments in studying might reflect meager demands placed on students in their courses in terms of reading and writing. Another finding of their work points to persistent racial and ethnic gaps in CLA scores—and those gaps widen, in the case of African-American students—over the course of four years of college

Some see their research results as a damning indictment of the American higher-education system. Conversely, their work has drawn its share of critics, who say their analysis falls short in its assessments of certain teaching and learning methods.

Nevertheless, the suggestion that four years of undergraduate classes make little difference in a student’s ability to synthesize knowledge and to put complex ideas on paper has serious implications for academic leaders and policymakers. Arum and Roksa may be delivering a wake-up call for those institutions failing to make undergraduate education a priority and falling short of properly preparing their undergraduates for 21st-century challenges.

The interview

DiSalvio: In your book Academically Adrift, Limited Learning on College Campuses, you conclude that a significant percentage of undergraduates are failing to develop the broad-based skills and knowledge they should be expected to master. How did you come to that conclusion?

Arum: The CLA, which we used to identify scores before and after a performance test, did not move up in a significant way for many students. The analysis showed that if the test was scaled from 0-100, 36% of the students didn’t go up even one point after four years.

What’s important to emphasize is that our conclusions do not rest solely on that instrument. We also surveyed students and asked them what they were doing in their course work and in their undergraduate education. It was those responses that we found even more powerful and troubling than the lack of growth demonstrated by the large numbers of students on the assessment.

Specifically, we asked them how many hours per week they studied and prepared for class. We found that on average, full-time college students in the U.S. studied only 12 to 13 hours per week and a third of that time was spent with their friends. Studying with their friends didn’t track at all with growth. In fact, it led to negative performance. Traditional studying alone is down today. Our analysis showed that 36% of these students studied alone five or fewer hours per week—less than one hour a day.

We also asked them about their reading and writing requirements in their class. Half of the students reported that in a typical semester, they did not have any class that asked them to write more than 20 pages over the course of the semester, and 32% said that they did not have a single class where they were asked to read on an average more than 40 pages per week.

This does not apply to all students, however. We found that some students grew on this indicator and that some were studying long hours. Some were taking rigorous and demanding courses. But what we identified in our data very clearly is that large numbers of students in U.S. higher education today are able to navigate through this system with very little demanded of them, and very little effort and very little learning, as measured by this CLA assessment.

It might be useful to say a bit about what the CLA performance test assesses. The CLA assesses critical thinking, complex reasoning and the ability to communicate in writing. These are general skills most individuals think all college graduates should develop. These skills are also what employers increasingly see as the core of what college graduates need to be successful in the workforce. These competencies are assessed by the CLA not through a standardized multiple-choice test, but rather students are given a task that might be asked of them by an employer in the future. Students are given a set of documents. They are asked to think critically about the documents. The reliability and validity of the information in the documents varies so they have to think critically about the usefulness of the data. They need to synthesize information across these various sources—a complex reasoning task. They then have to write a logical argument based on these documents using that information to provide evidence to support their points. This is, again, not a simple task but exactly the kind of task you’d expect college students to improve upon the longer they were in school. Unless of course, these students were either not studying at all nor being asked to study, and were not reading or writing. A pattern emerges where one might conclude that there is limited learning for all too many of these students.

DiSalvio: While not a direct rebuke to Academically Adrift, studies by the Council for Aid to Education offer a sunnier counter-narrative to your assertions about meager learning. Their studies suggest that college does have significant effects from freshman to graduating seniors. How do you account for that discrepancy between your research and the council’s research?

Arum:  In terms of the narrow measurement issues, our study followed several-thousand students from when they entered college to when they left college. They were given a test at two points in time, so that we could measure the actual growth that occurred. So our work, in a sense, is a descriptive report of what actually exists.

The Council for Aid to Education study that came out measures freshmen out of college and measures seniors out of college at the same point in time. That study tries to infer growth statistically through manipulation of the data. They need to statistically adjust their data because freshmen and seniors at a college or university look very different. Large numbers of students drop out of college. In many institutions, it’s 50% or more. So comparing a freshman class to the senior class is comparing apples and oranges.

Inferring growth by statistically adjusting for SAT is just coming up with an estimate based on these techniques. We’re not doing statistics at all on the descriptive findings I just noted. We simply said that this is where they started and this is where they finished. In fact, their statistical adjustments are inadequate and do not fully account for the attrition going on in colleges and universities. So they overestimate growth. That’s technically the difference.

Our work is often misinterpreted and misreported to say that students aren’t benefiting from college, that nothing is being learned and that college has no value. We have never said that. We have said that too many students are not applying themselves and not learning and moving up on this important indicator. This is not the only purpose that colleges and universities serve. And they have many functions outside this. Colleges and universities teach subject specific skills and contribute to larger socio-emotional development.

Yet our work is often mischaracterized as a condemnation of all college and all undergraduate education. In page after page, we highlight the important variation we see in the data and where some students are actually applying themselves and learning at quite reasonable rates. So again, some of the problems between our two studies are around this measurement issue.

There are significant numbers of students who grow from the undergraduate experience. We hope that no one misunderstands our work and thinks that we feel college is not a useful, critical, important thing for a young adult to embark upon. Even at the high cost of U.S. higher education, where students often go into significant debt to finance their education, we feel it is still a very sound investment for the vast majority of these students.

I think what happens often is when things become as public as the book has become, people take from it pieces that they like and use it for their own ends. The larger point we are making, is that colleges and universities should do a better job at dealing with these large numbers of students that clearly can be applying themselves and developing themselves more.

DiSalvio: You observed that the existing organizational cultures and practices of contemporary colleges and universities often fail to put a high priority on undergraduate learning. What do you think are the factors that contribute to that failure?

Arum:  There are multiple factors. One of the complications of identifying those factors, of course, is that U.S. higher education is quite diverse. Institutions such as UMass Boston may face a whole different set of issues around organizational culture than Boston College. Again, we have to be careful not to generalize, but at the same time we might be able to put forward some observations that may not apply everywhere but could apply to many schools.

A good place to start to address the question of factors is to observe how U.S. higher education has moved in the direction of a consumer-client satisfaction model. Higher education institutions have increasingly come to compete over individual students—to get them to apply and attend their colleges and universities—and then to keep them happy and satisfied while they are there.

In some ways, that’s a good thing. Organizations should be responsive to the clients that they’re servicing, but it has also led to all sorts of behaviors that are less than ideal. I have visited over 100 college and university campuses over the last few years and at almost every campus I visited, they would point out the new gym, the new student center and often the new dormitories being built. There is an arms race going on in U.S. higher education to provide greater amenities to 17-year-olds who go and visit campuses and make choices about where they should spend their next four years. While this is not a sensible way for the sector as a whole to be moving, it has moved very far in that direction.

This can be seen in the way instruction is often assessed on college campuses today, where too often the only measure of teaching quality that the institution considers is the course evaluation surveys that students fill out at the end of the semester. Those course evaluation surveys all too often are nothing but consumer-satisfaction surveys. “Did you like the class? Would you recommend it to a friend? Did you find it interesting?”

Many institutions are not asking questions about the academic content. “How many hours did you study? What kind of reading requirements did you have? What kind of feedback did you get on your paper?” So to the extent that institutions assess learning or teaching, it’s often again the consumer-client model, rather than a model that would promote academic rigor and excellence.

Another way to look at this issue would be to track expenditures. Over the last couple of decades, colleges and universities have increasingly invested in non-full-time faculty and student support services. The fastest growing sector of higher education is professional and quasi-professional staff in charge of student well-being. Now again, all things being equal, that may be well and good, except these are choices that the institution has to make about where investments are going to be made and where they are not going to be made. Increasingly, colleges and universities are making investments in non-academic functions through these amenities, through the student support services and again with a decline of full-time faculty.

So I think in broad strokes, those are some of the cultural factors that might be seen throughout higher education. This varies in many institutions and certainly not all are being judged exclusively on research and scholarship productivity, but many of the colleges and universities are busy, working to move up in their rankings. That again has little or nothing to do with undergraduate education and academic rigor. It has to do with what type of students you’re going to attract to the institution, the research and productivity of faculty. However it is not a measure of actual learning that’s occurring.

DiSalvio: In your research, you have found that learning in higher education is characterized by a persistent and a growing inequality. You maintain that there are significant differences in critical thinking, complex reasoning, writing skills when comparing groups of students from different family backgrounds and racial and ethnic groups. Given that there is a gap, what do you think has to be done to deal with that gap?

Arum:  The inequalities within higher education in terms of learning are a very important part of our book that is often ignored. In K-12 education, these inequalities have long been noted and we have a great deal of public policy discourse and public policy made to target and reduce them. For example, “No Child Left Behind,” with all its faults, brought increasing attention to assessing learning outcomes for not just average groups of students but for different racial groups of students, to make sure that all students, regardless of their backgrounds, were demonstrating growth and learning. In higher education, we haven’t had much of this debate at all. In fact, faculty often are in many institutions discouraged from working with students that are struggling because of the time commitments that are involved. They are implicitly encouraged to limit those investments and instead invest in the talented, and rewarding students in terms of their academic promise.

The struggling students are often diverted to remedial course work or remedial centers on campus. The effect of some of these programs and course work is unclear. I know there is a whole national debate emerging on the lack of effectiveness of remediation and remedial course work. Students are often put there, spin their wheels and take these courses repeatedly and their progress is compromised and suffers. We need to figure out how to do all the remediation in a smarter, more effective and efficient way. I think we need to pay greater attention to that area, just the way we do in K-12 education.

DiSalvio: You have said that the limited learning that exists on campuses qualifies as a significant problem and should be the subject of concern for policymakers and practitioners and parents and citizens. Yet you also say that limited learning on college campuses isn’t a crisis because the institutional actors implicated in the system are receiving the kind of organizational outcomes that they seek, so neither the institutions themselves nor the system as a whole seems to be in any way challenged or threatened. Why then should limited learning be a subject of concern?

Arum: In the book, we argued that we didn’t think it was a significant crisis because all the actors were generally happy. Institutions increasingly have been able to generate additional revenues through increasing tuition and other means. The students were generally happy, even those from whom not much was asked, because with their short-term orientation, it seemed like they had the best of both worlds. They are getting a college degree and it actually didn’t take much to do it. They had increasing time to devote to other pursuits, whether that was working additional hours to pay for their education or just engaging in leisure pursuits.

I think there’s evidence that actually both those things are going on. Students spend about five more hours today working for pay than they did in 1960. And there are another eight hours that are just unaccounted for in terms of their studying less, but not working more. So I think there is a lot of reason to think there has not been a crisis. Since that book came out in January 2011, increasingly there is a sense of crisis in the air. That is, I think, in part because of this unsustainable increase in the cost of higher education and that financial model coming up against some real limits.

The ability to increase tuition at twice the rate of inflation indefinitely and still have more students every year attend your institution, may now be hitting some natural limits. Debt load of students, the availability of additional funding for programs in Washington and economic circumstances are leaving large numbers of people to raise questions that during the time we wrote the book were not being asked. Additionally, what has changed is that technological disruption has accelerated. And so there is increased experimentation with alternative instructional delivery mechanisms, such as online education.

For those reasons, the sense of a crisis in higher education is becoming a more plausible argument, and in fact we are in a period of uncertainty when there appears to be some profound restructuring or reengineering happening.

Economically, today’s graduates have to compete in an increasingly globalized world. And so it’s not the case as it was maybe 40 or 50 years ago that their limited learning might not have mattered because they are still going to do better than the high school graduate who did not go to college. That still may be true to some degree, but they are competing today not just against the high school graduate but the software engineer in Ireland and the architectural design firm in Germany and the engineering companies in Asia.

The consequences of this limited learning for them and for the country as a whole are increasingly going to require addressing and remedying.

Limited learning in terms of critical thinking and complex reasoning and communication also has implications for the ability of our country in the future to have a functioning democratic system. The college graduates today are expected to be the civic leaders of tomorrow and yet the students that we’re tracking into the labor market were asked how often they read the newspaper in print or online and 36% of them said monthly or never. How can a functioning democratic system exist when the educated elite in the country are no longer reading news on a regular basis?

So, to think critically about the political rhetoric and to think systematically about the complex problems of the day are essential skills for the broader civic society. If we ignore this problem, I worry it will have much more profound implications than just our economy losing its competitive edge.

DiSalvio: What should higher education leaders and policymakers take away from your work and is it a call for action?

Arum:​ Hopefully it will be read as a call for action and that call for action will come from the leaders of higher education institutions. We feel strongly that the federal government, in a well-intentioned effort to address these problems, should not impose an accountability scheme on higher education in a centralized manner. We feel that would end up leading to all sorts of distortions and counterproductive changes as was seen in the "No Child Left Behind" program and the resultant imposed accountability frameworks imposed.

Because there is a real problem, demonstrated by consistent and overwhelming empirical data, we feel higher education has a responsibility to address this in a systematic way. The best place for that problem to be addressed, particularly in the U.S., with its decentralized higher education system and very large private sector, is at the institutional level.

Institutional leaders should take these issues seriously and must be willing to assess learning in their own institutions and to identify areas of concern to improve. We’ve been very clear to say that higher education institutions must answer three questions: 1) How are you measuring learning on your campus? 2) Where are the areas that need improvement? 3) What are you doing to improve those areas?

We should not need the federal government or a state government or even a board of trustees to tell us to do that. Every academic leader should be asking those questions because that is, in part, what defines academic leadership and what differentiates higher education institutions from an ordinary business.

DiSalvio: In your experience, how have higher education leaders generally responded to that call for action?

Arum: Higher education leaders overwhelmingly agree with the idea that there is a real problem. Some might express concern about the reputation of their own institution and say that the problem does not exist on their campus. But overwhelmingly, higher education leaders acknowledge that there is a problem because their institutional data confirms that the problem exists.

So, while it appears there is a widespread sense that there is indeed a problem that should be addressed, many feel they do not have the adequate tools to be able to do the work. There is not always a sense that the assessment tools available match up with their institution's needs.

While course evaluations are commonly used in higher education, I think different instruments might be used to track student’s objective learning growth. As those tools become available, our hope is these tools will be embraced and widely utilized by the vast majority of institutions.

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation ...]]>

In April, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices.

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk about the future of the credit hour; the second featured DiSalvio's interview with Fastweb.com and FinAid.org Publisher Mark Kantrowitz about student debt; the third, DiSalvio’s interview with Lumina Foundation President and CEO Jamie P. Merisotis about Lumina’s commitment to enrolling and graduating more students from college; and most recently, his interview with American Council on Education (ACE) President Molly Corbett Broad about the efforts ACE is making to raise educational attainment in the U.S. and around the world.

In this installment of the series, DiSalvio interviews Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), on why liberal education is essential to America’s global future.

The context

From its founding in 1915, AAC&U has focused on advancing and strengthening liberal education for all college students, regardless of their intended careers. AAC&U sees liberal education as a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills and prepares them to deal with complexity, diversity and change. This liberal education approach, characterized by challenging encounters with important issues, is more a way of studying than a specific course or field of study. AAC&U maintains that this can be achieved at all types of colleges and universities.

While some argue that the best possible preparation to meet the challenges of the 21st century is a liberal education, others say that liberal arts colleges and the concepts behind the usefulness of a liberal education have been falling short in communicating the purpose of a college education, what a good education looks like and how education should fit into the higher education fabric of the nation.

Proclamations about “the death of liberal arts,” and reports about student debt and the unemployability of those with an undergraduate liberal education abound. Others ask how practical versus idealistic college should be. In a recent New York Times interview, Hunter Rawlings, the president of the Association of American Universities, stated: “You just don’t know what your education is going to result in. Many of the kids graduating from college these days are going to hold a number of different jobs in their lives, and many of those jobs have not yet been invented. For a world like that, what’s the best education? It seems to me it’s a very general education that enables you to think critically.”

Carol Geary Schneider provides a perspective on the state of U.S. liberal education today.

The interview

DiSalvio: The broad goals of liberal education have endured even as the courses and requirements that comprise a liberal education have changed. How has liberal education changed over the years? Is it relevant today considering the rapid pace and complexity of change in today’s global economy?

Schneider: There are three broad goals of liberal and liberal arts education that have endured not only just over the years, but over the millennia. In each era, we rethink the meaning, the content and the approaches through which we address those goals, but the goals themselves endure. I’d also argue that there’s a 21^st century addition to liberal arts education.

The first enduring goal of liberal education is the acquisition of a broad understanding of the society of which individuals are a part; this requires broad knowledge about science, culture, society, history and the kind of knowledge needed to navigate the world. For a long time, liberal education was restricted to very few people, and those people were leaders in society. Now we have a more expansive understanding of who needs this kind of broad knowledge. Understanding the world of which one is a part is the first core goal of a good liberal education.

The second enduring goal of liberal education is developing the powers of the mind. In earlier centuries, these powers included grammar, rhetoric, logic and dialectic. Today, we use the vocabulary of critical inquiry or communication skills. But when we talk about capacities like critical thinking or information literacy or communication fluency, we are talking about powers of the mind—the adaptive capabilities that enable people to reason through complex questions and to use evidence-based analysis to inform their choices and actions. Fostering these capacities is absolutely essential to a liberal or liberating education.

The third enduring goal is ensuring that learners acquire, through their studies and through the mentoring that’s part of those studies, a strong sense of ethical responsibility to themselves and to society, as well as a strong sense of their responsibilities as citizens. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and the founders of this republic all understood civic virtue as necessary for sustaining a just and self-governing society. Ethical and civic responsibility is as essential today as it was in their time.

These enduring goals are addressed in new ways today. Knowledge has changed. The skills we are discussing have certainly changed, especially in the age of digital revolution. And our understanding of civic responsibility has evolved as we have become more conscious of the challenges and responsibilities of living in a diverse democracy—not just a democracy, not just a republic, but a society that really respects all people and all perspectives.

I think those are the three big goals of liberal and liberal arts education over the millennia. I would argue that in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, there is a fourth goal. AAC&U describes it as integrative and applied learning. Other people may have other language for it—flexible learning, adaptive learning—but it is the notion that students need to learn how to integrate their knowledge, their powers of the mind and their sense of responsibility and to apply that learning to real problems in real settings. That kind of knowledge can then be used to work through problems encountered in the economy and problems we face as a globally engaged democracy.

To my mind, teaching students to apply their learning to new problems and contexts needs to be signature achievement of liberal education in the 21^st century. The focus is not just on what we know and understand, but on what we can do and how well we take responsibility for the application of knowledge in real-world settings. When it’s described in that way, liberal education is not only relevant, but indispensable. It’s the most relevant and powerful form of education we’ve ever developed—that any society has developed—because it places such strong emphasis on teaching people to use their intellectual faculties and their knowledge of the complexities of the wider world in order to reason through new problems and make contributions both to their workplaces and to our democratic society.

So for all these reasons, AAC&U has taken the position that liberal education is not only our most powerful form of learning, but that it is, in fact, the best form of learning for all students—not just for some students. That is the final way in which liberal education is evolving today. In the 20th century, we thought of liberal education mainly as something that was done in liberal arts and sciences disciplines. The academy itself constructed a very clear dividing line between liberal arts learning, on the one hand, and professional and career fields, on the other. AAC&U’s approach to liberal education says that those dividing lines need to be erased and that the forms of learning I am talking about apply to learners in all fields—career and technical fields as well as the arts and sciences. We owe it to every student who comes to higher education to make sure that, in ways appropriate to their career goals and their choice of academic discipline, they actually acquire all the hallmark capabilities that characterize liberal education in the 21st century.

DiSalvio: Under your leadership, AAC&U launched Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP), a public advocacy and campus action initiative designed to engage students and the public with what really matters in a college education for the 21st century. With the LEAP initiative, AAC&U has set out to champion the importance of a 21st century liberal education. How will LEAP accomplish the goals of that initiative?

Schneider: The LEAP campaign is organized around a robust set of "Essential Learning Outcomes"—all of which are best developed by a contemporary liberal education. Described in College Learning for the New Global Century these essential learning outcomes and a set of "Principles of Excellence" provide a new framework to guide students' cumulative progress through college

Today, and in the years to come, college graduates need higher levels of learning and knowledge as well as strong intellectual and practical skills to navigate this more demanding environment successfully and responsibly.

Other areas of work around the LEAP initiative are campus action, public advocacy and evidence. In many ways, campus action is the centerpiece of the LEAP effort. LEAP now formally involves 350 colleges, universities and community colleges working in ways appropriate to their individual missions and their own students.

In addition, we have a formal partnership with the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges and with the New American Colleges and Universities, a consortium of private colleges and universities interested in the blend of liberal arts, career programs and civic learning. All these institutions and systems have adopted some version of the LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes.

In terms of public advocacy we wanted to test out advocacy strategies in local contexts with local state priorities. Rather than trying simply to make the case for liberal education as an invaluable resource for everyone from 30,000 feet above ground level, we prefer to connect liberal education with the growth agenda in Wisconsin, for example, with the access to excellence and equity agenda in California, with work already going on in Texas as they rethink their core curriculum, with efforts to improve educational performance in Indiana, and so on.

We have tried hard to ensure that LEAP’s work intersects with the college completion agenda, which is probably the dominant public priority at both the national and state levels across the nation. But we go beyond the completion agenda by focusing, not just on whether students have achieved the right number of credits in a timely fashion, but on whether students are completing with high levels of “demonstrated achievement” on the Essential Learning Outcomes.

The work we have done on what are called “high-impact practices” has demonstrated that when students frequently participate in forms of learning that ask them to do significant analytical, creative, problem-solving work, they are more likely to complete college as well as more likely to achieve the Essential Learning Outcomes. The high-impact practices include first-year seminars and experiences, common intellectual experiences, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, diversity/global learning, service learning, community-based learning, internships, and capstone courses and projects. There is new evidence emerging about additional high-impact practices that also result in higher rates of completion and better learning for students; we will undoubtedly revise the list of high-impact practices as we go forward.

Especially successful as a form of advocacy is our work with employers. Employers are urgently requesting that higher education do a better job of preparing students with the full set of Essential Learning Outcomes that LEAP advances. We have tried to get out of the way and let employers speak about this in their own voices and using their own vocabularies through a series of national surveys we have done.

Another form of advocacy is the LEAP President’s Trust. This includes over 100 college, university and community college presidents who care passionately about the educational and public value of liberal education, and who have committed themselves to use the pulpits that presidents routinely command in order to make the case for liberal education.

The employment of authentic evidence is another area of work in the LEAP campaign. We have been working on employing the evidence in two ways. One way is to build tools and resources for faculty to use in assessing the extent to which students are, in fact, achieving the learning outcomes that LEAP advances. Secondly, we are providing syntheses from various available national studies of what the evidence shows about students’ current progress, or lack thereof.

The portrait that we have put together is not an encouraging one. It shows, for example, that only about one-third of students report that they’ve made significant gains in college on global learning, an outcome that everybody today would agree is an essential part of the knowledge one needs for 21st-century competence. Only about 50% of students report that they’ve made significant gains in college on learning to engage perspectives different from their own. And ETS data have been showing us for years that on their tests for critical thinking, mathematical competence and writing, only about 10% of graduating seniors are proficient. Taken together, these and other studies indicate that we have a long way to go in order to achieve the goals that LEAP is promoting.

DiSalvio: Some argue that the best possible preparation to meet the economic development challenges of the 21^st century is a liberal education. Is that realistic, given the rising tuition costs and burdensome debt and the labor market itself?

Schneider: I think we have to make a very clear distinction between an educational strategy that is focused on short-term costs and one that is focused on the long-term interests of our entire society and the individuals within it. We believe with Tom Friedman that liberal education has historically been America’s “secret sauce.” It has cultivated, for at least a segment of the population, those innovative, adaptive, creative capacities that are so central to an innovative economy.

While it’s always been true that the U.S. economy has prospered through innovation and resilience and adaptability, in the current highly competitive global economy—with many nations now rising through their own new forms of economic creativity—it really matters that we invest in forms of learning that allow us to remain the world leader in terms of economic innovation and creativity. So to focus educational investment on short-term training for immediately available jobs, with no attention to whether or not graduates have the intellectual skills and knowledge needed to adapt to the next job and the next industry is to shortchange such individual learners and to shortchange America’s competitive future.

Yes, the kind of education we’re talking about cannot be done on the cheap. But the U.S. made its way to world standing, economically and as a democracy, by taking investment in education seriously. I think we need to recognize the historical sources of our strengths as a society and make sure that those strengths are being reinforced rather than eroded as we go forward.

I would also add, of course, that there are many ways that we can reduce costs within higher education. For example, we’re spending a lot of money on courses that never were designed to help students. If the only point of a course is to “deliver content” and see whether students can pass multiple-choice tests on that content, we can indeed “deliver” such courses via technology much more efficiently and cost-effectively. But, our top goal should be to ensure that all college students have frequent opportunities to go way beyond “content recognition” to meaningful competency development. You learn evidence-based reasoning by actual practice with evidence-based reasoning. I believe that higher education should do “content delivery” as inexpensively as possible while redeploying resources to high-quality competency development.

DiSalvio: Those who look at the intellectual benefits of liberal education may be saying that learning for learning’s sake is its most significant benefit. But aren’t the public and politicians and policymakers more likely to be swayed by other arguments that they deem more practical?

Schneider: When we launched LEAP, AAC&U made an official determination that defending liberal education as “learning for its own sake” was a non-starter in persuading skeptics. The notion that the liberal arts are primarily intended to cultivate a love of learning and personal development, leaving it to the individual to decide how that learning and development can be applied once they left college is a 20th-century idea. The argument we make today is that liberal education, when it is done well, is actually developing practical intelligence. Of course, we do hope that students will come to love learning for its own sake and we definitely want them to become people who are committed to continuous lifelong learning.

But in making the case for the long-term value of liberal learning, you do not start with “learning for its own sake.” If you are talking about an 18-year-old, you start with the fact that the student is struggling to understand why she is in college in the first place. You need to help her understand how what she is studying connects to the life she hopes to make for herself and that it is contributing to her development of an adaptable, portable set of capabilities and a flexible, adaptable base of knowledge. And you do that by getting her really involved in making connections between what she is learning and real-world problems that she can see need to be solved. Some of those problems will be enduring ones, such as those concerning identity and religion and social justice. Others will be contemporary problems, such as sustainability and climate change and what we do about hunger in our own communities or about HIV/AIDS.

Novice learners must be helped to see connections between the world they are living in and the lives they hope to make for themselves, on the one hand, and what they are studying, on the other. If you do that well, then I think they will also come to love learning for its own sake. But we start with their need to make connections between life and learning. And the same is obviously true for all those students who are coming to college as returning adults. They’ve already learned a lot from being out there in the real world. We need to connect their informal learning to the studies they will pursue. We need to recognize what they’ve already achieved through other means. We need to be prepared to validate forms of liberal learning that didn’t happen within formal academic settings. And all of this is intended to ensure that liberal learning is practical and useful and that it helps people make better lives, create better societies, and do better work. Once you describe it that way, then I think it’s easier to make the case to policymakers.

DiSalvio: In the 2010 AAC&U "Quality Imperative" report, the AAC&U Board of Directors states that, "It should not be liberal education for some, and narrow or illiberal education for others ... access to educational excellence is the equity challenge of our time." Yet, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, first-generation and disadvantaged students are less likely to take courses in the humanities, foreign languages and the arts, and are more likely to enroll in institutions and programs that provide narrow training. What must happen to equalize access?

Schneider: First of all we need to shine a strong, searing spotlight on the inequities. One of the things that’s so striking to me is that we recognize that our K-12 system was built along highly stratified lines. Some students are moved into college prep courses and tracks, while other students are moved into work tracks that are much less demanding educationally and much less likely to prepare them for college.

K-12 policy has been trying to undo this stratification and has been emphasizing the importance of high-quality, internationally competitive "common core standards" for all students—not just for some students. The goal of the No Child Left Behind program was to provide access to excellence for everyone, but it was deeply flawed in its tactics. Within the K-12 framework, we’ve had a dawning realization that our future as a society and our decency as a democracy depend on creating equal opportunities for students to learn at high levels as they go from preschool through high school.

Oddly, we’re not applying much of any of that to the discussion of higher education. People have been perfectly happy to accept a tiered system, or tracking, within higher education. In fact, many of the public policy priorities in several states deepen and accelerate and accentuate inequities and stratifications that already exist. For example, I’m thinking of policies—in states from the South to the North—that focus on getting students into certificate and short-term credential programs with the ultimate goal of getting them quickly into the workplace and, thereby, reducing the unemployment rate.

Questions are not being asked about whether those programs are helping students develop the broad knowledge, strong intellectual skill sets, anchored sense of responsibility and demonstrated capacity to deal with new complex problems that characterize a liberal education. We’re just asking whether they can manage computerized records; if they can, then they can have a job. AAC&U is trying to take dead aim at that deepening stratification by getting employers to acknowledge that people who are locked into mental cubicles are not promotable. And if people know how to do only one set of tasks and one job, then they will be employable only as long as that particular set of tasks needs to be done and as long as that particular job exists. If people want to be promotable and adaptable, they need a broad skill set, not one that has been narrowly tailored to meet the needs of a specific job.

Our surveys have repeatedly shown that employers do not recommend study in one particular field alone. Sixty percent of them recommend that college students pursue a combination of broad-plus-specialized learning, and 20%of them recommend that students pursue broad learning only. So just one in five employers—and we’ve asked this question several times in our surveys—would say that the right strategy for a young person or a returning person is to zero in on one field and become competent in it, much less to zero in on one set of skills that are a subset of a field, and then hope to make a career or an income-generating set of career choices on that foundation. It won’t work.

I think the right strategy is to focus on where the job market is going broadly. It’s churning out 30 million jobs every year that didn’t exist the previous year. We want to prepare people to succeed in those newly emerging jobs, not to be left in the jobs that are being outsourced or are simply disappearing. It is important to get employers to say that we need people who have portable, adaptable, resilient skills—not people who just know how to do one thing. And we need to rally as a higher education community around a commitment to inclusive excellence and against the stratification of opportunity that we already have in our educational system.

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation ...]]>

In April, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices.

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk about the future of the credit hour; the second featured DiSalvio's interview with Fastweb.com and FinAid.org Publisher Mark Kantrowitz about student debt; the third, DiSalvio’s interview with Lumina Foundation President and CEO Jamie P. Merisotis about Lumina’s commitment to enrolling and graduating more students from college.

In this installment of the series, DiSalvio speaks with American Council on Education (ACE) President Molly Corbett Broad about the efforts ACE is making to raise educational attainment in the U.S. and around the world.

The context

The nation’s most visible and influential association representing the presidents of U.S. accredited, degree-granting private and public universities, the ACE remains consistently at the center of federal policy debates in areas critical to higher education.

With a focus on improving access and preparing every student to succeed, ACE convenes representatives from all sectors to collectively tackle the toughest higher education challenges and to address and resolve those issues that most affect access and student success. Among those issues are disparities in access, college completion, student preparation, financial aid, student debt loads, and higher education costs, as well as persistent gaps in access to and completion of higher education by minority groups.

Ongoing challenges remain in making higher education more accessible and attainable. Providing useful insights on the transformational potential MOOCs hold for higher education and how higher education will evolve in the U.S. over the next 20 years, Broad points to the efforts that ACE is making in developing the next generation of higher education leadership. 

The interview

DiSalvio: Although significant progress has been made over the past decade to put higher education within reach of all students, gaps remain in access to and graduation from college. President Obama has made college completion a cornerstone of both his higher education and economic platforms, with the goal of graduating the highest proportion of college students in the world by 2020. What role is ACE playing in responding to these gaps?

Broad: ACE has taken a leading role in advocating for and developing a variety of initiatives aimed at boosting college access and completion, including the National Commission on Higher Education Attainment, which issued its report in January. Raising the nation’s education attainment rate is deeply embedded in the DNA of ACE. It has played a central role in the mission of ACE from our very founding. We were created by the nation’s leaders in 1918 as soldiers were returning from World War I to a jobless economy. We were then called the Emergency Council on Education because raising the education attainment of those veterans was an economic imperative. Again in 1942, ACE was called upon to create the alternative high school credential, the GED, to raise education attainment opportunities for those returning soldiers from World War II who had dropped out of high school to join the armed services. So by passing the GED, those veterans became eligible for the GI Bill and they went on to college and became what we refer to as the “Greatest Generation.” Since 1945, ACE has evaluated military training and experiences to determine their eligibility for credit recommendations. Later, ACE’s credit recommendation programs were extended to the workplace and to major departments of government. So it seemed quite logical for us to help create the attainment commission following President Obama’s call to restore the nation’s higher education preeminence. We’re already helping 34 states to participate in the American College Application Campaign and have created a Center for Education Attainment and Innovation within ACE. One of the greatest strengths of American higher education is the rich diversity of institutional size and mission. Consequently, our community is taking many diverse approaches to raising education attainment and to boosting the number of Americans able to gain a college degree.

DiSalvio: ACE was among a group of higher education associations that convened a national Commission on Higher Education Attainment. In its Open Letter to College and University Leaders, a blueprint was developed for a campus-level college completion campaign that is designed to prevent students from falling by the wayside as they pursue a college degree. What areas of reform and possible strategies to advance the goal of increased attainment are addressed in this document?

Broad: The attainment commission’s open letter is intended as a call to the academy from the academy, to make retention and completion a critical campus priority and to stem the unacceptable loss of human potential represented by the numbers of students who never make it to graduation. The commission raised the issue of new reforms and those already underway and urged campus leaders to consider three main areas for reform: 1) changing the campus culture to focus more on retention; 2) improving cost effectiveness and quality; and 3) making better use of data.

There is a plethora of ways institutions can go about meeting attainment goals. The open letter outlined strategies that are simply examples to guide the attainment conversation on individual campuses. It begins with assigning ownership. Presidents and chancellors must clearly assign responsibility for enhancing student retention and graduation. We urge our colleagues to give retention and completion the same level of priority that campuses afford to the recruitment and selection process in admissions. We further urge our colleagues to create a student-centered culture to improve the academic experiences and ensure faculty see student completion as a central part of their responsibility. In this way, students who need help could get ready access to appropriate campus resources, including support services for the growing numbers of nontraditional students. We also encourage institutional leaders to give credits for prior learning.

DiSalvio: Ongoing challenges remain in making higher education more accessible especially among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. ACE maintains that removing barriers to college education requires elevating student preparation, continued investment in financial aid, and greater flexibility in course delivery. In what ways is ACE committed to removing these barriers in advancing the pursuit of equal access?

Broad: Let me start with student preparation. ACE convened faculty groups from the learned societies to make recommendations on the various drafts of the Common Core standards, which will ensure high school graduates are college-ready. This, I believe, is truly an important effort and college teacher-preparation programs are now hard at work to incorporate these standards. We are seeing temptation to back away from the standards, but I believe that would be a great mistake. There is no better single strategy to improve college retention and completion than to have entering students who are well prepared to do college-level work. That is one place where ACE has invested a tremendous amount of time and effort.

I mentioned earlier that ACE was also the creator of the GED and it has been a part of our organization since 1942. In 2011, ACE and test developer Pearson VUE created a joint venture that will drive the future direction, design and delivery of the GED testing program. Beginning in January 2014, the GED test will be aligned with Common Core standards for high school graduation and offer additional learning resources and preparation materials in order to increase the number of adults who pass the GED test and go on to postsecondary education.

Another area where we are working on student preparation is our ACE College Credit Recommendation Service (ACE CREDIT) and military and veterans programs that assist adult learners and student veterans in speeding their path to a degree.

ACE also plays a central role in advocating for a strong system of federal financial aid that helps extend access to higher education to all students. Our institutions, despite significant financial pressures, are working hard to hold down college costs and to provide generous financial aid to those in need. In partnership with a number of higher education associations, ACE works with the tax-writing committees of Congress in support of higher education tax provisions, including tax credits that support tuition, as well as several kinds of education saving programs and the tax deduction for charitable giving.

I also want to mention our work on the Fisher case heard recently by the Supreme Court. ACE filed an amicus brief in support of the University of Texas at Austin. ACE has long advocated for the ability of our institutions to consider race and ethnicity as one factor when constructing a diverse student body, one where individual talents and personal interests, background, academic skills, and geographic origin all can play a role.

DiSalvio: In what could be a major step toward bridging the gap between massive open online courses (MOOCs) and the college credit system, the ACE has reviewed and made credit recommendations for five Coursera MOOCs. If some colleges decide to grant credit for those courses, the council's recommendations could go a long way toward helping students who complete MOOCs gain valuable college credits. How could this raise education attainment in the U.S. and around the world?

Broad: I believe MOOCs hold the promise of extending to students, including minority students and adult students around the world, greater access to high-quality education on their own timetable. We are seeing a growing number of post-traditional students enrolled in American higher education who are not full-time, first-time students coming to college right after high school.

The Coursera and Udacity MOOCs that we have recommended for credit are part of ACE’s overall MOOC evaluation and research initiative. This is a small but important part of ACE’s broader push to expand prior learning assessment. Of course, the decision to utilize MOOCs or accept those credits in transfer is one made by each institution on a case-by-case basis.

We have created a Presidential Innovation Lab that will offer opportunities for leaders in higher education, both those who are producers of MOOCs and those who are skeptics, to engage in some proactive thinking about this new learning space. We believe this effort will help us guide a national dialog about potential new models that can help close persistent attainment gaps not only among the young, but also among older students and low-income students. The outcome of the Presidential Innovation Lab will be shared widely with the ACE membership, the press and policymakers.

I also believe prior learning assessment is an area where we are seeing new ideas for raising education attainment. Many of our member institutions are asking questions about courses outside traditional degree programs—whether they can help raise completion, whether they can meet the college curricula and whether they can increase learning productivity. ACE is well positioned to help uncover those answers.

DiSalvio: The higher education landscape is transforming at a rapid pace. How will higher education evolve in the U.S. over the next 20 years? How will it affect higher education leadership and what can higher education leaders do to prepare for future challenges and opportunities?

Broad: Higher education has been an industry that for decades hasn’t seen much change in its delivery and its teaching methods. However, in recent years we have seen significant innovations. I believe there will continue to be more emphasis on the role of information technology and the cognitive sciences, as well as online learning.

Another trend in higher education is the graying of the presidency. Fifty-eight percent of college and university presidents in 2011 were 61 years of age or older. Over the coming years, we are going to see a significant turnover of college and university presidents. ACE is committed to developing the next generation of leaders who will take on those presidential positions and help sustain the preeminence of American higher education. Among the programs we offer are those for new presidents and new chief academic officers, the ACE Fellows Program, and an array of other leadership development activities.

We also should anticipate that higher education institutions will develop more flexible options for students looking to ease their path to degree completion and to gain credentials they can show employers. At the same time, new types of credentials appear to be emerging. Some call these "stackable credentials." Digital badges for the completion of certain learning activities, credits for prior learning outside the classroom and portfolio reviews are good examples. Some of this involves helping students earn degrees and some may be helping students gain other kinds of new credentials beyond degrees that will help them in both employment and their career. These are just some of the pressures for change that we will see in the years ahead.

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk about the future ...]]>

NEJHE's New Directions for Higher Education examines emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices.

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk about the future of the credit hour; the second featured DiSalvio's interview with Fastweb.com and FinAid.org Publisher Mark Kantrowitz about student debt.

In this installment of the series, DiSalvio talks with Jamie P. Merisotis, president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, about Lumina’s commitment to enrolling and graduating more students from college and the changes needed in higher education to help encourage that goal.

The context

The U.S. ranks ninth in the world in the proportion of young adults enrolled in college and has fallen to 16th in the world in its share of certificates and degrees awarded to adults ages 25 to 34—lagging behind Korea, Canada, Japan and other nations. In addition, while high school graduates from the wealthiest families are almost certain to continue on to higher education, just over half of U.S. high school graduates in the poorest quarter of families attend college.

A Schott Foundation report suggests that without a policy framework to create opportunity for all students, strengthen supports for the teaching profession and strike the right balance between support-based reforms and standards-driven reforms, the U.S. will become increasingly unequal and less competitive in the global economy

In February 2009, President Obama declared that “ ... by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” Around the same time, Lumina Foundation released its first strategic plan in 2009 with the goal that 60% of Americans obtain a high-quality postsecondary degree or credential by 2025—a goal Lumina now calls Goal 2025.

Expansion of undergraduate enrollments and the need to improve degree-completion rates—essential in both the Obama plan and Goal 2025—call for recasting the role of American colleges and universities and system-level change to improve student access and success in higher education.

Merisotis observes that there are significant obstacles that stand in the way of these attainment efforts. Expressing urgency for widespread systemic change, he provides useful insights on what reforms are necessary and offers recommendations on how higher education campus leaders and policymakers can help manage those changes.

The interview

DiSalvio: You have said that the current generation of college-age Americans are on the way to being less educated than their parents. Why is the educational attainment rate so important to America's future?

Merisotis: The drive for American success in the 21st century is going to be talent. Talent is the driver of our economic success, cultural success and social success. What we know from extensive research in this area is that the talent that is required now is different from what it was in the past. The talent that we need as a society is overwhelmingly that which is attained by having a high-quality education at the postsecondary level.

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to enroll in a postsecondary educational institution, because what we know is that there are many different ways in which postsecondary learning is now taking place. But postsecondary institutions, i.e., higher education institutions, are going to continue to be extremely important for the foreseeable future.

I think what we’re facing as a nation is this rapidly increasing demand for talent and the challenge of being able to actually meet that talent demand with our educational system. This challenge is growing more acute, and the gaps between those who have talent with a postsecondary education and those who do not, is increasing. You see it in terms of wages and employment rates and other economic indicators. You see it in terms of quality-of-life indicators, in terms of the way in which communities that have high aggregations of people with college education, postsecondary education, actually drive the cultural and the social well-being of communities. And you see it in the ways in which people who have postsecondary education literally have a higher quality of life. They live longer, their family structures are better, and their quality of life in general is much higher.

So for lots of reasons, increasing educational talent is extremely important to our country’s future. And the challenge before us is to figure out how we’re actually going to get there given the significant challenges that we face at a government level and at a personal level.

DiSalvio: Lumina Foundation's most recent strategic plan released in 2013 identifies two broad areas of action that will help the nation increase the number of college graduates. You have characterized this as another step in the organization's long-term shift away from simply awarding grants as the key strategy for fulfilling its mission. What are these two areas, and how successful has the effort been thus far in helping the nation increase its number of college graduates?

Merisotis: Lumina’s focus is essentially around two imperatives. We think these two imperatives are going to be critical in aligning the country’s efforts on getting to Goal 2025.

The first imperative is mobilizing all of the key actors that need to focus on increasing educational attainment to get to that 60% goal. That mobilization includes policymakers and employers. It includes regions and communities. And most importantly, it includes higher education institutions and their ability to focus on student success. It also includes the broader public, particularly students.

In our mobilization strategy, there are five strategies aimed at helping to support those actors to focus on increasing attainment and to give them tools that they can actually use to help increase high-quality postsecondary attainment.

The second imperative is to help design and build a 21st century higher education system. Here the idea is to help build greater system capacity so that we can actually support that mobilization. Focusing on designing and building that system is an acknowledgement that we won’t be able to supersize the current one. We are actually going to have to help create a better system that takes advantage of all the successes we’ve had but gives us a lot more capacity to increase high-quality attainment rapidly. That includes things like redesigning student finance and the systems that support student financing, helping to create new delivery models and a different business model for higher education and helping to support the advancement of a different system of credentials that are focused on high-quality learning that can actually be better articulated in our labor market and for society at large.

DiSalvio: In 2012, Lumina Foundation made more than 100 grants for a total commitment of roughly $45 million. How will these grants advance that focus on increasing Americans’ success in higher education and increasing the proportion of Americans who have high-quality, college-level learning?

Merisotis: ​The Lumina overall approach is that we see ourselves as a leadership organization. By that I mean that we have a large base of assets … the largest private foundation in the country focused on higher education. Therefore, we have both capacity and expertise. And so we’ve tried to apply that through our work—through our grantmaking, but also through a lot of the other activities we undertake, whether it’s our work in terms of communication in public will building, whether it’s our efforts around informing the public policy process, etc.

Grants are obviously a critical tool for that, and the grants that we’ve made are important in terms of our capacity. But we see ourselves as an organization that does more than simply make grants. Our hope is that we are providing leadership for system-level change. I think that is the key issue. Our efforts, in terms of our grants and the rest of our work, are really aimed at creating system-level change that will help increase educational attainment in the country. Goal 2025, the goal we’ve been operating under for the last five years, is the “north star” for our work. It’s a way of organizing all of those efforts in a very coherent and cohesive way.

The focus of what we’re trying to do is to create system-level change that will improve student access and success in higher education. Toward that end, we hope our efforts will work toward increasing the capacity of the higher education system to serve more students in a better way and to help ensure that there is high-quality learning associated with the degrees and other credentials. That will help the outcomes of higher education to be shared broadly, both from an individual perspective as well as from a societal perspective, particularly from the perspective of employers.

DiSalvio: Most agree that a preeminent higher education system is needed to meet the global economy’s growing need for talent. With that in mind, you have said that the American higher education system is in need of systematic change. What elements of change in higher education are necessary to further America’s preeminence?

Merisotis: I see three elements that undergird the need for change: student finance, new business and delivery models, and new systems of credentialing.

Keep in mind that for student finance, the current tuition and financial aid systems were developed decades ago for a student cohort that essentially doesn’t exist anymore. Only one out of five college students today attend a residential institution where they  go immediately to college after graduating the prior year from high school. The diversity of students is dramatically greater than in the past. And perhaps most importantly, our tuition structures simply are not supportable by a growing number of families. That is, affordability has become a serious challenge for families. So for lots of reasons, creating a different model of student finance is very important.

Similarly, it’s important to develop new and improved delivery models to better serve more students. We need to take advantage of technology and use what we’ve learned from a pedagogical perspective to advance ideas such as competency-based learning. In the area of credentials, I think the current system of credentials has served us well historically, but it clearly falls short now. We need to make sure that each credential has meaning—that is, that what students know and are able to do with their credential is clearly understood by the student, by the employer and by the people who are delivering the higher education. We must make sure that high-quality learning is represented in those credentials so that the learning is cumulative and that students can actually take that knowledge and apply and apply it in work and in life.

DiSalvio: You have expressed urgency in higher education reform and have suggested that business-higher education partnership is a natural extension of the investment that private business already makes on education and training. Are there specific forms of partnership you see as especially effective in increasing the nation’s number of college graduates? How can business leadership help colleges meet the needs of students and employers?

Merisotis: This is really important. We’ve spent two decades in a discussion with employers about what employers need and what higher education does. I think there has been some disconnect in that conversation. We’ve got to be clear with employers about how they can actually contribute to increasing educational attainment in this country.

There are three core ways that they can do that. The first is to literally support educational attainment in their companies or organizations. That is, by actually “walking the walk” on increasing educational attainment, by supporting tuition reimbursement, by helping their employees develop learning plans, and by actually supporting the advancing skills and knowledge of their own employees. That’s one way which I think employers need to be better engaged.

The second way is the idea that companies, organizations and employers have to see increasing postsecondary attainment as part of their corporate social responsibility efforts. That is, they have a social investment, a social obligation to support increasing attainment. Finding ways to support community-based efforts, to work in metropolitan areas to actually advance things on a community level is really important.

And the last way is that employers need to engage in public policy advocacy. We’ve seen employers have a measurable impact on the K-12 debate and efforts in increasing educational attainment at the K-12 level. They have to weigh in on a public policy level around the issues of financing higher education, about student learning outcomes, and about productivity of higher education. In all of these ways, they can actually add value and be more than just a bystander to this conversation. They can truly be advocates for systemic change that will lead to increasing educational attainment for a much larger number of Americans.

DiSalvio: As trustees and campus leaders, what specific steps can be taken to help mobilize those who must act to implement that change?

Merisotis: I think it’s vital for campus leaders and trustees and policymakers to be actively engaged. The engagement is important because changes in higher education are occurring rapidly, and we want higher education leading the charge, not playing defense. So I want to see higher education institutions and their leaders focus on such issues as increasing innovation to deliver more high-quality learning to larger numbers of students. I want to see campus leaders focus on mission reinvention and find ways to either focus more tightly on an existing mission or consider a new mission focus. I want to see campus leaders focus on improving equity and making sure that there is equity of opportunity for low-income students, for first-generation students, for students of color and for the large numbers of adults needing to be served by higher education. And the focus on equity should include both creating more opportunity and helping more of those students actually succeed in our higher education institutions. Those kinds of things, I think, are really important in terms of trustee and institutional leaders to better articulate the attainment agenda for the nation.