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MEET THE EXPERTS
KAY M.
MCCLENNEY
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FRANK
DEFORD
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GEORGE
KUH
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LARA K.
COUTURIER
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LEE
SHULMAN
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PATRICK M.
CALLAN
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RICHARD H.
HERSH
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KAY M. MCCLENNEY
Director, Community College Survey of Student Engagement, Community College Leadership Program, Univ. of Texas at Austin
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A few more interesting comments from Kay McClenney, excerpted from her interview.
Q: How good is our higher education system today?
McCLENNEY: If you're in a meeting with American higher education leaders, it takes about 20 seconds, by actual count, before someone says, why are we even talking about the problems in higher education? The American higher education system is the envy of the world. It is the best the world has ever known. And the problem with that statement is that it's the truth. The American higher education system has been, because of its diversity, because of its quality, the best in the world. Has been the best does not mean that we are now the best, or that we can continue to hold that title in the future. What I say is that once IBM was the Big Blue, and once Pan-American Airlines was the world travel pioneer. And I say, all you have to do to really understand this is to read that fine print, in the bottom of your mutual fund prospectus, where it says: "past performance is no guarantee of future results" and you will know what our challenge and predicament is in higher education today.
Q: Does the public think higher education is doing a good job?
McCLENNEY: By and large, public opinion polling tells us that Americans are pretty satisfied with higher education. The one thing that they are worried about is cost. And their fear is that the doors are closing with regard to affordability.
Q: So, aside from affordability, what is the American public's view of how well college and universities are doing at educating?
McCLENNEY: I think the American public thinks that it's okay. And that's because the American public has very little information. We don't really have any information that tells us how good higher education is, from the standpoint of student learning. We know kids go to college, we don't know whether they actually learn anything while they're there.
Q: Should our institutions be held accountable for what a student learns?
McCLENNEY: Absolutely. Every college and university should be able to talk in clear terms about what students should learn while they are in the college, and what in fact they have learned as a result of that educational experience.
Q: Why?
McCLENNEY: Because learning is the heart of the enterprise. It is the heart of what higher education is supposed to be about. But even more important than that, a student's learning and a student's capability to continue to learn will be what makes life and work possible for that student after he or she completes college.
Q: What's at stake if the system doesn't work for everyone?
McCLENNEY: When I ask people what they believe is the most dramatic change that's occurred in American society over the last 10 or 15 years, very often they respond by saying, "the Internet." It's dramatically transformed the way we live our lives. I would say that the most dramatic change that's occurred in American society in the last 10 or 15 years is this: that a very few years ago, it was possible to graduate from high school and get a job that could sustain a family, and even sustain a middle class standard of living in the United States. Those days are over. Never again will we see that time. College education is an absolute necessity for any individual to enter and stay in the American middle class. But even more importantly, our country's very viability, our competitiveness in economic terms, but also the vitality of the democracy rests on our citizens, lots and lots and lots of them being educated at a higher and higher level. It used to be possible to educate an elite, a small number of people who would be the leaders, and essentially would tell the rest of us what to do. That is no longer the case. We need to educate all of our people to a higher level. And we simply cannot afford to waste any person.
Q: What is the most pressing or critical problem facing higher education today?
McCLENNEY: In the United States of America, we have made a number of social and policy choices which have this as the bottom line: that education is the arbiter of economic opportunity in this country. That is, today we don't guarantee economic outcomes for our system, but what we say we guarantee is the opportunity - through education and hard work - to reach levels beyond what your parents were able to achieve, to be able to care for your family and advance in your life. The door to that opportunity in this country is closing. It is a promise that we have made, that we are not keeping. And if things continue in the trends that they are currently, we're going to keep them at even lower rates than what we're doing right now.
Q: We had something like a social contract in America, that ensured that any talented and motivated person could find a way to go to college. What's happened?
McCLENNEY: I think the toughest, and maybe the truest thing to say about that is that we, as a society, care less than maybe we once did about people who aren't as fortunate as the middle class and the more affluent in this country. We have developed, I think, a sense that higher education is an individual good �that it has benefits for the Individual, in terms of their life time earnings, their ability to get better jobs and so on. And so we've said, well let the individual pay for it then, instead of recognizing that higher education also has major social benefits. It is good for the society. It's good for communities. It's good for employers. And, it's good for families and individuals. But we have really left behind the time when we took very seriously the notion that it was important for the public to pay for the public benefits of higher education.
Q: Why should we care that everybody gets to go to college?
McCLENNEY: There are several important reasons. For example, the data document that the educational attainment level of a population is critically important to the economy of that population. Whether you're talking about a community like Bartlesville, Oklahoma, or you're talking about the state of Kansas, or the whole nation. For every year that you add to the average educational attainment level of the population, you add 5 to 15 percent in economic growth. So the connections between education and the economy are very, very clear. Educational attainment level is also powerfully and positively correlated with every single other thing we care about as a society. The more educated a person is, the more likely that person is to be employed, to be paying taxes, to be active in the political process, to work in political campaigns, to vote; and, conversely, the less likely that person is to be publicly dependent on welfare or in prison.
Q: How do we define quality in higher education today?
McCLENNEY: I'm concerned that we need to find a new way of defining what quality means in higher education. We have these fond traditions in America about the way we decide what is an excellent college or university. For example, we will say that a college must be really excellent if the students are already very smart before they get there. Or we'll say that a college or university must be excellent if they're already extraordinarily wealthy, but they still charge a fortune in tuition, because Americans believe that if it costs more, it must be better. And third, we believe that a college or university is excellent if they have a large number of faculty members who are, say, Nobel Prize winners, or have their pictures on postage stamps. When in fact it may be an unwritten rule in that institution that that faculty member never has to come within a half mile of an actual student. And that is the way it really does work in many of our colleges and universities. That the more prestigious the faculty member is, the less likely that person is to come in to one on one, face to face to contact with students, particularly undergraduate students.
Q: One of the measures in the US News and World Report college rankings has to do with selectivity ...
McCLENNEY: One of the things that grinds on me the most when I read U.S. News and World Report and their rankings of what they call America's best colleges is that when you look at the fine print about how they define what best is, what the criteria are for quality, one of them has to do with the acceptance ratio. Meaning, basically out of all the students that apply, how few do they allow into the college. And I say to myself, when in America did we come to the point of saying that the mark of quality is the proportion of prospective students that you refuse to serve. That makes no sense to me.
What ought to be the hallmark of quality in American higher education is not how selective an institution is, but what is the educational experience that a student comes into contact with while he or she is in that college. What is the educational practice? What are the learning experiences that that institution makes available to me as an individual student?
Q: How can we make good learning possible in more places?
McCLENNEY: We do know a lot about what constitutes good learning practices. There has been a body of research, that is large and has grown over time, about what works in helping students, both to persist in college and to succeed � to learn at higher levels. And so if we just do a lot more of what we know, then we're going to be far better off and we're going to have better outcomes for students, than we have now. Again, it's a matter of looking at what constitutes best practice and then of very intentionally incorporating that into the student experience.
Q: Would more government funding assure access to higher education?
McCLENNEY: We are not going to solve the problems of access to higher education with new money because it doesn't exist in most states, and it doesn't exist given the current federal deficits that we're talking about. So, if we're going to solve it, it's going to be solved through reallocation of funds, and that is a sticky wicket. It means that we have to decide that educating poor people and people of color has some priority in this country, and that means that we should reallocate funds from somewhere else to address that need. I'm not terribly optimistic about that at this point, but I think at some point we're going to realize that the future of the country depends on our ability to do it.
Q: What obstacles do people who teach at the college level face that make it hard for them to do their best?
McCLENNEY: At colleges and universities that serve large numbers of our college-going population, increasingly one of the challenges is simply the diversity of the students. If you are teaching in a City University of New York institution and there are 120 different languages spoken by your students and two-thirds of your students were born in another country and many of your students can't afford the 50 cent increase in the subway fares that they have to pay in order to get to college, then you've got all of that mix going on. It's a real challenge to create a learning environment that will be hospitable to those students, will meet them where they are, and help them to achieve their goals. There's nothing easy about it. It's just inescapably necessary.
Q: What's your biggest concern about what students are or are not learning at college?
McCLENNEY: I don't know what to be concerned about with regard to what students are learning or not learning because we've produced so little evidence with regard to student learning in higher education. That's what I'm concerned about. We haven't yet reached the point where we feel that it is important, even inescapably important, to document what students learn. And until we get there, we can't say anything about what they're learning and what they're not.
Q: Why are graduation rates so low, and why is that situation allowed to continue?
McCLENNEY: We haven't paid enough attention to completion and success rates and, in particular, we have not paid attention to the disaggregated data that tells us exactly who the students are who are falling though the cracks. If we did that, it would give us ammunition about where to intervene in ways that would leverage higher success rates for larger members of students. But we just haven't attempted to deal with the issue. When we do, we'll make it better.
Q: Are people ready and willing to do what it would take for the solutions to be put into practice?
McCLENNEY: I think that they are. We're seeing some of these innovations, like learning communities, multiply in working with undergraduate students. The problem is we're sort of fond of innovations as long as they stay on the margins of our institutions, as long as they don't threaten the mainstream of the way we do our work. And if we are going to really capitalize on what we've been learning about how students learn best and how we can help them to succeed, we're going to have to threaten the status quo in the mainstream of our work. We're going to have to reorganize the business of higher education to make it more appropriate to the students that we have, as opposed to the students we once had and the students we wish we had � the students that are actually sitting right there in our classrooms.
Q: Are you worried about the higher education system in this country?
McCLENNEY: I refuse to be gloomy. I stay concerned because I really believe that the work of providing access and ensuring success in higher education is some of the most important work for the future of our society. I do not believe that we as a country right now have made the decisions to keep the promises that we have made about that opportunity. But I remain hopeful that we will.
Q: What is the demographic profile of the �typical� college student, and specifically a typical community college student?
McCLENNEY: Most Americans continue to think of a college student in the old terms; that is, an 18 to 22 years old student who goes to school full time and lives on campus. Probably goes there and stays for four straight years, gets a degree, and then goes on with the rest of their lives. In truth, that description only fits one in six American undergraduates now. The other five out of six are �non-traditional� students � students who are older than traditional college age, students who didn't come to college directly from high school, students who may be married, have families at home, and the like.
An average community college student is almost impossible to describe. It's anyone you meet on the street in America. The average age of community college students hovers around 27, 28 years old. Fifty-six percent of the students in community colleges are women. And community colleges serve disproportionately high numbers of students of color. So you have this wonderful mix of people young and old, of all different descriptions and backgrounds, that all converge on the community colleges.
Q: Are community colleges doing the work that other colleges are failing to do?
McCLENNEY: I think just as you find good teaching in all different kinds of colleges and universities, you also find many different colleges and universities working hard to serve these non-traditional students, to serve students that bring a host of challenges with them to college. But community colleges were invented to do that work. And in community colleges you find people who see it as their vocation, as their passion � to move every mountain that needs to be moved in order to make college possible for people who come with the odds against them. That is an incredibly important piece of work, and it is hard work.
Q: When we observed things like student motivation, class size, connectedness, we saw similarities between small elite colleges and community colleges. Are there?
McCLENNEY: It's kind of ironic isn't it? In fact, what we know about what constitutes a high quality education are the kinds of practices that involve a high degree of personal interaction between students, between students and faculty, and so on. And those are the kinds of things that you are most likely to find on a small elite liberal arts campus and also at your local community college.
Q: How do you see the future of higher education, given our current public policies?
McCLENNEY: I don't think our track record is terribly good in this country at anticipating things that are going to become a crisis. We're pretty good at reacting once the crisis is in our face. But right now we're living with that boiling frog phenomenon � if you put a frog in a pot of cold water, and just turn up the heat kind of slowly, the frog won't jump out, because he doesn't realize he's being boiled to death. I think that's where we are with regard to the situation faced by America's colleges and universities. And we've got a big job to do to issue a wake up call to the American public, so we can create a better understanding of what's at stake here.
Q: What's at stake?
McCLENNEY: Unless we do a better job of communicating with the American public about what is at stake in maintaining access to higher education opportunity � what is at stake in maintaining quality in terms of student learning and student completion in higher education � our future as a nation is inevitably at serious risk. We have to encounter that reality, and we need to make some decisions about what we're going to do about it. |
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