Fischman and Gardner: The Real World of College
What is College For?
Think of this newsletter as a continuation of my last piece on Will Bunch’s After The Ivory Tower Falls. I want to use another book to fill in the dream for higher education the Truman Commission had that Bunch described from the 1940s.
I introduced this book in a piece I wrote in early July about Christian College Mission. The book, which came out in March and I read in late spring, is The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be by Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner. I wrote in July that I would come back to this excellent book, so here I am.
The authors are long-time faculty members in Harvard’s graduate school of education and well known as scholars in their own right, focusing on what makes “good work” and on “multiple intelligences” along with other topics. That leads them to two key issues for higher education; how systems can be well-aligned and how individuals learn.
Over the course of five years, they conducted in-depth interviews with hundreds of stakeholders at ten different higher education institutions in the US. These schools were primarily non-vocational in their orientation, although there was one specialty school included. There were liberal arts colleges and regional state schools, elite institutions, and open access institutions. They talked to students (both freshmen and seniors), faculty, administrators, trustees, community members, and alums. Then they spent two years making sense of the raw materials that resulted from their semi-structured interviews.
There’s a great deal of value to this book, beginning with the importance of aligning programs and personnel around the central educational mission of the institutions. In their section on the student experience (the bulk of the book), three things stand out: the goals students have for their college years, the mental models they use in pursuit of those, and the general sense of anxiety and alienation they carry. These three issues are very closely related.
Fischman and Gardner ask the students to prioritize four different goals for college: 1) to get a job, 2) to gain different perspectives on people, knowledge, and the world, 3) to learn to live independently, and 4) to study a particular content area in depth. Beyond simply ranking these responses, they asked the students to articulate their choices. In doing so, they noticed some clear patterns. Some students explained their selections using very well developed rationales. These students were high in what the authors called Higher Education Capital (HEDCAP), which they summarize as “abilities to attend, analyze, reflect, connect, and communicate.” This should, they argue, be the principle outcome for a non-vocational college education.
A couple of things to note here. First, majors or focus on a job are not bad per se. What matters is HOW the students are developing these skills. Second, exposure to a variety of perspectives1 isn’t an end goal without developing a mechanism for understanding, critique, and synthesis.2
They found that over half of the students interviewed had medium levels of HECAP. The other half was divided between low (21%) and high (24%). Or to put it more bluntly, only one in four students in these institutions had developed this deeper approach to learning. Among just seniors, that figure goes up to 32%, twice that of freshmen but still a minority of students.3
Having set the development of HEDCAP as the goal for higher education, they then turn to how students approach the college experience. They offer four mental models for college: 1) intertial (it’s the next step in the journey), 2) transactional (means to grad school or a job), 3) exploratory (try our new ideas and experiences), and 4) transformational.4 I want to quote their full definition of this last one:
One goes to college to reflect about, and question, one’s own values and beliefs, with the expectation, and often, as well, the aspiration that one may change in fundamental ways (122).
Fischman and Gardner happily found that only 3% of their students fell in the inertial category. But the largest category was transactional, capturing 45% of the group. This was followed by exploratory5 at 36% and transformational with only 16%. I should note that for seniors, the transformational percentage went up to 22% (the transactional was actually a point higher than the sample overall, likely due to the nearness of finishing and worries about job prospects).
That nearly half of all students, regardless of year in school, saw college as about jobs and future prospects underscores the argument Will Bunch was making in his book. We have told students for decades that a college degree was their ticket to a job (or more dire, that their prospects without a degree were extremely limited). It should be no surprise that they have taken those lessons to heart and approached college in a transactional way. It is credentialism at its worst and, as Fischman and Gardner argue, is responsible for the tremendous stress and anxiety experienced by today’s students.
Without prying into specifics about mental health challenges, the researchers simply relied on students’ own words. Nearly half of all students describe mental health as a challenge on their campus. This may or may not mean that the individual experiences this, but annual data collected by the HERI project at UCLA regularly scores concerns over anxiety in the upper 80% range. In addition the “normal” disruptions of leaving home, relationships, finances, friendships, time management, and the like, the constant fear that one isn’t taking full advantage of the transformational possibilities is debilitating. Not only are they taking on more debt, as Bunch argues, but every grade in every class can be seen as having a bearing on future employability (and potential for managing that debt). Sixteen percent of students also reported a lack of belonging, not being connected to other students or the institution itself. This feeling was more likely among students with low HEDCAP scores or transactional mental models.
As I think of the small campuses I served6, belonging was higher. In fact, it was often the selling point above academics. It might also be said that our focus on Christian development, what one my institution’s mission statement referred to as “a maturing Christian faith”, might be more transformational than would be true at Purdue when I was there.7
Like Bunch, I was taken by the vision the Truman Commission had for higher education in the 1940s. I think what they recognized was that college should sharpen students’ abilities to make sense of their world, to incorporate new material into their prior understandings in ways that made them more resilient. That calls for transformation and the development of HEDCAP. It could remove the strains of transactionalism that create anxiety, depression, and fear in our students.
Our current political moment, with its polarization and information silos and refusal to hear other perspectives would surely benefit from a commitment to transformative higher education. But the political separation between the college population and the non-college population, especially for those currently under 40, requires us to also commit to these goals for those who don’t go to college.
Those young people who pursue apprenticeships, the military, trade schools, service years, or retail/hospitality jobs also need intellectual capital, a possibility of transformation, and a sense of belonging. There may have been a day, when I was young, where more of that was provided by public school curricula. But our focus on jobs8, on standardized testing, and an order/control motif in managing schools has pretty well eliminated that.
So while we’re hoping to innovate on educational programs, we need to innovate on the development of social capital to overcome the alienation felt my too many young people today. We need to find ways to develop meaning beyond a paycheck and a big boat.
I don’t have any great programmatic ideas at the moment, but I expect I’ll return to this topic in future newsletters.
The variety of ideas is not the point in itself. That’s what was wrong with the op-ed from the University of Virginia student who wanted her classroom to be filled with rigorous debate.
Eliminating discussions of structural racism, economic inequality, sexual orientation, and manifest destiny deny students the raw materials they need to make sense of the world they will graduate into.
Hopefully, this is a result of student growth over time but some of that change may be due to attrition of lower HEDCAP students.
To pat myself on the back for a moment, I argued a similar four approaches in my 2014 book for freshmen entering Christian universities. I’m also biased toward transformation.
One way to thing about the exploratory group is that they are the ones that will prioritize friendships, greek life, parties, and meeting new people. Or, as a student of mine put it decades ago, he wanted to get B’s in his classes so he could experience all college had to offer.
I found that one could commit to a transformational model but it took work. Coming up with good questions in class, staying after to talk to the professor, becoming involved in the sociology club all solidified my approach which eventually led to graduate school.
When my now adult son was in 8th grade, he had to select a career path and report on the budget he would make to live on that career. In EIGHTH GRADE! I was not happy with the assignment, to say the least.