Over the last few years, as the economy went into the tank, our public discussions about the future of higher education have increasingly been about budget cuts, rising tuition, and the need for accountability. A central talking point in these discussion has been the need to implement outcomes-based measurement.
This new emphasis has changed the way we plan programs and services in higher education. At many schools, everything must be matched to an outcome, and every outcome must be assessed in some way. Institutions then use this data to drive decisions about funding and priorities, and to justify their programs and services to state legislatures, donors, accreditation bodies, incoming students, their parents, alumni and an ever-growing number of watchdog groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
So, like it or not, we live in interesting times. This can be viewed as a blessing or a curse, and it’s my opinion that we need to find the blessing in this situation, and to be thankful for the opportunity today’s political and financial environment provides. Change isn’t easy, and in our personal and professional lives, we all have periods of doubt. There are healthy and productive ways of dealing with this reality. Wanting things to stay the same is not one of them.
As a career coach, I help individuals work through these issues, by discovering their purpose, and finding ways to align that purpose with their work. This involves discussions about a person’s background and professional history, but more importantly, it requires exploration and discovery. The process that gets people unstuck is co-creative. Coaches ask the “big questions” and give activities that help clients explore them. We challenge assumptions, conclusions and doubts. We work through blocks. We help people explore new interests, research them, and focus on creating new, more positive patterns of behavior. We try to integrate the important parts of a person (talents, skills, abilities, interests and values) into each individual’s plan to move forward, and to help clients set S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time Limited) goals.
The best part of being a coach is that for the most part, clients come to you when they are ready to change. The discussions and activities are geared toward helping the client define, in real and measurable terms, what success means, and how they will know when they achieve it.
But lately, I’ve been wondering if higher education, as a field, is really ready to be coached. Furthermore, I’m not quite sure who should be coaching. I don’t think the state legislatures should be doing it, because they aren’t looking at the big picture, only at the cost of doing business, and who should be paying it. And politicians are more worried about re-election (their S.M.A.R.T. goal) and what institutions shouldn’t be teaching, than how they should be teaching. Watchdog groups like FIRE are often most passionate about the what than the how, and many times, their approach shuts down discussion, or erodes into a chaotic and mind-numbing clash of talking points or a game to be won, rather than a co-creative, purposeful process of discovery.
Here are three resources that really got me thinking about these issues.
- Improving Legislative Oversight of College Costs (Powerpoint Presentation from the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability.)
- Digital Students, Industrial Universities by Arthur Levine on Inside Higher Ed.
- Digital Students: Toys vs. Tools (A brief response to the article mentioned above, and thoughts on how it relates to adult learners, by Jeannette Passmore on her blog Learn, Unlearn, Relearn.)
I’d like to start a dialogue on this topic. Please share your thoughts and questions by commenting on this post. Take whatever direction you like, but here are some questions to get you started:
- What’s the purpose of higher education these days? Has it changed from in the past?
- What do institutions of higher education need to learn?
- Is higher education, as a field, ready for change? (And if so, is higher education “coachable?”)
- What learning outcomes do you think are most important?
- What S.M.A.R.T. goals should the field set for measuring improvement?
- Where should higher ed look for coaching on these goals? The legislature? The federal government? Professional associations? Somewhere else?
And if you have perspectives you’d like to share on these topics, in an upcoming guest post on Monday Morning QuarterBack, send me a message at sean@higheredcareercoach.com. I would ideally like to have guest posts on this topic each Monday for the next 2-3 weeks.
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Leave it to Sean to ask the weighty questions! I have some thoughts, but these are just my thoughts and I'm no expert (at least not outside of my own head anyway!)The purpose of higher education today needs to be, IMHO, to train students to learn, unlearn, and relearn, communicate, adapt, and change. Yes, it is different from the past where content knowledge was the ultimate goal. Information, technology, globalization, and the work force are changing at such a rapid pace that teaching content specific knowledge is quickly becoming a great way to train for academia only. Students today need to be able to shift from their first careers through to their third careers learning "on-the-fly". Critical thinking and communication play key roles in achieving these goals. What do institutions of higher education need to learn? To embrace change, try innovation, and to understand that the institution may need to have some minor failures in order to advance and meet the needs of the ever changing student population. The traditional brick-and-mortar residence hall filled with 18-25 year olds will never disappear, but I believe it is quickly becoming out-dated by the influx of nontraditional students, and traditional students, seeking to learn marketable skills at a pace and in an environment that stimulates them. This is not to say that Liberal Arts education is out-dated! I think we need liberal arts now more than ever.I'll have to think a bit more before I answer the last two. :)JIs higher education ready for change and can it be coached? I can't answer that. I think that like all long standing institutions the change and coaching need to occur some deference and a lot of respect for what higher education has accomplished until now.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Jeannette!
I want to start by answering the last question first. (For context, I work in Student Services at a community college in Washington State; I supervise a peer mentorship program in the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs.) Where should higher education look for coaching? Our students! This isn't to say that our students know absolutely anything and everything about providing them a successful education, but often if I feel stuck in my planning, or I need a new idea or new approach to freshen up what our office provides, I ask our students. Recently I put together a focus group with the group of students I supervise and asked them about how our program could improve. I got some really neat ideas from them (and some not-so-practical suggestions too) that I'm looking forward to implementing this next year. I really do think our students have a wealth of knowledge about strategies that are working for them (or not working for them); we need to be able to trust them enough to empower them to take part in that process.Actually, this reminds me of one of my favorite things I read during my Master's program (and wasn't required reading for my coursework). In Parker Palmer's "The Courage to Teach," he talks about forming a community of learners that place the subject matter at the center, rather than teachers putting information in students' heads (what Friere describes as "banking"). One of the scariest things for higher education could be to give up some of its authority in constructing the systems and processes by which students are educated in favor of empowering students to become actors in creating that process. Yet it could still yield extremely fruitful results.I believe we also need administrators who are well-versed in the history and traditions of the academy to be able to maintain fidelity to our original purposes (teaching and training, research and innovation, etc.). But I see a growing need to listen to our changing student body more and more. The area of student services in which I work, Diversity and Multicultural Affairs, was a direct product of students crying out for a change in services and the way the institution responds to the diversity of needs of a quickly changing student population. While our students have so much to learn from us, we have much to learn from them–and grow as individuals, institutions, and the system of higher education in the U.S. as a whole.–Bryce Hughes
Thanks for adding your thoughts, Bryce! I like the way Palmer phrased it. I guess I have another book to add to my reading list. You've hit on what I think are a couple of extremely central issues to this discussion: control vs. co-creation and product vs. process. Let's take a more mindful approach (in the Buddhist sense) on this. I don't think the issue comes down to giving up control; it comes down to recognizing that control is an illusion. Learning is a process, not a product. It's co-creative. Collaboration is the key, but true collaboration is only possible when all parties assume good intentions, give other parties the respect they deserve, engage in the back-and-forth, and make choices that move themselves forward.So I would posit that one of the keys to understanding the paradigm shift in education is to understand that processes have lives of their own, and that people learn from their participation, reflection and reaction to the interactions that occur between others, in the process. In this way, the challenge before institutions is to recognize that the process will go on without them if they don't find ways to participate.What do you think?
I think that we need to define "higher education": Do we mean all forms of post-secondary education which includes training in the trades or do we just mean colleges and universities. Because, I think, the two do two very different things and should do two different things. I think universities try to do too much now: liberal arts; hard, applied science; think-tank work; and everything and anything in between. Universities were made to educate, not train. I agree that students need to learn to be autonomous learners. But the question becomes, why is higher ed responsible for that? In fact, why can't a 16-year-old, who wants to become a mechanic, learn that skill, along with basics of accounting and marketing (which is essentially writing and communications) when they are 16? Is higher ed's job to teach a student how to use Twitter? In fact, with the Internet, things like Open University, iTunes U and OpenCourseWare, you can learn anything and everything at home. You really always could (think of Good Will Hunting). As the antagonist that particular bar scene said, I'll have a degree from Harvard and you'll be serving me french fries. Increasingly, that isn't the case. Universities need to offer more than just what is in the books, what they can find themselves online. Value-added, as they say.I've been debating skills vs knowledge, teacher vs professor, etc, on twitter for a little while now. Students clearly aren't getting the skills or knowledge they need in K-12. I don't think it's the university's job to make up that difference, I really don't. Everything will keep getting dragged down.As for can the university's change? There's a reason why I created the hashtag #higheredapocalypse – for better or for worse, change is coming. I just don't think it's going to come easy or that the results will be what is really needed. A lot of other people have noted that it is the next bubble that is about to burst. At the end of the day, has housing and lending practices really changed all that much? It just got harder to own a home. Is that what's going to happen to higher ed? I have no idea. You should check out my blog: collegereadywriting.blogspot.com where I've commented for fully on a lot of these questions.
Hi Lee, Thanks for taking the time to comment and to re-tweet. I think the Good Will Hunting reference is really applicable. Now there was an active learner, unafraid of debate and process, and not at all impressed by the egos of the more "educated!" They didn't want to let him into their elite circle, where knowledge was dripped down from on high. So he found his own way. For Will, college was irrelevant. He always had the capability and drive to learn. In the 1800s, Thomas Carlysle famously said "The true University of these days is a collection of books." What do you think he'd say today?
Hmmm…I think higher education has gotten pretty incestuous and useless as of late, especially at the post-graduate level. Speaking as someone who's attended graduate school, higher education almost seems like a pyramid scheme. Rather than teaching you any relevant or career-oriented skills (and I'm not just talking about trades), you're taught how to be a miniature version of your professor. It makes me wonder if other aspects of higher education (like the tenure system) are also outdated.
Thanks Treacle. It's nice to get comments from fellow Third Tribers. What do you think universities should be doing to stay relevant?
Yes, I completely agree that part of the answer is for people in institutions to realize control is an illusion. And to be okay with that, to be okay with understanding organizations shift and change organically based on the make up of that organization. But institutional culture in higher education, for some reason, does not lend itself easily to the type of trust needed to accept this, and that change can become extremely threatening for many involved people. Maybe the real issue isn't WHAT institutions need to learn, but HOW institutions can build trust into their cultures. Change doesn't have to move quickly, and society will allow institutions some time to learn and adapt, but that sometimes there are elements of our culture that we need to be okay with letting go.Trust I think is a big one, and it probably isn't an issue isolated to higher education.
I definitely agree with this. People have trouble trusting others, in part because they have trouble trusting themselves. They have to be ready to dive in. So how do we get there?
Couldn't agree more. I find that with coaching ed and tech, the HOW and WHAT are intertwined. So, in order to work, the coaching process needs to be flexible enough that it can adapt quasi-instantaneously to the needs of the specific group it's dealing with. The coach is, first and foremost, a reader of learning styles, and a proficient stimulator of the styles he/she detects.That's the way I do it, anyway 🙂
Thanks for the comment Mau. You make a good point about learning styles and matching them to the specific group. Obviously a tall order when you think of a field as broad and varied as higher ed administration. Any thoughts on how to “read the needs” of a whole field? I'm not sure where we should start, except to say that I don't think it should be the legislature.
I appreciate you stopping by. I'm gonna follow you now. Like the website for nifty. It's, well…nifty. I'd love to know more about what you do.
Sean,I seriously considering obtaining an Ed D and pursuing a career as a professor. The biggest obstacle is my age. By the time I'd finish I'd be in my mid 50s; even though universities I have spoken have said that age is not a factor, I've heard differently from friends who teach at the university level. They can get more use out of a younger prof than an old fart like me. I've put my dream of teaching university students on hold – my Ed D will be running a successful online learning company.