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Credit: The MIT PRESS
Cambridge, MA, March 30th, 2022—Why higher education in the United States has lost its way, and how universities and colleges can focus sharply on their core mission.
For The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be (The MIT PRESS, on sale 3/22/2022), Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner analyzed in-depth interviews with more than 2,000 students, alumni, faculty, administrators, parents, trustees, and others, which were conducted at ten institutions ranging from highly selective liberal arts colleges to less selective state schools. What they found challenged characterizations in the media: students are not preoccupied by political correctness, free speech, or even the cost of college. They are most concerned about their GPA and their resumes; they see jobs and earning potential as more important than learning. Many say they face mental health challenges, fear that they don't belong, and feel a deep sense of alienation. Given this daily reality for students, has higher education lost its way? Fischman and Gardner contend that US universities and colleges must focus sharply on their core educational mission.
Fischman and Gardner, both recognized authorities on education and learning, argue that higher education in the United States has lost sight of its principal reason for existing: not vocational training, not the provision of campus amenities, but to increase what the authors term “higher education capital”—to help students think well and broadly, express themselves clearly, explore new areas, and be open to possible transformations. Fischman and Gardner offer cogent recommendations for how every college can become a community of learners who are open to change as thinkers, citizens, and human beings.
In The Real World of College, Fischman and Gardner introduce helpful ways to conceptualize the college experience, including:
- Describing four mental models of college: inertial, transactional, exploratory, and transformational. The authors indicate how the incidence of these models differs across constituencies and across schools;
- Introducing a new measure called Higher Education Capital (HEDCAP): this documents the ability of students (and members of the other constituencies) to attend, analyze, reflect, connect, and communicate. They note conditions under which HEDCAP increases and when it does not, and report on whether HEDCAP increases over the course of college;
- Explicating three specific forms of belonging/alienation (to academics, peers, and the institution) and describing patterns across students and schools.
About the Authors:
Wendy Fischman is a Project Director at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and lead author of Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work.
Howard Gardner is John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the author of A Synthesizing Mind: A Memoir from the Creator of Multiple Intelligences Theory (MIT Press) and many other books.
Advance Praise:
“This provocative book explores the views of thousands of students and other campus personnel. Finding many students alienated and narrowly focused on grades and resumes, the authors call for a renewed emphasis on the larger intellectual and social purposes of college.”
—Michael McPherson, President Emeritus, Spencer Foundation, and Macalester College; coauthor of Crossing the Finish Line and The Student Aid Game
“In this bold and visionary book, Fischman and Gardner offer transformational solutions to the grave problems facing higher education today. The book’s compelling recommendations are supported by their definitive study of contemporary college life.”
—William Damon, Professor of Education, Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence; author of The Path to Purpose
“Based on extensive field work and thoughtful analysis, The Real World of College offers an exceptionally valuable account of liberal arts education in the US today. There are some surprises in these findings, and much to ponder in the recommendations.”
—Nannerl O. Keohane, President Emerita, Wellesley College and Duke University
“Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner distill decades of experience into this bracing, often surprising book about what college is, and is for. With rigor and wisdom, they burn away myths and challenge every American to recommit to truly higher learning.”
—Eric Liu, CEO, Citizen University
“Readers of The Real World of College will gain a new and powerful way of thinking about the impact of college, as well as its perils and promise. Everyone who cares about modern society (and its youth) should read this book.”
—Susan Engel, Class of 1959 Director, Program in Teaching, Williams College; author of The Intellectual Lives of Children
“Agree or not, it’s impossible not to be inspired with findings from thousands of interviews that students today need deeper engagement with broad-gauged learning. Professors Fischman and Gardner demand we remember the educational importance, always, of asking ‘why?’”
—Cathy N. Davidson, Founder, The Futures Initiative; author of The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux
“Books that purport to describe the college experience appear all the time, but they are almost always too limited—a study of one institution; a study of a group of similar institutions; a study of a highly selective institution that is presented as if it is a universal ideal to use as a benchmark; or a very broad study but based on slim data. At last, Fischman and Gardner have written the book we’ve all been waiting for: The Real World of College is based on exhaustive data about a very large number of students at a large and diverse array of US colleges and universities. Moreover, the authors probe both the effects on students of the formal curriculum and the effects of what happens outside the classroom. Most importantly, this study connects the two domains of students’ experience with a big enough sample of students to make the disaggregation of the data compelling in its findings for the subgroups of students who are discussed. Fischman and Gardner fully appreciate that not all students have the same experience and they do not give us a falsely universal description of college-going. Nonetheless, they do show us the patterns and their implications in this careful analysis that add up to a case for a peculiarly American experience of higher education, while also providing readers with new grounds to appreciate the great diversity of institutional types. And the authors go even further: to lay out the broad strokes of what any reform efforts ought to emphasize in the coming years if we ever hope to succeed in making American postsecondary education better than it is today.”
—Richard Ekman, President Emeritus, Council of Independent Colleges
AUTHOR QUESTIONS:
1. How did you decide to embark on this multi-year, ten-campus study of the state of higher education?
For a quarter of a century, both of us have been studying the nature of good work (https://www.thegoodproject.org/). When we worked with young persons, we found that they typically knew what good work was and admired it from afar. But they felt that they could not afford to do good work, because if they behaved properly, they would be scooped by peers who cut corners. Good work was “for later” in life, after success had been assured.
Of course, this disturbed us. And so, we began to work with college students in the Northeast, with various kinds of interventions. We realized that we needed to do this in a far more systematic way. And so, we embarked on what may well be the most ambitious recent study of American colleges—interviewing in-depth over 2,000 individuals at ten disparate schools. The project took our energies—and that of a few dozen research assistants—ten years to design, carry out, analyze the data, and write up our findings. We believe that readers will definitely encounter “the real world of college.”
2. Over the course of your research, you interviewed hundreds of students, faculty, administrators, alums, and parents. What was the most unexpected thing you learned?
Four things:
- Across disparate campuses, students are far more similar than we had anticipated. They have similar goals, concerns and even use the same words! We find few, if any, differences based on background or where they currently attend school.
- What you read about in the news (see Q3) is not on the minds of most students—free speech, political correctness, and even the cost of college rarely came up. Rather it was issues of mental health, and a sense of belonging or alienation.
- The egocentrism of students—our students use the world “I” and “me” eleven times as much as “we” “us” or “our.” This is very worrisome—please see our answers to questions 1 and 10.
- The misalignment between students and parents on the one hand, and faculty and administrators on the other. It is striking that students are mostly in agreement with the adults with whom most of them do not see on a daily basis, whereas they differ greatly from those with whom they are in contact. For example, is in the mental models for the college experience: the bulk of students are transactional—they see college as a means to an end—almost all faculty and administrators are transformational—they see college as an opportunity to reflect, grow, and possibly change. This comes up as a major throughline throughout the study.
3. Issues like free speech, political correctness, and the cost of college dominate news coverage of higher education. To what extent did those themes come up in your research?
Very little, even at more selective campuses. The exceptions occurred right before or after a controversial speaker came to campus.
We have continued to interview students after our study was completed—and it is true that at select schools, students sometimes feel silenced, afraid to say what they think. They are afraid that they will be misinterpreted, judged, and cancelled. We find that on the whole, students are uncomfortable discussing ethical issues, if they even notice them.
We find this very worrisome.
In terms of the cost of college, this rarely comes up organically as a topic of concern among students (adults assume that this is more of a concern for students). The cost of college was indeed a determining factor for students in deciding where to enroll (once they received their acceptances and learned about financial assistance decisions), but once they were in college, it did not seem to come up much for them. The only exception is when some students talked about tension with students from different SES backgrounds.
4. In your book, you propose the concept and metric of “higher education capital.” Can you describe what the term means and how it was useful for your study?
Higher education capital (HEDCAP) is the term we use to describe a student’s ability to attend, analyze, reflect, connect, and communicate on issues of importance. For example, if you are sitting next to a stranger—on a train or bus—and strike up an hour-long conversation with this person about almost any topic (a movie, a book), you will have a sense of one’s ability to ask good questions, connect the dots, bring in other perspectives, ask for clarifications, articulate one’s own viewpoints. This is HEDCAP.
We developed a way to measure HEDCAP by a simple scoring system (1-3) in which participants were scored as having a little HEDCAP (since we couldn’t prove that someone didn’t have any), some HEDCAP, or a lot of HEDCAP. We scored students and alums in two ways:
- We de-identified student and alum transcripts to “blind score” the HEDCAP of participants’ responses to each of seven specific questions—questions we determined would elicit substantive responses.
- We gave each student and alum a holistic HEDCAP score—based on an entire interview (not specific questions).
We found that these two methods correlated well.
HEDCAP is important to our study because we can use it to determine the extent to which one’s intellectual capital might “increase,” “decrease,” or stay the same over the course of college and beyond (since we scored alums). We can also correlate HEDCAP with other measures, for example, mental models and belonging.
Developing one’s HEDCAP over time ought to be the major purpose of college.
5. Your book focuses on nonvocational higher education, a sector associated with terms like general education and the liberal arts. Why did you focus on nonvocational schools, and what is the use of this type of education in the 21st century?
The genius of American education has been the college—an institution which purports to present a broad general education, giving students the knowledge and understandings that will serve them no matter what work they do, where they live etc. This form of education—usually called “liberal arts”—is vital for any democratic society. Alas, (see Q7), this form of education is in jeopardy in this country—largely because of the signals given by many parents, many teachers, and the broader society. We believe it would be tragic would this tradition be undermined
We found that few of our respondents know what “liberal arts” means and so we use the more neutral term “higher education capital” (see Q4)
We have no objection to vocational education and in fact we include one supposedly vocational school in our sample, The Olin College of Engineering. As one student there told us “I am getting the best of both worlds, a liberal arts education and an engineering degree”. That’s very unusual.
However, if a student chooses a liberal arts and science school or program, they ought not to be focused simply on jobs or vocation.
Note that all over the world, other countries are trying to implement liberal arts education. They admire what our country risks losing.
6. In your assessment, what are the biggest challenges facing schools and students today?
Unfortunately, there are MANY challenges. For students, the two main challenges they speak about are mental health (now deemed a “crisis”) and lack of belonging (see Q2).
We also see other challenges for students, mainly the preoccupation with achieving “external measures of success” (grades, acceptances, jobs) over learning. In other words, students feel it is more important to get an A or to build their resume to get a particular job, than it is to be exposed to new, different, or challenging content material—or even to do their own work (cheating is rampant on the college campus, and by all accounts, has intensified post-COVID because of online tests and exams).
This “uber transactionality” has been instilled in students early on their education. Therefore, some of the biggest challenges colleges face is not with just college itself, but also with the high schools and parents where these students come from!
In terms of the institution, challenges include: misalignment between faculty and administrators and the “customer” (see Q2), prioritizing the mission of higher education (and not the fancy buildings or athletic departments on campus), and justifying the value of higher education to students and their parents who worry about their “return on investment” (the number of college students is declining, as is the number of male students).
7. You propose two general approaches for the improvement of nonvocational higher education: onboarding and intertwining. Can you describe what these terms mean and how you came to those conclusions?
Onboarding is the concept we use to describe how to get all students aligned with the goal of the college or university, higher learning. From the first interaction on campus—whether this be at an admissions tour, orientation, or the first day of class—the mission of the institution needs to be clearly conveyed. Too often, students (and their parents) know more about internships, jobs after college, study abroad programs, residence and dining halls, and the gyms on campus.
Intertwining is the concept that if a school has a secondary mission—such as civics, religion, ethics or even work (like Northeastern University or Berea College)—that this needs to be integrated into the academic program for students. If it is separate, it will seem “extra” and not necessary or important.
The way we came to these conclusions is by spending time on campuses, going on college admissions tours and information sessions, in listening to more than 2,000 participants talk about how they view the purpose of higher education. Too many people are misguided about this purpose.
To have effective higher education, we need students who understand the mission; faculty, staff, and administrators who model the mission; and institutions which reflect the mission.
8. The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically disrupted schools as much as any other part of our society. Has the pandemic changed your assessment of higher education or offered any insight on its future?
In one way we were very fortunate. Our data collection was completed in 2018, well before the onset of the pandemic. In 2020-2021 we could not have carried out the many hundreds of interviews in person, on campus, in a realistic setting.
We all know that the pandemic has disrupted all forms of education. It’s been hard on everyone—thus the increase in mental health problems for teachers as well as students continues.
But one important blessing, in our view, is that the pandemic has forced EVERY institution and EVERY profession to consider it core mission, its core values, its essentials—the features and objectives that cannot and should not be scuttled. Two years after the pandemic, we feel more strongly than ever that we have lived up to the message of our subtitle: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be.
9. To what extent did your own experiences learning and teaching in universities inform your research? Did completing the book make you think differently about your own experiences?
We were both fortunate to have been educated at good liberal arts institutions, which have also been attended by our children. We wish that everyone would have the opportunity.
But in our study, we deliberately included very different schools—and of course, going to a highly selective school like Duke University or Kenyon College is different from attending a community college (like Borough of Manhattan Community College) or a large state school (like California State University at Northridge). We realize and greatly appreciate the challenges faced by teachers at institutions where students have not been well prepared, either by family or by earlier education. That said, the fact that students were surprisingly similar to one another is also notable.
For Howard, the biggest difference is that, having spent my life at Harvard, I realized that I took for granted understandings and aspirations which I could presume for most students. When I am lecturing or giving interviews now, I no longer make those presuppositions—and I realize that I should have been more sensitive to students who, while talented and with much promise, did not share those presuppositions.
For Wendy, the study made me realize three things: first, how fortunate I was that my parents valued education and higher education enough to treat it as an expectation (especially because they did not attend college themselves); second, my appreciation for the liberal arts and sciences, and specifically the history department at my college, which taught me how to think about things and to write; and third, my sadness and concern that so many people in society do not value education for the sake of education—being an informed citizen and an ability to contribute to society. Without this belief, we will be left with a “winner take all” society.
10. Can you share what you’re working on next?
We were extremely surprised and disturbed that so few students thought about ethical issues and so many of them took cheating for granted (see Q1). We are devising an approach for higher education which, we hope, will sensitize students to become aware of ethical dilemmas that arise at work, or in school, and help them think about how to resolve these dilemmas. For more information, please see: https://www.thegoodproject.org/
In addition, based on the interview questionnaire we used for our higher education survey, we have developed a survey that other institutions in the US and beyond—can use to learn about the perspectives of stakeholders on their own campus. It is important to understand not only the views of others, but how these are aligned and misaligned within a single institution and/or across the sector.
For more information, please see: https://www.therealworldofcollege.com/about-survey
The Real World of College by Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner
$34.95 T
ISBN: 9780262046534
408 pp. | 5.25 in x 8 in
Publication Date: March 22th, 2022
https://www.therealworldofcollege.com