Fixing College Education: A New Curriculum for the Twenty-first Century

Chapter 8: Final Problems

120 8 Final Problems ACCESS AND RETENTION Paying primary attention to the curriculum should not allow us to pass over the fact that there are lots of other things about the American college that need improvement. One of our most urgent problems is that of access and retention, of finding and keeping places in college for students from poor families and for those who are potentially capable but are underprepared or lack motivation. Currently, only 52.6 percent of full-time students entering four-year public colleges graduate in six years; Hispanic students have a 41.8 percent rate, and African American students a 38.1 percent rate. The push toward ever greater selectivity at “elite” colleges, the scarcity of need-based scholarships, and the use of standardized entrance examinations on which children of lower-income families are less likely to succeed have meant that the gap in college going by income is actually widening. Almost all the increase in the proportion of eighteen- to twenty-fouryear -olds in postsecondary institutions in recent years represents children from middle- and upper-income families. While many agencies and colleges are addressing this problem with outreach and scholarship plans, it is ironic that most of them are laboring to recruit disadvantaged students into a second-rate system. Instead of sensitively introducing these students to the fascinating, unfamiliar culture of higher learning, the college courses prescribed for many of them typically have the same traits, often worsened by the label “remedial,” that make them deadly for the regular student as well: bald presenta- FINAL PROBLEMS 121 tions of subject matter in large, impersonal classes taught by overworked and underpaid part-timers, with emphasis on memory work for letter grades. These students deserve a first-rate curriculum , and it should be obvious that one based on close advising , small-group interaction, focus on interesting problems, and sensitive assessment would attract and retain more of them than the conventional one does. In a sense, not only the disadvantaged but also most of our entering college students are underprepared. One of the reasons may be that high school teachers and administrators largely envision college preparation as preparation for the same mediocre curriculum that they themselves experienced. Future teachers and administrators, among all the students in college, are the ones who not only take the curriculum but also duplicate or perpetuate it. For other students, the college experience might be a means to an end; for future teachers it becomes an end and a model. Even if they start their careers teaching kindergarten, college remains a permanent presence in their professional lives. This is true both for the content of the curriculum and for the mode of teaching. So the curriculum has a greater resonance, has far greater consequences, mediated through the lives and experiences of future teachers than it has through the lives of ordinary students. That means that a poor college curriculum experienced by high school teachers will be poor for high school students too. As the Education Trust has reported: “Most of the problems that characterize secondary education in this country—unclear and differential standards, uneven teaching, little curricular coherence—can be found in spades in higher education as well. Indeed, these two systems are intertwined in so many places that neither can solve its own problems without the other’s cooperation.” There are exceptions, of course, but they should not be allowed to obscure the general picture. Most of our high school teachers—for all their admirable idealism—have themselves gone though an experience in college that had no describable structure. They have come out of it with little more than a ran- FIXING COLLEGE EDUCATION 122 dom collection of 120 semester units, including a “major” set in a miscellany of electives and “core” courses. The major probably consisted of a fixed number of courses in one department, not necessarily offering basic intellectual discipline, but rather just a special subject matter with its special jargon. If the “core” or “distribution” requirements produced little that was coherent in breadth, the narrow specialized major did not provide compensating coherence in depth. Nor did the faculties employ or promote the most powerful teaching devices or provide the best atmosphere for learning. They worked, over and over again, with about 10 percent of the student’s mind: the part that memorizes facts and authoritative opinions and repeats them on exams for letter grades. Meanwhile, with little...