The Purpose of Undergraduate Education
What is the aim of undergraduate education? Perhaps we should aim toward the lofty goals of Emerson:
Colleges have their indispensable office, to teach elements. But they can only serve us when they aim not to drill but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.6
Or perhaps we should consider the aspirations of Henry Philip Tappan, first presi-dent of the University of Michigan:
Universities may, indeed, make learned men; but their best commendation is given when it can be said of them, that furnishing the materials and appli-ances of learning, setting the examples in their professors and graduates, breathing the spirit of scholarship in all that pertains to them, they inspire men, by the self-creative force of study and thought, to make themselves both learned and wise, and thus ready to put their hand to ever great and good work, whether of science, of religion, or of the state.7
To achieve either goal, we need a new spirit of liberal learning, one that strives not just to impart the facts but to encourage and support our students to develop a philosophy of life.
At a much less idealistic level, the purpose of a college education for most students and parents is to earn the college degree necessary for a good job and personal economic security. Many of today’s students approach their college education with definite career goals in mind. They enroll with plans to become doctors or engineers or lawyers or teachers. While many will change their minds during their undergradu-ate years, almost all will emerge with specific career goals still uppermost in mind.
Modern employers reinforce this utilitarian approach. The recruiters they send to campuses are looking for very specific skills. Perhaps they seek a particular under-graduate major or Internet navigation skills. Or perhaps they seek some evidence that the student can communicate well and work comfortably in a diverse
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ment. Students are extremely sensitive to these signals from the employment marketplace, and the experiences of other students with job interviews and place-ments can impact their own educational plans.
In this way, the university is caught between opposing forces: the desire to respond to the more pragmatic goals of students and employers while providing the broader liberal education important for good citizenship and a meaningful life. And in a world of ever-changing needs, the university should always be striving to prepare students for a lifetime of learning. The old saying that the purpose of a college education is not to prepare students for their first job but rather their last job still has a ring of truth.
The Undergraduate Curriculum
The raging debate over the character and content of the undergraduate curriculum pits several philosophies of instruction against each other:8
• The Great-Books Approach: The goal of this approach is to transmit a defined body of knowledge to students, as captured in the great works of human thought.
As Bloom puts it, “Philosophy and liberal studies, in general, require the most careful attention to great books. This is because these are expressions of teach-ers such as we are not likely to encounter in pteach-erson, because in them we find the arguments for what we take for granted without reflection, and because they are the sources of forgotten alternatives.”9
• Methods of Understanding and Inquiry: This approach stresses an acquaintance with the principal ways by which the human mind apprehends the world—that is, methods of understanding and inquiring about literature, art, moral philoso-phy, history, economy, and society, as well as natural sciences. This philosophy of liberal learning views undergraduate education as a foundation to provide stu-dents access to many fields they can pursue later in life.
• Distribution and Breadth: The aim of this approach is to achieve breadth by requiring students to take a certain number of courses in each of several diverse categories such as the social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, and arts.
This philosophy assumes that different disciplines have separate and valuable ways of apprehending the world and that requiring students to sample a wide variety will suffice to broaden their minds.
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Of course, in practice most undergraduate programs combine aspects of all three methods. Most would agree that the undergraduate curriculum should seek a common set of goals such as those articulated by Rhodes.10
1. The ability to read, write, and speak with clarity, precision, and grace, and to understand and articulate not only the facts, but the nuances and shades of meaning.
2. The habit of disciplined inquiry and the ability to delve deeply, systematically, and thoroughly into new subject areas.
3. The understanding of times and cultures other than our own.
4. An appreciation of nonverbal and non-quantitative expression, including those of the creative and performing arts.
5. An in-depth study of one chosen area to develop an appreciation of the methods, boundaries, relationships, limitations, and significance of a specific discipline.
6. Through a wide-ranging perspective of the world at large, the development of a sense of the context—physical, biological, social, historical, and ethical—in which students will live their lives.11
The organization of the university, its faculty, and the undergraduate curriculum into highly specialized disciplines and programs poses challenges to the pursuit of these goals. The past century has seen the rapid growth of specialization within the academy. Faculty have been encouraged to focus on their own learning and scholar-ship in increasingly narrow and numerous specialties and subspecialties—from 19th century Japanese economics to plant physiology, from deconstructing poetry to analyzing first amendment law. This excessive specialization has propagated into the contemporary undergraduate curriculum, as any cursory scan of a college course catalog will reveal, and it has overwhelmed efforts to develop a coherent character to undergraduate education. Shapiro states it well when he observes:
There is a growing sense that the competitive demands of specialized scholar-ship and other developments have placed an irreparable rift between gradu-ate and undergradugradu-ate education and may have impaired the capacity of research universities both to remain centers of modern scholarship and to fulfill their broader educational functions. The real problem is that teaching and research may be too closely related. At the root of our unmet challenge in undergraduate education is the failure to distinguish between the transmission
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of knowledge and the development of a capacity for inquiry, discovery, and continued learning. The predicament is that the faculty is transmitting what they know—and love—with little awareness of what the student needs to learn.12
The traditional curriculum, with its division of knowledge into scholarly disciplines and its practice of teaching by means of lecture and text, is ill-suited to today’s student and tomorrow’s society. While the attainment of specific knowledge and skills may be valuable in preparing students for citizenship or rewarding lives, it no longer seems appropriate to impose rigid constraints in the form of curricular require-ments.
With today’s increasingly diverse student body, there is a need for new learning environments that can accommodate differences in learning styles, interests, and backgrounds. We should not confuse the goal of learning with that of mastering a given body of knowledge, even within a specific major or concentration. Today’s students require a curriculum—indeed, an educational experience—that is more personalized to their particular educational goals and background.
This will pose new challenges for the faculty, because they will have to develop the capacity to consider each student as an individual, with distinct goals, needs, and abilities. But this “humanizing” of the mass education process that has too long characterized undergraduate education is overdue.
Teaching, Research, and Service
Today we see an unprecedented shift in education from the dominant focus on knowledge delivery or transmission teaching to a focus on student learning. The learning associated with a university education occurs through many activities, some formal such as classroom instruction and some informal such as student interactions and extracurricular activities. Interestingly, in longitudinal studies of their graduates, several universities asked alumni to rank the value of their various experiences while undergraduates. The alumni consistently tended to rank as most valuable their interactions with faculty and other students (the community theme again). Lowest in value was the actual content learned in formal courses.13
This view is reinforced by surveys of CEOs of major American corporations who, when asked what they seek in today’s college graduates, tended to respond: the ability to communicate, the willingness to continue to learn, the capacity to value and manage diversity, and the desire to drive change. Again, particular curricular content was not high on the list.14
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There is a certain irony here. The contemporary university provides one of the most remarkable learning environments in our society—an extraordinary array of diverse people with diverse ideas supported by an exceptionally rich collection of intellec-tual and cultural resources. Yet we tend to focus most of our efforts to improve undergraduate education on traditional academic programs, on the classroom and the curriculum. In the process, we may have overlooked the most important learning experiences at the university.
Think about it from another perspective. When asked to identify the missions of the university, we generally respond with the time-tested triad: teaching, research, and service. Undergraduate education, however, is usually thought of only from the perspective of the first of these missions— teaching. Clearly, we should broaden our concept of the undergraduate experience to include student involvement in other aspects of university life.
For example, at a research university, every undergraduate should have the opportu-nity—or perhaps even be required—to participate in original research or creative work under the direct supervision of an experienced faculty member. The few students who have been fortunate enough to benefit from such a research experience usually point to it as one of the most important aspects of their undergraduate
education; unfortunately, most receive their education only through the more stan-dard curriculum. Interestingly enough, many faculty members who have supervised undergraduate research projects also find it to be an exhilarating role, because undergraduate students are frequently more questioning and enthusiastic than graduate students!
There is ample evidence to suggest that students’ learning also benefits significantly from participating in community or professional service. Such activities provide students with experience in working with others and applying knowledge learned in formal academic programs to community needs. Many students arrive on campus with little conception of broader community values and the experience of doing something for others can be invaluable.
In fact, major studies suggest that knowledge is created, sustained, and transformed in “communities of practice.”15 Learning constitutes a form of membership that evolves as the individual engages in the practices and activities of the community, which becomes the living repository of knowledge. While there are numerous opportunities for volunteer community service at all universities, a more structured approach would better align these experiences with the goals of an undergraduate education. Such community or professional service might even be considered as a requirement for an undergraduate degree.
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The undergraduate experience must be reconsidered from a far broader perspective, encompassing the multiple missions of the university. All too frequently each of the missions of the university is associated with a different component: a liberal educa-tion and teaching with the undergraduate program, research with the graduate school, and public service with professional schools. In reality, all components of the university should be involved in all of its missions—particularly in undergraduate education.
A Liberal Education
A concept still quite relevant to undergraduate education but usually misunderstood is that of a liberal education. Today educators and others use the term to refer to everything from an education based on “the great books” to a broad but superficial survey of all of the liberal arts. According to Harold Shapiro, a liberal education involves: “The need to better understand ourselves and our times, to discover and understand the great traditions and deeds of those who came before us, the need to free our minds and our hearts from unexamined commitments, in order to consider new possibilities that might enhance both our own lives and build our sympathetic understanding of others quite different from us; the need to prepare all thoughtful citizens for an independent and responsible life of choice that appreciates the connectedness of things and peoples.”16
Shapiro also points out that over the past two millennia since the concept was first introduced by the Greeks, the definition of a liberal education has changed dramati-cally. For the Greeks and Romans, a liberal education had a disciplinary intent:
grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. As time passed, more objectives were added such as the freeing of the individual from previous ideas, the disinterested search for truth, the pursuit of alternative ideas, the development and integrity of the individual, and the power of reason. Shapiro suggests that the only continuing themes have been the achievement of important educational objectives that are complementary to those of a purely technical educa-tion and the creaeduca-tion of a certain type of citizen.
To be sure, the notion of a liberal education for the 21st Century will be different than that of our times. Yet, as difficult as it is to define and as challenging as it is to achieve, perhaps the elusive goal of liberal learning remains the preparation of students for a lifetime of learning and a world of change.
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