For the future of higher education, we need to educate the whole student

In US society, higher education represents the most promising solution to the nation’s biggest challenges: stagnating incomes and productivity, persistent inequalities of wealth, and political polarisation. If higher education is to meet these challenges, it must adapt. The cost of attendance and educational debt are too high, retention and completion rates are too low, and learning and employment outcomes are too uncertain.

Inequalities exist in every facet of higher education. In terms of spending per student on instruction and support, cost after financial aid and admission to the most selective, well-resourced campuses, American colleges and universities are among the nation’s most stratified and status-conscious institutions.

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I am advocating an approach to undergraduate education that is developmental and transformational. It’s an education with clear objectives that are not simply cognitive but entail educating the whole person. It’s also an approach that seeks to ensure that as many undergraduates as possible get the opportunity to take part in the high-impact educational practices that can transform lives. 

These practices are currently reserved largely for the most privileged students: those who attend highly selective, well-endowed research universities and liberal arts colleges or who are admitted to public universities’ honours programs. The transformational experiences include the opportunity to engage in guided research and supervised internships and participate in a learning community with dedicated faculty mentors, professional advisers and rich co-curricular activities. I believe such experiences can be scaled.

Achieving this vision will not be easy. It will require broad-access institutions, which serve the vast majority of undergraduates, to better serve the students they have, not those they might prefer to have. 

These undergraduates represent the new majority – students who have received an uneven high school education and must juggle their studies with work and family responsibilities. Coming, as most do, from lower middle-class and working-class families, these students tend to be highly career focused, debt averse and concerned, for good reasons, that their dream of receiving a college degree won’t work out. 

These undergraduates are especially likely to drop out of school. They require more advising, more supplemental instruction, more constructive feedback, and more time, energy and personal attention than previous generations of students customarily received.

To bring these students to a bright future, campuses must innovate. Such innovations entail cultivating a sense of belonging and connection to the institution, faculty members and classmates. These innovations also involve providing more coherent pathways to a degree, more intensive academic and career advising, a greater emphasis on skills-building and more wraparound supports. And these innovations must be implemented within the context of resource constraints.

The innovations that I propose require changes across every dimension of a college or university. Faculty must re-envision their roles and embrace their responsibilities as mentors, learning architects and providers of more extensive and substantive constructive feedback. Institutions must redesign degree pathways and make these routes to a degree more coherent, integrated and synergistic. 

Pedagogies must place a greater emphasis on active, collaborative and inquiry- and project-based learning. Course design and delivery must move beyond the standard instructor-centred lecture and the discussion-based seminar and embrace more experiential learning in the form of practicums, clinicals, studio classes and community; and field-based courses as well as scaled, supervised research and internship opportunities. In addition, colleges and universities need to embed skills development, career preparation and the acquisition of job-aligned credentials and certificates across the undergraduate experience.

My larger goal is to rescue and resurrect two conceptions of education that have faded over time: cura personalis, the idea of educating the whole person, and Bildung, the notion of education as part of a larger process of self-discovery and personal maturation. In my view, institutions must accept a much greater responsibility for educating and assisting the whole student, helping to meet their basic needs for housing, food, transportation, and physical and mental well-being but also by facilitating their emotional and social development and metacognitive (self-reflective) skills.

In addition to promoting students’ cognitive growth, colleges and universities must do more to drive maturation across other vectors of development. Institutions need to help students grow morally, socially and interpersonally. Undergraduates must learn how to function in diverse, multicultural environments and handle interpersonal relationships judiciously, empathetically and respectfully. 

Colleges and universities also need to nurture students’ intrapersonal development: their capacity to plan, assess their own strengths and weaknesses, manage emotions, delay gratification, overcome distractions and obstacles, and adjust their strategies as needed.

Some, no doubt, will view my prescriptions as out of reach. But dreams can inspire and motivate, and dreams have a funny way of eventually becoming reality. Predicting the future is easy. Anyone can do it. Getting the predictions right, however, is hard. As a historian, I know full well that “unpredictability” is  among history’s watchwords. Forecasts tend to be futile yet fundamental. In times of uncertainty, the best we can do is speculate, spin scenarios and prepare accordingly.

What will the higher education landscape look like fifteen years from now?  Some changes strike me as likely.  Many very small colleges – typically those with fewer than a thousand students – and campuses in areas with shrinking populations, I predict, will have closed or merged, forged partnerships and alliances, or adopted shared services. At the same time, alternatives to an education at a traditional brick-and-mortar college will have expanded, posing a serious competitive threat to struggling institutions. An increasingly larger share of the undergraduate population will consist of non-traditional and historically underrepresented students. Costs – driven by the need to expand student services, enhance technology and invest in new programs in emerging fields of study – will have risen at a rate equal to or faster than inflation.

Other changes strike me as plausible. Institutions will be held more accountable for meeting their diversity, equity and inclusion benchmarks. Elite institutions will come under increasing attack over their refusal to grow and admit a more representative student body. Virtual internships will become more common. Schools will increase their online offerings and expand online professional master’s programs and nondegree programs, even though the market already seems glutted.

Apart from these predictions, my crystal ball is cloudy. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that higher education stands at a crossroads as it struggles with a series of disruptive developments, including shifting student demographics, mounting  student debt, rising costs, emerging competition from fully online institutions and alternative providers, and public questioning of higher education’s value proposition. Colleges and universities need to contain costs and provide an undergraduate education more efficiently and effectively, without compromising quality or rigour. Institutions also need to figure out how to raise graduation rates dramatically for students who are already in college, a statistic that has barely budged from around 60 per cent in six years. So too must this country ensure that many more adults – as many as fifty million who never went to college or dropped out – acquire the credentials they need to obtain the secure, well-paying jobs that the economy requires.

The future is, it’s quite rightly said, a blank page. It’s up to us to create that future. 

Steven Mintz is a professor of history at the University of Austin. 

Adapted from The Learning-Centered University: Making College a More Developmental, Transformational, and Equitable Experience by Steven Mintz and published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.