What college students learn …

Beyond routine assessment measures, what do we hope for in a really excellent undergraduate education?

College is an inflection point in the intellectual development of many young people. It is different from high school, and it is different from Ph.D. studies as well. It is a time of really significant growth — of horizons, of perspectives, of intellectual skills, and of social skills.

Think of the brain as a knowledge- and action-organ of immense capacity; how do we enable the owners to make the most of their assets? College is the time when young people can take a “hockey-stick” shift in their ability to reason, question, inquire, analyze, communicate, collaborate, and imagine. And if they don’t make that transition, then they have stalled out on a lot of the discoveries and achievements they would otherwise have made later in life.

Here is what I mean by a “hockey stick” phenomenon:

On this curve the variable plotted in red took off with qualitatively different growth around 2000, and its growth from that point forward was dramatically different from the earlier years.

If we wanted to adapt this particular graph to the cumulative development of cognitive capacity from birth to adulthood, it would work pretty well, with a rapid surge in years 1-4, a slow accumulation through grades 1-9, perhaps some back-sliding in grades 10-12, and then a real acceleration from freshman year in college through graduation.

So the really great question for university professors is this: how to challenge students to throw themselves into that “growth spurt” of intellectual capacity through the experiences they have in the classroom, in the library and laboratory, and in collaborative work with other students? How can we make sure that university students get the challenges and opportunities that are needed to allow their own talents to blossom along the hockey-stick part of the curve?

I suspect people who have coached young people in a sport like track, tennis, or swimming will see something similar in their observations of the development of talent at various points in the young athlete’s process: some setbacks, some periods of long, slow improvement, and then a sustained period when things are coming together and there is very rapid progress.

Of course college needs to help young people to develop some very prosaic skills — better analytical tools, better ability to communicate, better ability to empathize with other people’s experiences. But beyond all of that, we need to be helping each young person actualize those intellectual and personal talents that lay dormant in them, and to take that series of steps that leads to flight.

It is my impression that this aspiration is very consistent with the educational philosophy of John Dewey, who emphasized the importance of spontaneity, freedom, and imagination in his writings about the education of children. He believed that this sort of environment brought out the best in each child. But we can have the same optimism about a university education: emphasize self-direction, challenge, creativity, independence, and self-respect, and we can expect great things from our young people.