In One Ear and Out the Other: How Well Are Colleges Actually Educating their Students?
What do you think of when you think of a university? A place where you can develop the skills and knowledge you need to succeed in relationships, in the job market, in the world? If you believe this, you have lots of company: most employers and consequently most students and their families believe this too, driving both the cost and the payoff of a college degree ever higher. I believed this for a long time. But what if I told you that many students spend four years, thousands of hours, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to not learn anything?
Let’s rewind time by about a thousand years and travel across the Atlantic to Bologna, Italy. Behold! The founding of the first western university, set up to teach (recently rediscovered) Roman Law. To this end, the first instructors would read from an original source to a class of students who took notes. Thus the lecture was born. Keep in mind, at this time, the world’s most advanced weapon was a sword and toilets wouldn’t be invented for another six hundred years. Yet in universities today, most instructors lecture in exactly the same way. Why? Could this simply be because we nailed education on the first try? Is lecture-style teaching like a fork — a 4th century innovation that still works perfectly and will likely never need to be improved? Let’s explore.
Simply put, an education consists of 1) The What — the content of the curricula — what knowledge, skills, or wisdom an institution aims to impart and 2) The How — the methods used to teach students. An excellent education should consist of content that is useful (which I’d define as the stimulation of interpersonal, professional, and intellectual growth) and methods that are effective (impart content well.) One of these without the other — useful content taught poorly, or useless content taught well — is certainly not good. But useless content taught poorly is inexcusably bad.
Now let’s evaluate the modern university through these two lenses. The ‘what’ is usually some foundational knowledge in many disciplines (general education courses) and a deeper exploration of one or two siloed disciplines (your major(s)). Most degrees are knowledge-based rather than skill or wisdom based. There is no teamwork major, critical thinking, or creative problem solving major. Students certainly do develop skills, like the chemistry major learning to conduct lab experiments, or the economics major learning how to run regressions, but they’re a by-product, rather than the core objective of a degree. I certainly appreciate the intention behind a general curriculum that aims to provide students with vast bodies of foundational knowledge, but the execution of such programs, at least here at USC, leaves much to be desired. Most students view GE courses as major-extraneous boxes to check, and put in the bare minimum to get an A. And since most GE classes are taught in large lecture settings, grades are a function of tests and homework that rarely require deep understanding of a topic and rather promote cramming and regurgitation a few times per semester. As with many college courses, there are rarely incentives to genuinely understand the subject matter.
How about the ‘how’? Mostly lectures (>82% of courses according to a recent study)1 despite conclusive research demonstrating that lecturing is a truly awful way to teach. According to the National Training Laboratory, lecturing is the least effective method, with average learners retaining just 5% of material (The Learning Pyramid). And in a 2014 study, students in lecture courses were over 1.5 times more likely to fail (receive an F) than students in classes that used active learning methods. As George Leonard aptly puts it: “lecturing is the best way to get information from the teacher’s notebook to a student’s notebook without touching the student’s mind” (Strauss 2017).
The fruits of shallow knowledge curricula and ineffective lecture methods are as rotten as one might anticipate. Academically Adrift, a seminal book that examined learning outcomes of college students, “punched data-driven holes” in what historically has been the apparent “unassailable strength of American higher education” and exposed a culture that is alarmingly “anti-intellectual” and that produces students with “neither the skills or knowledge they will need to succeed after graduation” (Lederman, Doug). The authors utilized the College Learning Assessment (CLA) to evaluate undergraduate student development in core skills such as critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing only to find that for many students, there was no development at all. “If the CLA was scored on a one-hundred-point scale, 36 percent of students would not have demonstrated even a one-point gain” over four years of undergraduate study (McGuinn 2015, 2).
Though astoundingly “little is known about either the skills students gain during college or how what is learned in college is related to post collegiate outcomes” (Fischer 2014, 621) research on what and how students should be learning offers much more insight. Rather than lecturing to imbue students with knowledge, experts are recommending active methods to empower learners with transferrable, ‘21st century’ skills to cope with a constantly changing landscape. As Yuval Noah Harari reasons in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, “since we have no idea what the job market will look like in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need”. We should downplay knowledge “and emphasize general-purpose life skills” shifting our focus to imbuing students with the four Cs — critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. This would enable individuals to deal with change, learn new things and “preserve mental balance in unfamiliar situations” (Harari 2019).
These ideas haven’t totally been ignored, and for the few who do implement them, the results have been pretty great. Tiny, trail-blazing institutions such as venture-backed Minerva University, or the Iovine and Young Academy have gone so far as to create brand new curricula that put “meta-cognitive skills at the center”. At Minerva, students spend their entire first year developing the “habits of mind” and foundational concepts that underlie four core competencies — thinking critically, thinking creatively, communicating effectively, and interacting effectively. They also did away with — get this — lectures! Students and teachers utilize a in-house-developed video learning platform that facilitates debate, polls, breakout sessions and other active modalities. As one graduate brilliantly put it, “The goal of Minerva’s curriculum isn’t memorization or the study of factual information; we study academic content so we can develop fluid and adaptable skills. Content is not an end in itself, but a medium through which we learn to develop our minds”. Minerva also recently blew by Stanford to claim the title of world’s most selective university with a 1% acceptance rate.
But conventional elite universities, padded by ever-rising profits and skyrocketing demand for limited prestigious degrees, have had little reason to improve the quality of their product. Instead, they’ve stuck to knowledge curricula and passive lecturing for a thousand years, literally. In the words of Minerva’s founder Ben Nelson, getting academics to adapt would be like “showing up with antibiotics to a hospital that still uses leeches to drain bad humors”. And when evaluating the priorities of a typical institution, this unfortunate reality is understandable. There is no economic incentive for universities to completely revamp their practices, the status quo provides astronomic levels of funding to support an existing academic agenda. And students gladly accept highly coveted spots — often paying dearly for them. Neither students, parents or professors stop to critically evaluate the educational quality of the system they participate in. To make matters worse, not only do most academics not value teaching meta-cognitive skills, but they actively disparage it. In fact, multiple professors at the University of Southern California went as far as to suggest that tenured professors who lecture knowledge “look down on the instructors who teach skill-based courses’’. While these academics’ perspectives are completely backwards, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, as Einstein said, “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking” or in this case, the same kinds of thinkers “we used when we created them”.
Thank you for bearing with my criticism of a system so near and dear to our hearts. And, let me clarify, it is not that I think the education system is awful, it is that it can and will be astronomically improved. There are three points I hope to leave you with. One — if you are a student, it is entirely your responsibility to genuinely educate yourself — in fact, there’s a 36% chance you will otherwise graduate university with zero improvement in core human skills like critical thinking. Institutions have not evolved to teach the skills and wisdom needed to navigate the modern world — if anything they incentivize the opposite. It is well worth the time to reflect deeply on this point if you haven’t already. Two — if you are an instructor, professor, or administrator, please reflect on your opportunity to design the future of humanity. Consider how to teach human skills that transcend disciplines and will remain useful for the duration of your students’ lifetimes, and how to advocate for your department and institution to follow suit. Three — Education is upstream of all human progress, yet in its current form is arguably the most antiquated component of modern civilization. Enabled by societal addiction to prestigious credentials, institutions have become comfortable profoundly squandering human potential. The incentives are simply misaligned — institutions and professors aren’t incentivized to educate, students aren’t incentivized to genuinely understand, and parents aren’t incentivized to send their kids anywhere else. It is only a matter of time before a far superior alternative to higher education and credentialing is popularized and this education bubble pops, the only question is whether legacy universities will evolve in time or die out.
Thank you for reading,
Oliver
Bibliography
Fischer, Mary J., and University of Connecticut Search for more articles by this author. “Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates. by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. X+246. $18.00 (Paper).: American Journal of Sociology: Vol 121, No 2.” American Journal of Sociology, September 1, 2015. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/6822
Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Random House UK, 2019.
Lederman, Doug. “Studies Challenge the Findings of ‘Academically Adrift’.” Studies challenge the findings of ‘Academically Adrift’. Accessed February 3, 2022. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/20/studies-challenge-findings-academically-adrift.
McGuinn, Sara. “The Purpose of Higher Education and Study Abroad.” Accessed February 3, 2022. https://www.nafsa.org/sites/default/files/media/document/2017-990form.pdf.
“The Learning Pyramid.” Education Corner© Online Education, Colleges & K12 Education Guide. Accessed February 3, 2022. https://www.educationcorner.com/the-learning-pyramid.html.
Strauss, Valerie. “Analysis | It Puts Kids to Sleep — but Teachers Keep Lecturing Anyway. Here’s What to Do about It.” The Washington Post. WP Company, July 11, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/07/11/it-puts-kids-to-sleep-but-teachers-keep-lecturing-anyway-heres-what-to-do-about-it/.
Fischer, Mary J., and University of Connecticut Search for more articles by this author. “Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates. by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. X+246. $18.00 (Paper).: American Journal of Sociology: Vol 121, No 2.” American Journal of Sociology, September 1, 2015. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/6822
