Diversity, Complexity, and the Mismeasure of Learning

by Carol Geary Schneider
from Liberal Education 89:3

In her latest president's message for Liberal Education, AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider notes that this past summer's Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action represent only one issue of many on the horizon for higher education in America. These gains for inclusive education, she writes, must be seen in the context of a larger struggle for America's colleges and universities to forge ahead in their role to help create a more inclusive, just democracy. AAC&U, along with many other higher education associations, renewed these goals in “Diversity and Democracy: The Unfinished Work” a statement published in The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education in the wake of the Supreme Court decisions.

Schneider characterizes Congressional discussions anticipating the reauthorization of the higher education act as out of touch with what institutions and students need: “too many of those now debating ‘quality and accountability' hold a disturbingly impoverished view of what powerful learning in higher education is really about.” The proposals for tuition caps, Schneider says, are evidence of wrong-headedness, especially at a time when “state support and endowments are plummeting.”

The challenge is to help state and national level officials to better understand how to assess higher education—a decentralized entity that serves many missions and differing student populations, Schneider says. “Multiple-choice and norm-referenced tests” she writes, “make no sense at all as an index of quality for a world that puts such a high value on creativity, ingenuity, complex problem solving, and the ability to learn with and from colleagues very different from oneself.” To assess the effectiveness of a college education, she believes, it is necessary to have “examples of their learning evaluated in the context of challenges they will actually face after college” such as research projects, assignments completed on deadline, and collaborative problem-solving.

She calls for a national discussion on the aims of education informed by what's really going on in the academy. She urges higher education leaders “to go beyond their work on campus to begin educating the public and their elected officials about what college learning is really about” and what the academy has been working on as it “reinvent[s]” itself to “advance new learning outcomes essential to the futures of today's students and the health of our diverse democracy” and “to improve the quality of undergraduate learning for a much more diverse set of students with varying levels of academic preparation than the academy has ever seen before.”

To read the article, visit www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-su03/le-su03presidentsmessage.cfm.