GENERAL EDUCATION IN AN AGE OF STUDENT MOBILITY

Foreword by George R. Boggs

Institutional diversity is one of the distinguishing characteristics of American higher education. Across the United States, there exists a tremendous variety of colleges and universities: public and private institutions, liberal arts colleges, women's colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, tribal colleges, and community colleges. Among these very different institutions, specialized accrediting agencies, licensing bodies, and professional societies have attempted to bring curricular coherence to the major, while the individual institutions themselves have responded to calls for degree integrity through seemingly endless debates about general education distribution requirements and periodic accreditation self studies.

Intra-institutional attempts to bring coherence to the curriculum do not have much meaning in an environment in which students are increasingly mobile, transferring between institutions, perhaps several times on the way to a degree. For community colleges, this is not a new phenomenon; since their founding one hundred years ago, transfer has been one of their major missions. A great deal of their credibility as institutions depends upon the ability of their students to transfer courses, and advising students is a difficult challenge when receiving institutions have no commonality in graduation requirements. Whenever a receiving institution does not accept transfer credit, students lose precious time and money. For public institutions, these transition problems damage the reputation of the community college and invite legislators to make decisions best left to educators.

Robert Shoenberg makes a case that the credit hour is no longer adequate to serve as academic currency as students transport evidence of learning between institutions. He calls for system-wide agreements about the intended outcomes of the general education program. Although the credit hour has at least served the purpose of permitting students to transfer, it has never been an assurance that students have received the same level of course instruction even within one institution. And, of course, academic discussions and transfer agreements have been based upon coverage of material rather than evidence of learning.

Pioneering work is being done in a few consortia of institutions to identify what a college education should mean, and what knowledge and skills that graduates should have. Faculty members in these institutions are moving beyond parochial interests in order to improve the learning experience for students and to assure the quality of the degree. Of course, even in the most progressive institutions, there is resistance and complacency to these changes. However, as Shoenberg points out, academia is being pushed by students, parents, state legislatures, and accrediting associations to develop meaningful assessment of learning.

It is time for the higher education community in the United States to engage seriously in a dialogue focused on curricular coherence and student transfer in this environment of increasing student mobility and continued attention to institutional accountability. That dialogue should reach across the traditional boundaries to include higher education practitioners and scholars and those in community colleges as well as their four-year colleagues. I commend the work of the Association of American Colleges and Universities in calling for a focus on these significant issues through this publication, and I hope for a response from a united higher education community.

George R. Boggs
President, American Association of Community Colleges
January 2001