GENERAL EDUCATION IN AN AGE OF STUDENT MOBILITY

Who Wants Coherence?

by Marshall Hill

Bob Shoenberg assumes that most people value curricular coherence-but I'm not sure that's the case. For many years, higher education has promoted itself first and foremost as a vehicle for economic development, both personal and societal. When appropriations are on the line, it's certainly easier to rally support around economic needs than to rally people around the task of educating a responsible, well-rounded citizenry. And as long as some in society (and some of our students) seem to believe that economic development is the only desirable outcome of higher education, then students (perhaps supported by parents and legislators) will continue to look at the general education curriculum and ask, "Why do I have to take this course?"

Shoenberg's effort to link the problem of coherence to the evolution of the credit hour is intriguing. However, I suspect that the more powerful forces have to do with the changing nature of higher education itself, particularly two factors: the laudable expansion of academic opportunity beyond the privileged classes (and the consequent imperative to teach toward "real-world" benefits), and, relatedly, the ever-changing mixture of "education" and "training" expected of our institutions. Personally, I'm not optimistic that state-level solutions will be effective at responding to such forces-especially in large states with complex governance structures. (And, of course, those states are the ones in which problems of transfer and curricular coherence are most pressing.)

So where does that leave us? It may be that students will have to assume greater personal responsibility for getting a "coherent" education, and that we'll have to do a better job of advising them, helping them to navigate the distribution requirements and state-level expectations already in place. Perhaps coherence will come after they leave us and embark upon the "lifelong learning" for which we seek to equip them. And perhaps we'll have to accept that when we increase the range and scope of higher education, and when we expand its availability to people of all ages and backgrounds, we must accept less coherence than we would prefer, and we must regard that as a reasonable and socially responsible trade-off.