GENERAL EDUCATION IN AN AGE
OF STUDENT MOBILITY
Why Do I Have to Take This Course? or
Credit Hours, Transfer, and Curricular Coherence
by Robert Shoenberg
It was the fashion among novelists in the nineteenth century to
give their books two titles: one catchy and allusive to pique interest,
the other more prosaic and explanatory. I've chosen this style
of titling because what I want this article to be about—helping
students make sense of their college education—and the place
to which my chain of reasoning keeps pulling me—bureaucratic
arrangements for determining degree completion—seem miles apart.
Thus, I need two titles.
AAC&U has been working for the past two years with state higher
education systems in Georgia and Utah, which are struggling to find
cogent and persuasive answers to students' perennial question
about general education requirements: "Why do I have to take
this course?" But they know they cannot answer the question
for students until they can answer it for themselves, until they
can agree on a cogent definition of their own curricular intentions.
And this is no mean feat, given the structural and bureaucratic
realities at hand. Not only must the colleges and universities involved
answer to the fiscal and political concerns of state legislatures,
respect faculty autonomy, cope with limited tools for assessment,
and make sense of a crazy-quilt of student attendance patterns,
but they must also arrive at inter-institutional agreements about
the purposes of their requirements.
For state systems, the phenomenon of student mobility creates
a particularly complicated set of problems. All concerned want,
insofar as possible, to make movement within these systems easy
and to allow it to be accomplished without loss of credit. The formal
mechanisms for creating this "seamlessness" are sets of common core
courses and agreements about transfer of credit. But in their zeal
to effect ease of transfer, the designers of these agreements often
fail to take into account either the variety of ends to which core
courses might be taught or the coherence of the general education
program or major to which those courses apply. Thus, they tacitly
encourage students to mix and match unrelated courses, leading them
to see these requirements as so many bureaucratic hurdles to be
jumped, not as parts of a purposeful and coherent curriculum.
The credit chase
Why is it so difficult to define, with intellectual clarity, the
meaning of an undergraduate education and the interconnections of
its parts? Why do we have such trouble answering students when they
pose the entirely legitimate question, "Why do I have to take
this course?"
Our problem can be traced, I believe, to what may seem a rather
distant source: the creation of the credit hour as the standard
unit of academic currency. Created early in the twentieth century,
the credit hour was designed to bring integrity to a higher education
system then rife with diploma mills. The requirement that students
complete a specified number of credit hours worth of courses would
assure anyone concerned that holders of a degree had done genuine
intellectual work to earn it. Over the years, all kinds of voluntary
accrediting associations and administrative structures, strengthened
by state and federal legislation, have been created to certify that,
among other things, colleges and universities meet these basic requirements
for the awarding of a bachelor's, associate's, or other
degree.
As long as only a small percentage of an age cohort went on to
college and stayed at the same institution for four years, the credit
hour continued to serve only its original purpose. However, following
World War II, as the number and variety of institutions increased
and students became more mobile, we discovered a new use for credits.
They now began to serve as a highly effective medium of exchange
among institutions. Students could accumulate them like so many
dollars in their bank accounts, and they could transfer them from
one institution to another. To be sure, this currency came in many
different types and denominations: semester, quarter, and course
credits; upper division and lower division; general education and
the major.... But we have been clever and increasingly well-organized
in managing the rates of exchange, so that by now we can pretty
well exchange credits at College A for those at College B as effectively
as we exchange pounds for dollars.
However, the convenience of the credit hour as common currency
has driven out the better but far less fungible currency of intellectual
purpose and curricular coherence. How easy it is to define a baccalaureate
degree as 120 credit hours (the modal requirement) divided in specified
ways, also stated in terms of credit hours; and how easy to plug
each course into a formula linking class hours (or laboratory hours,
or hours in an internship or practicum) to units of credit. But
what do those hours mean in terms of the educational intentions
of the courses and the connections among them? Do they cohere in
the minds of individual professors and students? When added together,
do they comprise a meaningful whole?
The demand for efficiency
As student transfer among colleges and universities has increased
to the point where the majority of students receive bachelor's
degrees from an institution other than the one at which they began
study, demands have grown ever more vocal for efficiency in the
transfer of credits. Neither students nor state legislatures want
to pay twice for the same course. And many schools, anxious to increase
their enrollments, also seek to oblige students as fully as possible.
The result has been transfer agreements between institutions and
across state systems that spell out in some detail what kinds of
courses will transfer in satisfaction of which requirements. Sometimes
a general education transfer package is specified by legislation,
as in Florida and Ohio, or by direction of the state higher education
coordinating system, as in Texas and New York. In many other states,
including the two in our project, the higher education authority
has brokered transfer agreements by assembling groups of faculty
to reach, under some pressure, a system-wide articulation agreement.
However, none of these transfer agreements addresses in any meaningful
way the purposes of the general education curriculum, much less
the purposes of a baccalaureate degree. Uniformly they assume a
general education program consisting of a loose distribution requirement
plus competence in writing, mathematics, and, increasingly, computer
use. They give some definition of the content of courses that meet
the requirements, but they offer few details as to the goals to
be reached through study of that content. As far as these transfer
agreements are concerned, all social science or science or humanities
courses are created equal. Never mind that the introductory Political
Science course at one institution addresses a different set of purposes
than the introductory course at another—they are identical
in the eyes of the transfer agreement. Never mind that some schools
offer a rigorous and integrated general education program while
others do not. Any collection of courses from whatever source, no
matter how lacking in coherence, must be accepted for transfer if
they are in the same subject matter domains.
Florida, for example, has by legislative requirement developed a
common course numbering system across its public institutions, specifying
that all courses with the same number are entirely interchangeable.
A statewide committee determines the credit hour equivalencies,
but their oversight does not extend to the purposes of each course,
nor to measuring student achievement. Any survey of, say, American
History to 1865 is equivalent to any other, no matter that one course
drills students on names and dates, while another raises complex
questions about the nature of historical inquiry.
The result of these kinds of credit-driven transfer regulations
is a lowest-common-denominator general education program, based
invariably on loose distribution requirements. And since unique
courses of study only serve to make transfer difficult for students,
schools have an incentive not to make their own general education
offerings too adventurous or challenging.
These practical restrictions are equally frustrating to two- and
four-year institutions. The community colleges, which must prepare
students planning to transfer to any of several baccalaureate institutions,
can ill afford to create general education programs with distinct
character. The four-year colleges have somewhat more leeway in designing
programs for their native students, but they cannot hold transfer
students to those requirements. And when a majority of their graduates
turn out to have transferred their general education credits from
institutions with quite different goals, what can the four-year
institutions (even those with carefully structured general education
programs) say about the integrity of their degrees?
A need for systemic reform
The demands for transfer efficiency not only push general education
programs to the lowest common denominator but they also tend to
conflict with demands for educational accountability. Since colleges
and universities require a heavy investment by students and taxpayers,
they are expected to demonstrate effectiveness in achieving the
outcomes they promise. In other words, each school must show that
its students are meeting its educational goals. But how does an
institution measure results against goals if it has no clear educational
goals and, indeed, is de facto discouraged from defining them (at
least for general education) too precisely, lest they get in the
way of efficient transfer?
The solution is to stop treating this as a problem for the individual
institution. The only way to reconcile the demands for efficiency
and accountability is to come to inter-institutional or, better
yet, system-wide agreement about the intended outcomes of the general
education program, and then to link those outcomes closely to the
transfer agreement. Accountable to a clear, coherent, and common
set of purposes, individual schools might then invest in local curricular
reforms without having to worry about ease of transfer.
However, no states have as yet built these sorts of curricular
outcomes into their transfer guidelines, even where agreements
have been negotiated among academics rather than imposed by
legislators. Thus, the recent and ongoing work of the state
systems in Georgia and Utah promises to set an important precedent
and serves to illustrate the challenges at hand.
Linking assessments to shared goals
During the 1998-99 academic year, faculty from these states'
public two- and four-year institutions began working with AAC&U
(supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's
Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education) to develop
new system-wide goals for general education, to gain broad faculty
and student understanding of them, and to come up with ways to assess
them.
Each state already had an existing set of general education requirements,
based on the standard English/Math/Distribution model (though Georgia's
newly-minted plan is rather more detailed and includes a strong,
statewide, faculty-dominated administrative and policy structure).
Neither set of requirements, however, included a clear statement
of goals for the program. They simply set forth the subject matter
areas to be covered and the number of credit hours to be completed
in each area, giving no rationale for those requirements. Thus,
a student might ask, "Why do I have to take this course?"
and a faculty member would be at a loss to give an answer other
than, "Because it's required."
The work going on in Georgia and Utah has to be characterized as
rationalization after the fact. The requirements already having
been established, faculty in these states have to decide what they
meant—or more properly want to mean—by them in terms of
students' ability to know, do, and understand. Both state systems
are driven to this task by firm mandates to assess outcomes, and
by the awareness that they cannot do this without knowing what outcomes
they want to achieve.
With such an arrangement in place, the faculties in Georgia and
Utah certainly have their work cut out for them. Consider, for example,
the ubiquitous requirement that students complete a college-level
mathematics course. Students whose major fields of study require
regular use of mathematical skills will seldom question this requirement,
but the many who expect never to use anything more than simple arithmetic
and geometry frequently wonder why they must take such a course.
Leaving aside the vexed question of what constitutes "college-level
math," one might argue that "Educated people should be
numerate as well as literate." Well, why? And, more trenchantly,
what mathematical knowledge makes a person "numerate?"
Is it a higher level of mathematical skill than might normally be
expected of high school graduates? Is it a greater or different
kind of facility with arithmetic and basic algebra? Is it probability
and statistics? Mathematical modeling? And how do we increase the
likelihood that students will continue to use their new skills,
so that they don't forget what they learned as soon as the
course is over?
Adapting recommendations from the Quantitative Literacy Subcommittee
of the Mathematical Association of America, Utah faculty agreed
on a short list of skills that define a "quantitatively literate
college graduate." Rather than focusing on the prerequisites
for advanced math classes, they reasoned that all educated people,
math majors included, ought to be able to interpret and manipulate
the sorts of mathematical information that support arguments in
a range of fields. For example, graduates should be able to:
1. Interpret mathematical models such as formulas, graphs, tables,
and
schematics, and draw inferences from them.
2. Represent mathematical information symbolically, visually, numerically,
and verbally.
3. Use arithmetic, algebraic, geometric, and statistical methods
to solve problems.
4. Estimate and check answers to mathematical problems in order
to determine
reasonableness, identify alternatives, and select optimal results.
5. And recognize that all mathematical and statistical methods have
limitations.
Such a list offers guidance in deciding which approach to course
content is best suited to a general education course, as well as
providing a strong connection between the outcomes of the particular
course and the larger purposes of the curriculum. Further, it gives
faculty members some basis upon which to answer the question, "Why
do I have to take this course?"
Building faculty support
Of course, the difficulty lies in encouraging all of the system's
faculty members, at all different kinds of institutions, to teach
to the purposes of the requirement. The lever most likely to shift
this heavy weight is assessment, which asks students to demonstrate
the requisite competence, and which promises institutional embarrassment
if faculty do not teach to the agreed-upon goals. But the fulcrum
on which the lever is to be mounted is not yet in place; institutional
commitments to assessments of student competency are not yet firm.
Nor, for that matter, is the lever itself—the existing collection
of assessment strategies—strong enough to lift the weight of
custom.
Certainly, some institutions and a few states require students at
the mid-point of their baccalaureate programs to pass tests demonstrating
general skills and knowledge. Both the ETS and ACT have developed
such examinations, and they are used with some frequency either
to test individual students or to assess the institution's
effectiveness in general education. These tests are responsibly
developed, but they are, of necessity, geared to the lowest common
denominator in order to maximize the number of institutions that
can use them. In many situations in which they are used, the examinations
do not follow closely what is actually taught, how it is taught,
and the testing methods with which students are familiar. Thus,
the value of test results as an indicator of the institution's
success in helping students meet the institutional goals—assuming
that it has clear goals aligned to the standardized examination—is
highly questionable.
Until outcomes assessment is developed to the point where it seems
credible to the majority of faculty, we appear to be stuck with
our credit hour addiction. Academia is, however, being pushed to
break the habit from a variety of quarters: state legislatures and
student and parent constituencies that want to see concrete improvements;
re-entry students who come back to school to be certified for specific
competencies; professional accrediting associations that are beginning
to lean toward outcomes-based accreditation (a notable example is
the set of "ABET 2000" standards of the Accrediting Board
for Engineering and Technology.); and regional accreditors who are
slowly but surely pushing their members in the same direction.
All these forces are at work in Georgia and Utah, leading state
systems there to clarify their goals in the manner of the mathematics
objectives cited above. As the experience in those states has suggested,
reaching this kind of clarity is not as impossible as it looks.
Cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary groups of faculty, assembled
at the state level, can fairly readily arrive at a mutually agreeable
statement of the general intentions that implicitly underlie basic
skills and distribution requirements. But these groups are generally
made up of faculty members who accept the importance of such understandings.
Gaining their acceptance by the faculty back home is another matter.
A comparative handful of willing faculty can accomplish the task
in the abstract; turning those abstract understandings into concrete
actions with real consequences for faculty and students is another
matter.
Neither state group has yet gone through this process, and it
will require a massive effort both logistically and politically,
even in a state with as few higher education institutions as
Twenty-two states have implemented statewide core curricula, in
order to facilitate transfer of credits among public 2- and 4-year
colleges. Most of these states specify the number of credit hours
required per subject area, and many specify the particular courses
that comprise the general education program.
Thirteen states have crafted articulation agreements that apply
within a particular segment of the higher education system but not
across the entire state. For example, general education courses
automatically transfer between California's community colleges
and the University of California system, but there is no such agreement
between the University of California system and the California State
University system.
Fifteen states have no segmental or statewide articulation agreements
in place. However, there often exist local articulation agreements
between these states' two- and four- year colleges.
Utah—nine public two- and four-year schools, plus one major
private university. For example, the process will have to involve
discipline-by-discipline discussions, acceptance of the outcomes
of those discussions by large numbers of faculty, the certification
of individual courses as meeting the guidelines, and the effort
to deal with the fallout when courses are not certified.
Yet, to engage in this work is the only way we can hope to move
away from our present habit of simply counting credit hours, with
only the most superficial look at what lies behind them. Though
the majority of college graduates no longer earn their degrees at
a single institution, they generally do complete them within a single
higher education system. If the integrity of a single college's
or university's program once guaranteed that an individual
student would have a coherent educational experience, it now must
be the entire system that provides this curricular integrity.
State systems, and other groupings of related institutions among
which students move, need to emulate the long and difficult process
of agreeing about intentions that has begun in Georgia and Utah.
Only then can we provide a useful answer to the student who asks,
"Why do I have to take this course?"
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THIS PUBLICATION |
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PART I: OPINION |
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PART II: CONTINUING
THE DISCUSSION |
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PART III: MORE
PERSPECTIVES ON CURRICULAR COHERENCE AND STUDENT TRANSFER |
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