Modern liberal arts education isn’t what it used to be
These are the best and most challenging times in the history of higher education in America.
More options are available to young people (and old) than ever before to pursue a college education, ranging from entirely online degrees to small liberal arts colleges and broad-context research universities.
This is a good thing, for them and the country. The data continue to support the correlation between more education and higher employment rates, lifetime earnings and even happiness — in short, a path to upward mobility and a better life.
Yet increasingly, the public is experiencing a different narrative. According to a 2018 survey by the Pew Research Center, for the first time the concept of higher education as a benefit to society is getting less than a 50 percent approval rating among some important demographics, including those that swung the last presidential election.
Many perceive that top-tier colleges are for the elite, are not for them, and possibly even a scam. There is an urgent need for higher education institutions to change not only the perception but also the reality of their value proposition. Fortunately, there is new research on long-term outcomes that points the way, and UConn is well poised to lead and partner in that endeavor.
When I talk to legislators about the value proposition for public universities, they point to their importance in workforce development for the state. When I talk to the faculty, they see their role as human development.
Fortunately, these are not contradictory, and in fact recent research suggests they are complementary. In several surveys — including the extensive Gallup Alumni Survey and its predecessor, the Gallup-Purdue Index — certain educational experiences correlated strongly with both high well-being and high work engagement throughout life.
The things that made a difference, graduates said, were the opportunities to apply what they had learned to authentic problems while still students — and having emotionally supportive mentors, the kind that cared about their hopes and dreams. These kind of experiences and mentors exist in good supply at UConn and at many of our peer universities. We call such experiences life transformative.
For example, UConn offers a community engagement course connecting our faculty research and curriculum in community activism to a project in partnership with Willimantic’s police department, applying activism principles in the community to educate and help mitigate the opioid crisis there.
UConn medical students can be found serving many of the state’s most vulnerable citizens in clinics for migrant farm workers, and at homeless shelters and soup kitchens. Their counterparts in the School of Dental Medicine are also out in the community, providing screenings and oral health education at Camp Courant, the Special Olympics Connecticut Summer Games, and in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of
Hurricane Maria.
UConn engineering students also recently teamed with the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center to research and test ways in which a wearable device might help track young baseball pitchers’ throws to help avoid ligament injuries. At the same time, their peers were working with a wide range of other prestigious local and national corporate and government sponsors on projects. They’ve been exploring everything from programming autonomous firefighting drones to using 3D printing to create nutrient-dense meal options for soldiers in extreme terrain and temperatures.
And for more than 15 years, students in UConn’s Neag School of Education have worked as mentors to children in Hartford’s North End through the “Husky Sport” program, a community-campus partnership engaging students through athletics, health and wellness education, and academic enrichment.
But often such things are a result of chance extracurricular opportunities. At UConn, along with a growing number of partner schools, including one with my friend President Rick Miller at Olin College in Massachusetts, we are asking ourselves: Shouldn’t we be intentional about trying to bring those kinds of experiences to every student?
This is not trivial at the scale of nearly 24,000 undergraduate students. In fact, it is something of a grand challenge and one that will require new ideas and experimentation in pedagogy. But it is a challenge that the UConn faculty, staff and students are well positioned to lead. We already have a culture committed to student success and one of the highest graduation rates among public universities, as well as programs to build on through a renowned honors program and highly engaged regional campuses.
Liberal arts education is as vital to economic and human development as ever, but the liberal arts education of the 20th century is not enough today. Through authentic mentored experiences, students will learn not only identity (who they are and their place in the world), but also agency (empowered to change it) and purpose (the motivation to use their power for the greater good).
By embracing this approach, students will graduate who are even better equipped to solve the challenges we face in the modern world, strengthening Connecticut’s economy and workforce in the process.
That’s why building and enhancing life-transformative education at UConn will be a key aspect of our strategic planning, beginning now. If we succeed, we will not only benefit our own students and state, we will change the face of liberal arts education in the 21st century.