Call me crazy, but I always thought that learning should be at the center of educational institutions.
Unfortunately, during my teaching career, I have seen firsthand the ways in which learning becomes part of the way colleges and universities operate. I’ve written many times about the problem of turning education into a transaction and how that reality leads institutions to stray from what should be their primary goals, and prevents students from having the kinds of educational experiences that will prove beyond their ability to land that first job in college.
Getting Learning Right: The Promise of Higher Educationis a forthcoming book from three professors deeply invested in reorienting the work of higher education institutions through the lens of middle learning. In this guest post, they argue why and how this will have significant benefits for the wider community of colleges and universities. –John Warner
The Real Purpose of Higher Education Is Hiding in Plain Sight
Chris Girdharry, Chris. W. Gallagher, and Kevin G. Smith
Jey had a plan. “I’m here to get the most expensive paper,” he told us when he started college. “I’m going to get this degree, go into the investment industry, make a lot of money, go into the private sector, retire when I’m forty, maybe buy an island.”
Honestly? Good. Survey after survey tells us that students and their families come to college primarily for economic reasons: the credentials, the paycheck, the return on investment that is truly terrifying. Given the cost of college, it’s hard to argue.
But a few years later, during a financial stint in Australia, Jey received a panicked late-night phone call from his boss about missing money. Something clicked. “All I do is get yelled at by rich people,” he told us. This could be the next twenty years of my life, and I didn’t want that.” He still cared about his job. He just wanted his work to mean something.
We’ve spent years following students like Jey in their undergraduate careers, listening closely to what learning looks and feels like on their end. What we’ve found is that students come to college with one set of questions and leave with a better, more complex set. Jobs are still important to them, but the way they measure a good job—a good life—becomes richer than return on investment. That change does not happen smoothly, or on schedule, or in three years instead of four. It happens badly, unevenly, over time, with tests and experiences that cannot be suppressed or done well.
That discovery feels more urgent right now. In April, a Yale University committee released a major report on declining public trust in higher education. The report is self-deprecating and, unfortunately, has a lot to do with us in the higher order. Trust has collapsed, and colleges and universities bear real responsibility. The committee names problems that many institutions have been reluctant to discuss publicly: rising costs, open admissions, inflation so high that the average Yale graduate now gets an A (Harvard recently voted to limit A grades). Recommendations are considered. Scholars have written them, so they are also very long. But in a report that focuses on the long-term work of education, the word “learning” does not appear.
The report speaks consistently of “teaching,” “the classroom,” “the goal of education,” “knowledge.” It talks very little about learning or how students come to understand things, change their minds and grow into the adults we—and most importantly, they—hope they will become. And when the report’s recommendations finally turn to the classroom, they focus more on what needs to be done prevent or give back: Ban the phones, reduce the distances, stop testing yourself, it requires the same curriculum. We can debate whether these are good ideas, but the truth is, they are self-defense measures. They do not constitute an idea of what is worth studying be.
That’s the gap we want to name. The trust problem in higher education is not just a communication problem, or an admissions problem, or a cost problem, although all of that is very real. It is a learning problem. Most colleges and universities are actually not organized in terms of learning. They are organized in relation to teaching, research production, standards, income, and the maintenance of the institution’s reputation. Students feel this, even when they can’t say it. The community feels it, too. Educational researchers themselves have been making this argument for decades, but it has never felt more urgent than now.
The Yale report says, wisely, “trust is earned by doing what you say you’re going to do.” Universities say they are about learning. The way to rebuild trust is to say it and build institutions that prove it.
What does that look like? Consider Boston College’s core curriculum, organized around what the school calls “Complex Problems and Continuing Questions.” Experts from different fields jointly teach courses based on challenges such as climate change and racial violence or questions such as, “What does it mean to be human?” Students work collaboratively on real projects with community partners. Faculty describe these courses as the most challenging and rewarding teaching they do. Students say the course helps them “connect schoolwork to life.” That is no small thing. That’s it i thing.
This type of work is not limited to well-resourced or selective institutions. Consider Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Fla., an accessible, affordable community college that serves a diverse population. Hillsborough is determined to do better for a group that higher education has long failed to do: Black men and Latinos. Using decades of research on how learning really works—about belonging, confidence, and the power of high expectations—the college developed a strategy called the Four Pillars of Academic Success. Students are paired with faculty mentors. They form groups with peers. They engage in intentional educational planning based on their goals and lives. This teaching method does not treat students as numbers to be moved through a program but as students whose success depends on relationships, recognition and ongoing support. It has produced real results for students that the program has been working on for a long time. And, basically, an act of institutional honesty about what needs to be learned.
Neither BC nor Hillsborough has higher education found. Both face the same pressures that every institution faces, and both have deliberately chosen to organize important parts of the student experience around self-directed learning that focuses on real problems, real questions, real results. And the practices that make learning right—listening carefully to students, designing spaces where learning can actually happen, connecting academic work to the world beyond campus, treating students as partners rather than clients—are available at all institutions, selective or open, well-resourced or scrappy. They need to be objective and honest about what college is really about.
Yale committee calls on universities to “focus on work.” We agree. But focus on work means more than refining the statement. It means framing all decisions—academic, financial, architectural, pedagogical—about a real commitment to learning. It means asking, often and uncomfortably: Are our students really learning? What do they tell us about what works? And what are we willing to change?
Jey kept thinking about his career throughout college. He never stopped worrying about his future. But by the time he graduated, the metrics by which he measured success had been replaced by what he had learned and lived. That change is specific to higher education. It is also, we would argue, where public trust in higher education ultimately rests.
The Yale committee is right that trust must be rebuilt through messaging. The most important, and often overlooked, action is this: Study properly.
