In December, 2006, Clive Keen, Director of Life-long Learning and Enrolment Management at the University of Prince Edward Island, and Ken Coates, Dean of arts at the University of Waterloo, published an opinion piece in Academic Affairs titled ‘Universities for the 21st century,’ with the caption ‘It’s time for universities to face the challenges of mass education.’
Keen and Coates have some useful suggestions directed at helping universities maintain their enrolment levels. Theirs is a matter-of-fact solution that rejects the idealism of those of us who want universities to maintain liberal arts curriculum and higher-educational standards. Their argument is essentially that the variously unprepared, unmotivated, and disengaged students should not be expected to meet their learning environments half-way; instead, their learning environments should do all the stretching in programmes that students will enjoy, with teaching methods that will get them through to graduation. Universities, they argue, ‘are in the business of mass education’ and will do better at it ‘once we admit to the facts.’
Their solution is a multiple-tiered university with élite liberal arts programmes for those who can handle them, and vocationally oriented programmes for others, taught with methods that assume a lack of motivation and lower abilities.
In early 2007, Andrew Park, a biology professor at the University of Winnipeg, responded with an opinion piece titled ‘Heck no, you shouldn’t go,’ with the caption ‘Despite our best efforts to help struggling students, there are some who really shouldn’t be there in the first place.’ Park noted evidence of the poor preparation of many students, along with their poor outcomes, identifying three types of students he has not been able to reach, in spite of taking ‘great pains to professionalize my teaching, address myself to different learning styles, produce challenging assignments, make lectures available online, and reach out to students of all abilities.’
According to Park, two of these three groups have no interest in biology (yet take his courses) and are ‘not shy to say so on course evaluations.’ The third group is enthusiastic, but unable to handle course requirements, either because of a lack of preparation or because they are too busy with other commitments. He disagrees with Keen and Coates that remediation will help these students and he rejects their call for a two-tiered system, arguing that the ‘idea amounts to boutique education for some and devalued “Walmart” degrees for the rest.’ The fairer solution, he insists, is to counsel ‘students far more carefully before they enter university and, when necessary, turn them away for their – and our – own good.’ He also points out viable alternatives to university for job training, which are eschewed by the persistence of ‘the myth that university is the only route’ to high-paying jobs ‘in the minds of parents and students alike.’
Keen and Coates responded to Park by arguing that he is being too idealistic, and should acknowledge the inevitable task of dealing with disengaged students, whom they designate as the bread and butter of contemporary universities:
The tempting route, when faced with the disengaged, unmotivated and ill-prepared students he describes so well is ‘Just exclude them all from universities. They shouldn’t be here.’ That’s fine, as long as we are prepared to live with the consequences.
We agreed with [Park’s] main point – that many students come to universities without the requisite level of commitment, preparation or curiosity. But his solution – leaving them out – would be fine if we don’t mind closing down half our universities and displacing very large numbers of our faculty and staff. Save for the highly selective universities, our campuses are financially dependent on these same students who seem so ill-suited for the kind of education many faculty would prefer to provide.
They go on to contend that because mass access is a ‘political imperative,’ universities would not be allowed to exclude disengaged students. Indeed, Keen and Coates tacitly acknowledge that a decline in standards has taken place to the extent that ‘the public has much the same expectations of access to university that they had in the 1950s about high-school education.’ Consequently, they submit, universities must find ways to engage and motivate these students, even if it means they become more ‘polytechnic-like.’ They evoke the rhetoric of the ‘21st century’ university, implying that there needs to be a qualitative change from the 20th century. They say that the ‘19th and 20th century curriculum is at the heart of the problem,’ and intimate that many 21st century learners will not engage with it. (I examined the rhetoric about ‘21st learners’ in previous posts, finding much of it to be baseless.)
I had the opportunity discuss Keen’s views with him as part of a symposium titled ‘Strategic Options in a Changing Enrolment Landscape,’ sponsored by the Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission (MPHEC) where Keen and I were panellists presenting ‘two diametrically opposed paths for universities.’ As it turns out, our views are not entirely different. Instead, they vary mainly in what should be done to reform universities and how they should be undertaken, but not why.
Keen’s ‘why’ reasoning is based on evidence that the average student in current mass systems has less academic aptitude than did/does the average student in pre-massified university systems, and more selective institutions currently found in some countries. Currently, he argues, the more able students, who would have prevailed in earlier systems, are now a minority. Consequently, it is unrealistic to expect high levels of engagement in the liberal arts from average students today: they do not have the intellectual ability to engage deeply in reading and discussions, and are not interested in developing those abilities, so no manner of teaching approaches will reach them. Keen argues that we must change the curriculum to address this. Keen does not address the wider need for reform of both the secondary and tertiary systems, and instead argues that we should accept the poor preparation and lack of motivation of would-be students as an unchangeable given, and that we should use the mentality of the alienated student as a route to reform.
In a paper titled ‘Male University Transition Problems: A Guilt-free Explanation,’[i] Keen makes the case that North American universities should follow the example of those in the UK and Australia by offering courses that are of intuitive interest to males, who are more likely to be disengaged in high school, and therefore to have less interest than females in academics. He asserts rather boldly that:
North American universities will need to become more polytechnic-like, changing not just their curriculum but their pedagogy. They will have to realize that they suffer from incredible self-delusion in telling young males that they should spend two hours in private book-study for every hour spent in class. Perhaps that happened when universities dealt with the gifted and intellectually curious. Repeating this expectation for today’s average young males is to live in cloud-cuckoo-land.
The programmes that he argues could be offered, and which now can be found in British and Australia universities, include:
- BSc Disaster Management and Emergency Planning
- BSc Pollution Control
- BSc Ethical Hacking and Countermeasures
- BA Crime and Social Order
- BSc Computer Forensics
- BSc Computer Games Technology
- BA Adventure Recreation
- BSc Cruise Operations Management
- BA Resort Management
- BSc Robotics and Automated Systems
- BSc Security Technology
- BSc Property Development
- BA Sports Journalism
- BSc Science and The Media
- BSc Mobile and Wearable Computing
He adds a further programme, a BSc (Hons) in Surf Science, which he quips ‘shows how very far British universities have come from the stodgier days.’ This degree is advertised at the University of Plymouth as ‘a rigorous academic study of the scientific, technical and business aspects of the international surfing industries.’ Keen argues this programme ‘would surely be a lure to some sixteen-year old males who would otherwise be first in the dropout queue.’
Although these programmes may ‘work’ elsewhere, the biggest obstacle to Keen’s prescriptions may well be the community colleges (in Canada) and polytechnic institutions that strenuously object to this poaching of their students by universities. Indeed, when viewing the interests of the entire post-secondary system, recommendations for universities to take on these sorts of programmes set in motion competitions for students, which can amount to zero-sum games among publicly financed institutions. In other words, given that the public purse subsidizes secondary and post-secondary education in Canada, there is not much to gain collectively from this attempt to capture the ‘disengaged student market.’
A more reasoned solution is to provide better high school preparation for those who would benefit from a liberal education, and to help those who want applied programmes go to upper secondary programmes, colleges, or polytechnics where teachers who do not conduct independent research have the time and training to instruct them.[ii]
This more reasoned solution should also produce more students who want to pursue a post-secondary education, not fewer. But, it is a long-term solution, not a quick fix done out a fear of enrolment declines. Moreover, it is not evident that there are enough qualified teachers for such programmes, and enough jobs available for their graduates—how many jobs in Surf Science can there be? Without assurance on both points, I believe it would be unwise to proceed down this path.
[i] Thymos, Volume 1, number 2, Summer 2007, pp. 220-225.
[ii] Keen also calls for teaching loads that amount to 80% of a professor’s duties, with research allocated to 20%. However, this would all but kill recruitment into the profession. The PhD is a research degree, so why would someone spend that time, effort, and money to earn a PhD, only to spend most of their time in the classroom? Teacher’s colleges could accomplish the goal of training teachers for an instruction-heavy system, but the entire research-intensive university system—which the rest of the world attempts to emulate—would collapse, and the economic benefits of such a system in knowledge-generation would be severely diminished.