Higher education has received some good air play lately, featuring prominently in President Obama’s rhetoric and the House’s stimulus proposal as well as Governor Nixon’s proposed budget (political tussles over the MOHELA funds notwithstanding).   It is heartening to hear our political leaders speak of education as an essential investment.  Recently MSU President Michael Nietzel  argued before the Missouri Senate that higher education itself is a stimulus package.

The general appeal for public support is education = jobs.  We are accustomed to helping people make this connection, especially parents of prospective students, though it sometimes seems a tougher sell for the liberal and fine arts.  For an eighteen year old seeking a secure economic future, a liberal arts degree may not seem the shortest distance between two points.

This is not a new situation, of course.  As a college student I listened to professors extolling the virtues and practical benefits of a liberal arts background over professional education — learning how to learn, adapting to change, transferable skills, etc.  In the mid-1950s Forbes editor William H. Whyte, Jr. lamented the rise of pre-professional training and the trend away from liberal arts education.

The stewards of the liberal arts are to blame for its low estate in another respect.  If people swing away from them on the grounds that they are not useful enough, this cannot be explained entirely as a worship of false gods.  There is nothing wrong with usefulness as a criterion; from the beginning, after all, the liberal arts were intended as a highly functional training.  That they no longer seem so to the majority of people is rather strong evidence  that something more is at fault than people’s judgment. — The Organization Man, 1956,  p. 108.

Whyte’s book was a bestseller, but the liberal arts have not gained much ground in 50 years.  Despite perennial surveys reporting employers value the characteristics and abilities we claim to foster, the belief that to be successful you have to study something “practical” persists.

Several years ago the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU) launched its LEAP initiative  — Liberal Education and America’s Promise — to “champion the value of a liberal education—for individual students and for a nation dependent on economic creativity and democratic vitality.”   The LEAP initiative seeks to advocate nationally for the value of liberal education, to work with institutions to strengthen liberal education, and to provide evidence of educational outcomes. 

LEAP identifies four broad “essential learning outcomes” that education must address for the 21st century: knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world; intellectual and practical skills; personal and social responsibility; and integrative learning.  (For a concise elaboration of these learning outcomes and data supporting employers’ need for them, see College Learning for the New Global Century.)

As society puts hope in higher education as an engine of economic and intellectual development, we also face increasing scrutiny of whether our outcomes measure up to those expectations.  As families increasingly view university education as critical to individuals’ success, more than ever they question whether they can afford it (see one recent survey).  And as people need, more than ever, broad understanding of culture, history, and human expression,  they are more worried than ever about having the skills that will insure them immediate employment.  In the midst of these paradoxes we must articulate and deliver upon the promises of liberal education.

At least twenty years ago we began complaining about the consumerfication of higher education.  We lamented that education was being driven by the demands of individual consumer/students rather than our own ideals.  Today this perceived power struggle misses the point.  Higher education is a public resource and a public good, and we will play a large role in shaping the economies and cultures of the future.  We should be asking ourselves, in the words of one AACU publication, “what contemporary college graduates need to know and be able to do.”  Answering that question requires that we enter into conversation with students, employers, and the broader society to determine together what an education adequate to the demands of this century looks like.

The LEAP initiative is a good step in this direction.  I encourage you to learn more about it and carry on the conversation in your own corner of the world.