High Impact:
Wagner and the Future of College Education
In fall 1998, Wagner College began implementing the Wagner Plan for the Practical Liberal Arts, a comprehensive undergraduate educational program dedicated to integrative learning, reflective practice, and experiential learning in the context of a liberal education.
Twelve years later, Wagner College remains committed to these original goals. At the same time, new initiatives and activities have emerged, complementing the goals of the original Wagner Plan. Together, they bring us to the Wagner Plan 2.0.
In the Wagner College 2009 Annual Report, President Richard Guarasci and Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), provide national and historical context for the Wagner Plan, remember their college days, and convey their vision for the most effective form of college education today.
In this expanded discussion for the Web site, Guarasci and Schneider also address ways of measuring the effectiveness of liberal education, the disconnect between public perceptions of college education and campus realities, and the affordability problem.
DEFINING THE MISSION
WAGNER: Let’s begin by introducing Carol Schneider. What is your background in higher education? What is the AAC&U — its mission as an organization and its current focus?
CAROL GEARY SCHNEIDER: The Association of American Colleges and Universities was founded in 1915, and from the beginning its focus has been on helping colleges and universities provide a liberal education to their students. We’ve consistently been interested in the quality of undergraduate education, making sure that our member institutions make changes in their institutional culture and practice to ensure that students are prepared for a changing world. Today, AAC&U has 1,200 member institutions, drawn from all parts of higher education.
I myself had a liberal arts education. I went to Mount Holyoke College as an undergraduate and went on to get a Ph.D. in history at Harvard University — two institutions that were never ambivalent about their commitment to liberal education.
I then went to work in institutions that were much less sure of their focus on liberal education, and I began working with students who were non-traditional — students who were first generation, and many who were returning as working adults to the academy — and this whole experience caused me to think hard about what it meant to provide liberal education to students from widely different backgrounds.
I’ve spent my entire career trying to help the academy focus on the core elements in educational excellence, or a liberal education, and to figure out appropriate ways of providing that kind of learning to all students, and not just to the small fraction that attend small colleges.
WAGNER: What do you mean by “liberal education”? Why do you believe in it so strongly?
CAROL SCHNEIDER: Richard and I have been working together for quite some time, and during that time the focus has shifted from defining a liberal or liberal arts education in terms of certain disciplines — the humanities, the sciences, the social sciences, the arts — and focusing on the multiple purposes of a liberal education. These include broad knowledge of the larger world, including a knowledge of science and society, and also include a development of students’ capabilities: intellectual capacities, an examined sense of civic and ethical responsibilities, strong focus on what it means to live in a pluralistic and diverse and interdependent world, and much more emphasis on students applying their learning in real-world contexts.
RICHARD GUARASCI: Yes, and I would just add that what Carol and AAC&U have done is to restore a sense that liberal education at its base is about educating students for democratic citizenship and their civic responsibilities as members of an intercultural democracy. That was lost for a while in higher education, and it’s critical. Higher education has become such an essential aspect of a student’s education. We have gone from about 10 percent of the population getting an undergraduate degree to — what is it now?
CAROL SCHNEIDER: Within two years of graduating from high school, 72 percent will enroll in some form of postsecondary education. Now, a big chunk of Americans never finish high school, some 25 or 30 percent. But with such a large percentage of the population enrolling in higher education, we really have an unprecedented opportunity to help students develop the breadth of knowledge and the intellectual competencies to deal with the challenges we face as citizens, which are unbelievably complex but critical to our future as a society.
NOT YOUR FATHER’S COLLEGE EDUCATION
WAGNER: How is higher education different now than what our alumni remember from, say, 30 years ago?
CAROL SCHNEIDER: The content has changed, and the most important forms of teaching and learning have changed. The content has become much more focused on the global context, whether you are talking about history, or social sciences, or the humanities, or science. The biggest problems that science is dealing with are problems of global sustainability, climate, hunger, food supply, how we power and fuel the world. All these science and technology challenges are global in scope, and they are civic questions just as much as they’re scientific questions.
But equally important are changes in the way we actually try to teach students. AAC&U has identified about a dozen pedagogical reforms that have become increasingly essential, and each one of them is fundamental to the way Wagner tries to teach its students. What these new practices — we call them high-impact practices — have in common is that they engage students with significant, complex questions, where the problem itself isn’t scripted. We don’t know the answer — if we knew what the answer was, it wouldn’t be a significant question. And we’re trying to engage students as authors of insight into how to frame the question, how to analyze the question, what to do about the question.
High-impact practices include first-year experiences; learning communities, which means courses that are linked together around big questions; field-based learning and other forms of experiential learning, such as internships and community-based projects; study abroad; courses and experiences that deal with societal diversity and issues of justice and inclusion; capstone projects; writing across the curriculum, math across the curriculum — all of these strategies have emerged as ways of allowing students to develop high-level intellectual capacities and engaging students with their own responsibility to address and solve these problems for our society.
RICHARD GUARASCI: At Wagner, 30 or 40 years ago many of the things we offer now in the Wagner Plan for the Practical Liberal Arts were attainable, but only by coincidence, as opposed to by design and intention. That is, students could have taken courses around a common theme, but they would have had to cluster them on their own.
CAROL SCHNEIDER: And that’s exactly what I did as a student, all by myself.
RICHARD GUARASCI: I remember doing the same thing as an undergraduate as well, saying, “Wow, I see the link between my history course and literature course. Isn’t that so interesting?” Also, you could have linked your studies to some field-based experience. The pieces were there, but we hadn’t put them together into a concrete, intentional program. So, the Wagner Plan really draws upon the legacy and the mission and the values of Wagner, but we put all the pieces together so that students would get them by design rather than by accident.
CAROL SCHNEIDER: That’s a really important point. The practical liberal arts, and the design for liberal education we’re talking about, draws on the strengths of the professions as much as it draws on the strengths of the arts and sciences, and weaves those strengths together. One way of thinking about it is that we’re looking for more big-picture thinking in the professions, and more real-world applications in the arts and sciences.
Traditionally, the strength of the arts and sciences has been their ability to engage students in big questions; the professions have been known for their ability to prepare people for practice. A contemporary liberal education tries to do both. It tries to ensure that students have that 360-degree perspective, but it also focuses with great intensity and intentionality on helping students integrate the different parts of their learning, and learn to apply their knowledge, their judgment, their sense of responsibility in real contexts.
I think higher education is starting to break free of the notion that it’s either a liberal arts education or career preparation, and to see that liberal education is a very powerful career preparation. AAC&U has found abundant evidence that employers are pleading with us to produce the aims and outcomes of liberal education. They don’t call it “liberal education,” but they are looking for the competencies that it provides, and finding them all too hard to find. We also found evidence that jobs which require liberal education capabilities pay more. There is, as economists put it, a wage premium for achieving the best a liberal education can provide you.
DOES LIBERAL EDUCATION WORK?
WAGNER: What evidence do you have that liberal education is delivering on its promises? How are you collecting evidence of learning outcomes?
CAROL SCHNEIDER: Well, when you have a curriculum designed like Wagner’s, where students have many opportunities to apply their learning and do a culminating senior project, proof of the gains they’re making is in that work. We like to say, “The proof is in the portfolio.” That’s the excitement and the advantage and the power of these so-called high-impact practices. Because they keep asking the students to do significant, complex pieces of work, they give us abundant opportunity to see if they’re making the kinds of gains we’re talking about.
Those of us at the AAC&U were pleased that the federal government gave us a fair amount of money to try to spell out what quality looks like in relationship to different aspects of liberal education. So, we have identified a set of learning outcomes that every student should achieve, and we have defined standards of competence, called “rubrics,” for each of those outcomes. Institutions can take those rubrics and look at what are in students’ portfolios and ask whether students are making the kinds of gains that nationally defined standards would set for them.
As an association, we are skeptical of the notion that there’s a test out there that you can give a student that will tell whether they’ve learned everything they need to learn in college. We think the real test comes in those projects they do: the research, the assignments, the community-based work.
But if you do look at the evidence of national testing, you see a couple of things: One, that students are still not getting the kind of education we’re talking about; and two, that there’s a correlation between an institution’s commitment to engaged learning and high-impact practices on the one hand, and whether or not students are in fact making the kinds of gains we’re talking abut. So for example, there’s something called the National Survey of Student Engagement. Wagner uses this, right?
RICHARD GUARASCI: Yes.
CAROL SCHNEIDER: It asks students themselves whether they are making gains in areas like critical thinking, problem solving, learning about perspectives different from their own, learning about other cultures, learning about giving back to the community, learning about ethical reasoning and judgment, and a number of other outcomes of a good liberal education. The more students are engaged in the kind of high-impact learning practices we’ve been talking about, the more their self-reported gains on any one of these outcomes.
RICHARD GUARASCI: At Wagner, we are using a variety of measures. First of all, every academic department has defined goals and outcomes for their majors. We also have them for our general education program, our first-year program, and our intermediate learning communities.
And we are now beginning to use electronic portfolios, e-portfolios, because I really do think, as Carol said, that the proof is in the portfolio. We learn the most from looking at samples of student work, over time, to see what progress they’ve made in the work they’re producing and in how they see themselves.
We also use the NSSE, the National Survey of Student Engagement, which we find very helpful. We benchmark ourselves against other New American Colleges and other benchmark groups, schools that are similar to us. We use the College Learning Assessment, the CLA, which is an attempt to give a test, pretest and posttest, on learning over four years. We have certain reservations about it, but we’re part of a three-year experiment using this technique.
But we never rely on only one piece of evidence. We’re always looking at a variety of pieces of evidences of student outcomes. For 10 years now, we’ve also done a writing assessment, in which we identify a percentage of freshmen students, and, with their permission, take samples of their work over the four years to see how they have improved and grown, not only as communicators but also as thinkers.
And then I think the big thing, because we’re going through a regional accreditation right now through [the] Middle States [Commission on Higher Education] — which is very helpful to us, quite frankly, on these questions — is that we’re not only looking at the assessment of learning outcomes, but we’re also trying to look at institutional outcomes. Is the institution living up to its own mission, and what evidence do we have to suggest that, and what do the trends look like over time?
BUILDING PUBLIC AWARENESS
WAGNER: Over the past years, the federal government has been critiquing higher education for a supposed lack of accountability and trying to implement new accountability standards. But, we’re talking here about how Wagner and other colleges are diligently measuring their effectiveness and offering evidence that we’re delivering on our institutional promises. So, maybe the question is: Do we need to be communicating that better to the public? Because it seems like the public is not hearing this.
RICHARD GUARASCI: Good question! Over the last five years and even longer, the AAC&U has been to get the public to understand what liberal education is and understand its value and to understand what it actually produces.
CAROL SCHNEIDER: He’s right. One of the things that has struck us as an association is the disconnect between all the activity you see on many campuses, and the far-reaching changes in the way we try to teach and assess undergraduate learning, and the perception outside the academy that nothing’s happening, nothing’s changing. That we were educating people the way we have for the last 500 years. This is a huge disconnect: the record of creativity and innovation on campus and the perception outside the academy that there is neither creativity nor innovation.
So, in 2005, AAC&U launched LEAP, Liberal Education and America’s Promise, which is a 10-year effort in which we have worked with our members to focus on the important aims and outcomes of a good college education, to identify those aims and outcomes with liberal education, and to insist that if you’re not addressing all those aims, which include civic development, personal development, and pre-professional development, then you’re missing something fundamental. We have worked with our campuses to help them be more coherent in the way they explain what they’re doing, and to build public awareness both of what matters in college, of the kinds of evidence that institutions are producing to show what their students are getting there, and above all to encourage the public to say, “If you’re not offering liberal education, why not?”
RETHINKING HIGHER EDUCATION
WAGNER: What about the question of affordability: You say that all students need a liberal education, but the costs of such an education keep rising at a rate that exceeds families’ earning power. How will middle-class families, much less first-generation college students, be able to pay for such an education? How is Wagner addressing this problem?
RICHARD GUARASCI: The question of affordability is absolutely at the forefront of every institution of higher education right now, as it tries to address internal issues of cost and expense, necessities, priorities, delivery.
There’s quite a debate going on about how we deliver higher education. Some have argued for an online delivery system, but there’s been a real slow-down in seeing that as the salvation of affordability. For one thing, it’s expensive to deliver education that way, and for another thing, we’re not sure if the results are quite as successful as other forms of delivery.
What’s really going on is that the fundamental business plan of higher education has to be rethought. Not-for-profit higher education is not a world in which you see mergers and acquisitions, where institutions would begin to acquire one another in order to create efficiencies and extend their access. Instead, we’re competitive, we’re always trying to show how we’re different from one another. Higher education is a sector where there is a perverse relationship between competition and price. Most economists would argue that increasing competition will decrease price, or at least level price. In higher education, the more you increase competition, at least at this point, you increase price.
Really, the focus needs to be on collaboration and sharing. In certain areas, like programs abroad, which are incredibly expensive, there has been collaboration. But the same thing could be done with library resources, research resources, lab resources, and other ways you can find efficiencies. I think that’s where we can see some gain in terms of reduction of cost, and therefore maintaining some level of affordability and arresting the rate of growth in cost and expense to go to college.
But there’s going to be a struggle, at least from the paradigm of higher education, as we go forward, because institutions are so busy trying to explain to their respective publics how their institution is distinct. For them to then turn around and say, “We share these programs with this institution, and we share those programs with that institution” — it becomes complicated. We are just beginning this discussion. It’s a huge paradigm shift, at least in potential.
CAROL SCHNEIDER: It’s a very high level of strategy.
WAGNER: I read about the phenomenon of “swirling” in another interview by Carol — in other words, that many more students are now moving from institution to institution during their college careers. Wouldn’t increased collaboration among colleges and universities be a boon in this environment?
CAROL SCHNEIDER: The recognition that many students were attending more than one institution when they get their degree is what stands behind AAC&U’s work on learning outcomes. We came to the conclusion that it just didn’t make educational sense for each institution to define a unique set of outcomes when, in fact, the economy and democracy and global challenges all require that students leave college with a certain set of capabilities that are reliable, wherever they went to school. So, the focus on common outcomes is driven by the recognition that students need these kinds of learning to succeed in society, and that all of us share the responsibility to help them achieve these kinds of learning, liberal education, wherever they started and wherever they finished.
That then raises the question that Richard alluded to: What, then, is the distinctiveness of Wagner? If anyone can provide a liberal education, how is Wagner distinctive? And I think that the right answer for colleges like Wagner is to compete around signature practices — in your case, the practical liberal arts, making a mission of New York City, and getting students out into the community. You have put together a whole tapestry of practices that are distinctive to Wagner and are your strategy for helping students achieve the outcomes. A community college down the road is going to have a very different set of strategies. The question will be which works better, and that’s something we can work out empirically.
However, we’re still talking about each institution competing as a unique institution, and what Richard has pointed to is the need for cooperation across institutional lines, not just on outcomes, but on programs and practices as well. And that discussion has barely begun, as he said.
When I stand on the outside as neutral observer and ask, “What would I do if I were in Richard’s position?” I come to something like the following: I distinguish between kinds of learning where work with faculty is essential and fundamental, and kinds of learning where, frankly, technology could do it better. So when you’re talking about information delivery, the fact of the matter is that technology can make the delivery of information more interesting, more engaging, more multidimensional, and more memorable. And that sort of thing you don’t need small classes to do. You need great technology.
However, when it comes to teaching students how to analyze, how to solve a problem, how to work with a team, how to get out in the community and make sense of what they just learned in the community, there you really do need faculty.
RICHARD GUARASCI: Absolutely.
CAROL SCHNEIDER: And so we need to distinguish between forms of learning where faculty work, faculty capability is absolutely crucial, and those where we are frankly still using very outdated modes of teaching and learning.
RICHARD GUARASCI: Just to give an example of what Carol said, I think one of the best examples of a lecture is Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. It was a beautifully done lecture with multimedia use, and that went to millions of people, and — whatever you may think of the argument — look at the impact that lecture had on public opinion and the investigation of that issue. But to really do the investigation, as Carol was saying, and then make meaning of that research requires hands-on interaction between faculty and students, and students and students as well.
CAROL SCHNEIDER: Exactly — how to do research oneself, the work of a student. So, qualifying the distinction between faculty time spent developing students’ competency versus faculty time spent delivering information is really fundamental to cost efficiency.
RICHARD GUARASCI: The only thing I would add to this question is that on the business end, there are ways for colleges to reduce costs rather significantly by grouping together. For instance, Wagner buys its liability insurance with 100 other colleges. It can’t do that with health insurance, at least up to this point. But there’s no reason why we shouldn’t buy our food in large groups of institutions, our bedding, our maintenance materials. There are a lot of ways to reduce costs in these areas that are not a part of learning, but they provide an infrastructure that supports learning, and that could have a big impact. Just think of energy, and efficiencies that we could share through the delivery of energy costs. There’s so many of them that we haven’t thought about, and that’s another part of the conversation. That’s low-hanging fruit. We have to incentivize institutions to do that. That could easily be a federal project that would reduce the cost of education dramatically.
