Credentialed by 26 Blog | Does Degree Completion Really = Learning?

This may sound familiar to you: my inbox overflows with notices of webinars, policy briefings and other events focused on achieving the bold new higher education goals set by the Obama administration and other prominent American leaders.  The invitations (and sometimes the events themselves, though I make it to relatively few) abound with references to access, retention, graduation, persistence and attainment.

What they often lack, notably, is any mention of learning.

A new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum and colleagues is an important and timely reminder that earning a degree or credential is not the same as learning -- and we would be misguided to use a degree as a proxy for knowledge or real-world skills. In the commotion to get more young people successfully to and through college, Arum argues, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fundamental issue of whether and what they are learning while there.

One of the startling findings highlighted in the book is that 46 percent of students in a sample study demonstrated no significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication after two years of college. After four years, a full 36 percent of students still demonstrated no gains in these areas.  These findings are based on a longitudinal study using the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a written test given during students’ freshmen, sophomore and senior years.

The good news is that several promising efforts are afoot within higher education to focus on student learning, identify common learning outcomes and improve undergraduate teaching. For example, through the Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative, hundreds of campuses and state systems are organizing around a common set of essential learning outcomes focused on preparing graduates for “21st century challenges.”  This week the Lumina Foundation released the Degree Qualification Profile, a cross-disciplinary framework that establishes what recipients of associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees should know.

Unfortunately, these efforts seem disconnected from most of the policy conversations I find myself in about postsecondary completion.  In those conversations, references to “accountability” outstrip references to “learning” hands down.  But isn’t learning what we want educational institutions to be accountable for?

Speaking of accountability, 24 states have now signed onto Complete College America’s Alliance of States. This means they have agreed to publically report on a set of common completion metrics (e.g. degrees awarded, transfer rates, time to degree, credit accumulation). In a similar vein, the National Governor’s Association’s Compete to Complete initiative is urging governors to set completion goals and report on some of these same metrics.  More transparent and consistent reporting of such information is a welcome development.

But note that inside higher education, a Voluntary System for Accountability has been in place since 2007 and more than half of all public  four-year institutions, among others, have signed on.  It includes measures of persistence but also learning and other aspects of students’ experiences on campus. A new sister initiative, the Voluntary Framework of Accountability has recently been launched for and by community colleges, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates and Lumina Foundations.  

Of course I’m not the only person noticing this gap. In their recent report, College Learning for the New Global Century, the American Association of Colleges and Universities points out in that “across all the discussion of access, affordability, and even accountability, there has been a near-total public and policy silence about what contemporary college graduates need to know and be able to do.”

Hopefully the findings from Academically Adrift will help spur this much-needed dialogue. They certainly reinforce prior research by Corporate Voices for Working Families suggesting that employers struggle to find not just high school graduates but college graduates who come to the workplace with the critical thinking, team work and problem-solving skills needed to be successful.  

Helping more young people get degrees without ensuring that they also get an education would be an easy trap to fall into. But accountability and learning need not be at odds with one another. We need more consistent and transparent tracking of the things that are relatively easy to count, like completion and graduation. But institutions also need more effective ways of assessing and supporting the complex processes of learning and development. And those of us working at national intermediaries and think tanks need to do our part to integrate the important dialogues now underway in the field about completion and student learning.

Nicole Yohalem is The Forum for Youth Investment's Director of Special Projects, where she oversees work related to postsecondary success, out-of-school time, and bridging research, policy and practice. (The Forum is SparkAction's managing partner.)