Raising the bar?

Citation

Abeles, T.P. (2002), "Raising the bar?", On the Horizon, Vol. 10 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/oth.2002.27410baa.001

Raising the bar?

Raising the bar?

In the USA, there is a growing sense that K-16[1] is or will become the basic standard for a person who hopes to enter the workforce in the near future or to have mobility in the job market. Many professionals who have two-year degrees are also finding it necessary to work towards a Bachelor's. And now many community colleges (the two-year institutions) are planning or are already offering four-year degrees. In the case of the community colleges, some of these programs are in cooperation with traditional four-year institutions, while others are contained within the current institution.

Within the K-12 institutions, in the USA, many educators feel that the senior year is a waste of time. College-bound seniors already know that this last year will not affect their decisions as to the institutions of choice and those not college-bound see the last year as a holding pattern until they can graduate to the workforce, vocational training or the military. Thus, even high schools now are able to offer many students a variety of college options. Some high school teachers are qualified to offer their courses to students for college credit. Other options include advanced placement programs, which offer potential credits at the student's future college; and some students are even given the opportunity to take courses at a local university with these courses also counting towards high school requirements.

In other words, students in grades 11 and 12 are finding many opportunities to move between their high school courses and grade 13-16 courses much as any student enrolled in a university can choose courses at different levels. In fact, it seems that it could be possible for students to enter their college experience possibly as advanced as a junior without being seen as a prodigy. Thus, for students, except for the change in institutional matriculation, the K-16 experience might be seen as seamless. And, where students are taking courses in virtual space, the change could be almost transparent.

For university faculty, many issues start to become apparent. First, there is a growing trend in undergraduate programs to place more emphasis on teaching performance and student evaluations. Courses and workshops on effective delivery of knowledge are being offered for both brick and click space. Thus, academics may not be able to stand principally on their content expertise and their publish/perish records. Similarly, in high school, faculty are under continual pressure to upgrade their content skills and many are obtaining advanced degrees in subject areas. In the USA the adjunct faculty population in colleges and universities has been estimated to be in excess of 40 percent, many of whom are not PhD-prepared or even certified at the high school level for teaching competence. With community college faculty falling between these two bodies, we are seeing a continuum that may soon level across institutions.

Content and courses are now easier to interchange between institutions and, with the rise of virtual institutions, where a student matriculates and from where the course originates or is delivered, can be transparent and moot. A program offered through one institution may use courses that come from a variety of sources. At one time the European Union was looking at standards that would, for example, allow a student to take the first semester of a course in one country's university and the second semester at a different institution, located in another country. As has been mentioned, in several places, the advent of the US Department of Defense into a lap-top arrangement with many institutions can only hasten such a commodification, as will the growing arena of "knowledge objects". The latter are small modules that, because of common standards, can be assembled in a choice of combinations to form a learning experience.

Thus, faculty in universities may find their students coming from many countries and not all having matriculated in the originating institution or been evaluated for that institution's certification. There has been concern about who owns professorially created materials used in courses. The interchangeability of learning experiences between institutions raises even more interesting issues.

For administrators in The Academy, there are a number of looming issues, as the K-16 paradigm becomes firmly established. First, of surprising interest, is the potential that, at least in many public institutions, enrollment in remedial courses could severely atrophy and, simultaneously, the bulk enrollment in introductory courses could diminish. Both of these, as one university found out through analysis, could severely affect the revenues needed to support the smaller, usually upper-division, courses and programs.

Second, with the increased number of adults returning for their Bachelor degree and the simultaneous matriculation of students whose purpose is to complete the basic job entry-level requirements of a BA/BS, the purpose of a college experience changes, shifting the demands on the infrastructure of an institution. This becomes even more apparent when one allows for a mixture of experiences in brick and click spaces.

It is interesting that in the K-12 system there are growing sets of alternatives other than the traditional private and religion-based schools and public institutions. Charter schools, home schools and variances add to the mixture of choice. In the 13-16 sector, the rise of the "for-profits" with their student-centered focus creates a set of alternatives, that when blended with the K-12 choices creates a very large marketplace from which one can assemble a K-16 program in both brick and click spaces.

In the 13-16 arena, we are seeing strategic alliances forming for sharing of programs and courses. As the system moves to K-16, there will be a strengthening of relationships between K-12 schools and the undergraduate institutions. In the past, these have tended to be informal and often between private, élite institutions and medallion universities. With the need to reduce costs via program sharing and the overhead for recruitment (it has been stated that the cost of recruiting one undergraduate can range between US$4,000 and 7,000) there must result a contraction, either through strong relationships or the loss of financially weaker competitors, be they public or private institutions.

With the shift from K-12 to K-16, and the college degree becoming the base for entry into the world of work, what happens to the vision that has set The Academy above the basic educational experience? The ability to get a degree virtually has raised the issue of cost/value for a brick education and hence the traditional academic experience. Perhaps the last four years of a K-16 effort become an extension of the high school transformation, changing the entire relationship of students, faculty, administration and community-at-large?

The other shoe left to drop is the issue of the postgraduate programs, the Masters and Doctorate. Oxbridge has already set the tone for the Master's, where two years of postgraduate experience and a few pounds give you the Master's. In the USA, there is recognition that not all who seek the PhD wish to enter the scholarly life of a researcher. Some institutions now award a "Doctorate" in a discipline, a degree that indicates a more applied research path, one that focuses on a person's future work outside an academic research-driven department. This could be a degree for a person in government, non-profit organization or a teaching position, K-16, non-research driven.

Here, several persons have noted that research-trained faculty tend to teach even their undergraduate courses, as if their students were to major in the discipline with an eye towards advanced degrees. The concern at the 13-16 level is that many students are very honest in stating that such scholarliness is not within their interests. Yet it is difficult for a person who has a research orientation and a lifetime of specialization to shift gears and reorient the educational experience for the student.

This is a very difficult and unresolved issue. Is a non-research-driven curriculum at any level one that just lowers standards, or is it completely rewritten and refocused? How does one provide a chemistry major for a person who intends to enter journalism, or the fast-rising graduate programs for persons whose label is "public intellectual"?

One of the principal differences between the for-profits and the traditional 13-16 institutions is that the former are student-centered with a drive to keep every student who matriculates through graduation with an experience that meets student needs. Traditional universities have an instructor focus, where students, in spite of student-centric posturing, are driven by the interests and directions of the faculty. And the traditional institutions seem indifferent to the loss of a percentage of the entering class. Thus, for-profits tend to work with those students whose academic interests and strengths might not orient them to a traditional university. On the other hand, we are now finding students, educated in four-year institutions, who are returning to these alternative programs.

Thus The Academy is being squeezed by a number of emerging pressures. The shift to a K-16 focus essentially extends the academic experience out four years and calls for a recentering of the direction and purpose of the traditional 13-16 experience. It also changes the faculty requirements and reduces the differentiation between university and traditional high school faculty. The constant upgrading of content specialization of K-12 faculty pushes at the traditional research-driven postgraduate programs at the universities. This is complemented by pressures for vocationally-driven advanced degrees in all areas from political science and public administration to education and the traditional arena of liberal studies.

In the USA, major research institutions are differentiated by the size of their programs and funded research. Yet little has been done to separate them based on focus, where some are driven by understanding the fundamental nature of their specific disciplines and others might have more of an applied and even vocationally-driven focus. A number of the private for-profits with advanced degree offerings are filling this emerging niche, one that is eschewed with extreme disdain by traditional graduate institutions.

In the past, and still, today, we differentiate institutions by the level of their programs, high school, undergraduate, graduate. While we differentiate many of these by "quality", few outside vocational schools are differentiated by purpose in the basic disciplines. The shift to K-16 and the focus on more applied postgraduate degrees speak towards the traditional institutions repurposing themselves based on a market segment. As the institutions evolve in this emerging transformation, many of the terms in business seem to be appropriate, such as: strategic partnerships, channel partners, market segments and value-added resellers.

In a survey conducted several years ago it was found that, with the exception of faculty in two countries, most academics would rather be teaching than fighting for promotion and tenure via the publish/perish paradigm. It has also been noted that faculty who teach in the student-driven for-profits are more satisfied with their work than when they were in traditional academic-driven institutions. The emerging K-16 model may be offering faculty a path that they have been unable to carve for themselves, in spite of the visible and voluble protestations of a segment of the community.

Tom P. AbelesEditor

Note

1. 1.

   1 In the USA, the high school diploma is considered the minimum requirement for one to enter the workforce. Most students attend a pre-school, kindergarten or grade K, and complete high school with their senior year or grade 12; hence the basic sequence is K-12. Many in the USA now see the four-year college degree as being the basic level, which is or will soon be needed, with the exception of two-year professional/vocational degrees. This four-year "continuation" of high school can be extrapolated, affectionately, as grades 13-16; hence the school sequence from start to termination can be labeled as K-16.

   For some in The Academy, the term K-16 is less than complimentary, since it connotes an academic experience that is more a continuation of the high school programs than the intellectual and socially transformational world projected for college. In point of fact, one of the purposes of this editorial is to alert us to the possibility that this may be happening right before our eyes. One need only think of the story of the wood-cutter who sends his son on a trip lasting several years. When the son returns, he sees open fields where forests once stood, while his father does not sense the change as having occurred.

   The rabbit in the grass is often invisible to the fox until he makes the mistake and moves. We hope that On the Horizon serves as a breeze that stirs the intellectual meadow.