More than 2,000 post-secondary educators convened in San Francisco last week to attend the Association of American Colleges and Universities' annual meeting on higher learning. At the three-day conference , university and college presidents, provosts and professors discussed new research on the quality of American learning, cutting-edge advancements in campus technologies and the significance of student success in an increasingly competitive global economy. The meeting was the largest in the association's history .
Highlights of the conference included a number of highly anticipated presentations, among them one by University Asst. Sociology Prof. Josipa Roksa. Roksa spoke alongside Prof. Richard Arum of New York University and questioned whether post-secondary learning is helping students to acquire useful skills necessary to attain employment and success in the global marketplace.
"[This is a time] when less than 60 percent of students entering four-year institutions graduate within six years, when the economic prospects of college graduates are uncertain, when financial strain and competition for resources are on the rise," Roksa said. "The era when people trusted higher education to do what it was supposed to do - or said it was doing - is over. If we are not proactive, we will end up being on the defensive, and that is never a good position to act from."
These debates stem from the worrying results of the organization's survey on higher education, which polled more than 2,300 undergraduate students at 24 different institutions around the nation and found that only 55 percent demonstrated significant improvement in a variety of skills - such as complex reasoning, critical thinking and writing - during their first two years of college.
Eduardo Ochoa, Assistant U.S. Secretary for Post-secondary Education, appealed to higher education institutions to cooperate on public outreach and internal communication, encouraging them to find a way to speak with "one voice" on "shared values and shared goals." This, he said in an interview, would help illustrate the transformative power of higher education and call attention to the "quiet miracles" that occur on campuses.
At the same time, he spoke positively of the issue of gainful employment regulations, which have garnered some controversy among universities and colleges. These regulations would limit the amount of federal aid provided to career programs in which a large percentage of graduates fail to earn enough money to pay back their student loans.Ochoa acknowledges that education "cannot be reduced solely to the ability to get a first job after graduation" but that employability must be taken into account. He was also quick to reassure colleges that the new regulations would not "flatten the definition of quality."
Allen Groves, University Associate Vice President and Dean of Students, said there are certain aspects of higher education that colleges, and especially public colleges, have in common.\n"Of course there might be some various issues, but that's the challenge of anything like this: finding out where there are shared interests and where there are conflicting ones and working through those"
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