Qualify for your MOJO ribbon by reading a Planning article this fall, then commenting on it. Find out more. Sign up now.

Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum stirred up a great deal of conversation at SCUP–46. (SCUP members, and others who attended, can view video of Roksa and Arum’s plenary session in the SCUP–46 proceedings.) In this Change magazine article, they report on their research about what’s happening in the lives of recent college grads.

In this study, we explore how recent college graduates have navigated transitions into adult roles in this time of economic crisis. While these transitions are often rife with difficulties, college graduates today are facing unique obstacles in cutting a path toward independence and economic self-reliance.

These challenges are worthy of note, as early transitions tend to shape long-term trajectories, giving initial outcomes lifelong consequences. In his pioneering study of children born in the 1920s (i.e., shortly before or during the Great Depression), Glen Elder documented the profound effects that early experiences of economic hardships can have on human development, not only in the formative years but also throughout life (Elder, 1974).

Even “socialist” Europe doesn’t have the functional equivalent of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA): An American student goes abroad in a wheelchair. And he’s making a movie about it:

The name of the film is Wheelchair Diaries: One Step Up. "One step up" means that everybody with a disability has that one step up they have to take. It's not a flight of stairs, it's not a $5-million dollar remodeling. It's a piece of plywood that allows them to get up. We all deal with it in different ways. But my message is that we need to realize where that one step is, and put that ramp up. That will make the world of difference for physical accessibility and social inclusion.

People who plan need to find relevant and credible information streams. SCUP provides those streams. From @SCUPNews, the society's daily environmental scanning tweet stream and the weekly SCUP Email News • to publications like Planning for Higher Education and Trends to Watch In Higher Education • to networks on LinkedIn and Facebook • to the society's annual, international conference and idea marketplace (July 23-27, ~DC)

We've titled this post "Are Students Brains Changing Faster Than Higher Ed Can?" It's actually an untitled item from the Learning section of 2010's Trends to Watch and takes the form of an observation with related thoughts.

"Trends" is written by SCUP's director of education and planning, Phyllis T.H. Grummon, who will facilitate SCUP's Pacific Region's June 10 Trends in Higher Education Symposium the Claremont Colleges.

Learning

Observation

Changes in the learning environment, sometimes very subtle, can affect the performance of students in classrooms.

• Exposure to the letters “A” or “F” at the start of an examination seems to have an affect on how well students score. Subjects receiving an analogies test with the label “Test Bank ID: A” scored significantly better than students with “Test Bank: F”, with a “Test Bank ID: J” scoring in the middle.
• A study of high school students found that the gender of the images of scientists affected test scores for females. When all male examples were used, girls’ test scores were lower. They increased when textbook pictures were either all female or equally divided. 
• Recent research reports that a variety of skills are enhanced by playing action video games, including better visual selective attention and better focus.

Our Thoughts

Technology is also introducing changes in the environment. Our interaction with it appears to be influencing how our brains are wired. The power to increase learning comes with the reality of our evolving nervous system The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, (2010) Carr, N., W. W. Norton).

• Math software developed by the University of California-Irvine, based on neuroscience research, significantly increased the passing rate on a state examination in 64 of the lowest performing elementary schools in the state.
• Devices that track eye movements while reading on a screen can now be combined with software that infers a reader’s progress and provides help when eyes pause on words or names.
• Informal learning through television, video games, and the Internet has increased students’ abilities with visual-spatial reasoning.

Are we failing our students by not making our services, including learning experiences, available during some of the times they are most active and definitely engaged in some kind of learning: During the night.

Our front-line residence hall professionals, most commonly our youngest and least-experienced staff members, many of them just a few years past their own undergraduate experience. And these staff are available only to the minority of college students, as many more live off-campus without even these resources nearby.

If we were to design a similar staffing structure in the retail world, we would be out of business in short order. Imagine a convenience store that closed at noon, a shopping mall that shuttered its doors on the weekends, a train schedule that ignored common commuter times. Imagine a restaurant that served exquisite dinners… at 2 p.m. Or a pub that opened at 8 a.m. and closed at 4 p.m. None would survive, and on the way to their demise, people would say, “Geez. What were they thinking?” But on our campuses, many of us miss the big stuff that happens daily (and nightly) for our students. Geez, I wonder, what are we thinking?

You could not write a better lead-in paragraph for this article:

In August, 60 years after the University of Texas admitted its first black student, the school welcomed the first freshman class in which white students were in the minority.

For a related, classic article, see The New Demographics of Higher Education by George Keller. More quotes from the current article, below.

Stan Jones, former Indiana commissioner of higher education and the current president of Complete College America, a national nonprofit group dedicated to boosting the number of college graduates, said the numbers have been telling the story for years. “But it hasn’t necessarily gotten through to policy-makers that this was going on, and clearly not to the general public,” Mr. Jones said. “All of us are seeing it happening faster than we had expected.”

For example, although their birth rate is growing at a significant clip, Mr. Jones said, Hispanics do not graduate from high school, go on to college or graduate in the same numbers as white students. “If you look at the freshman class everywhere in this country, it is more representative than it’s ever been,” he said. “But in four years, if you look at the graduating class, it is not going to be representative of the country, because many of those students from the underrepresented groups won’t make it to graduation.”

Educators give several reasons for the disparity, including economic differences, the comparative quality of college preparation at urban, rural and suburban schools, and a sense of isolation among those who are the first in their families to go to college.

They are not like us! And you've probably already seen this, it's all over, but just in case … .

The class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate and five hundred cable channels, of which they will watch a handful, have always been the norm. Since "digital" has always been in the cultural DNA, they've never written in cursive and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch. Dirty Harry (who’s that?) is to them a great Hollywood director. The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat. 

Nonetheless, they plan to enjoy college. The males among them are likely to be a minority. They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them.  A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship. (emphasis added) They will discover how to research information in books and journals and not just on-line. Their professors, who might be tempted to think that they are hip enough and therefore ready and relevant to teach the new generation, might remember that Kurt Cobain is now on the classic oldies station. The college class of 2014 reminds us, once again, that a generation comes and goes in the blink of our eyes, which are, like the rest of us, getting older and older.

Up until the 20th century, "adolescence" was not a meaningful concept to our cultural ancestors. Psychologists are now seeing the development of another new stage in life for American youth: Emerging Adulthood.

During the ... emerging adulthood ... young men and women are more self-focused than at any other time of life, less certain about the future and yet also more optimistic, no matter what their economic background. This is where the “sense of possibilities” comes in ... they have not yet tempered their ideal istic visions of what awaits. “The dreary, dead-end jobs, the bitter divorces, the disappointing and disrespectful children . . . none of them imagine that this is what the future holds for them,” he wrote. Ask them if they agree with the statement “I am very sure that someday I will get to where I want to be in life,” and 96 percent of them will say yes. But despite elements that are exciting, even exhilarating, about being this age, there is a downside, too: dread, frustration, uncertainty, a sense of not quite understanding the rules of the game ... .

Some scientists would argue that this ambivalence reflects what is going on in the brain, which is also both grown-up and not-quite-grown-up. Neuroscientists once thought the brain stops growing shortly after puberty, but now they know it keeps maturing well into the 20s. This new understanding comes largely from a longitudinal study of brain development sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, which started following nearly 5,000 children at ages 3 to 16 (the average age at enrollment was about 10). The scientists found the children’s brains were not fully mature until at least 25. “In retrospect I wouldn’t call it shocking, but it was at the time,” Jay Giedd, the director of the study, told me. “The only people who got this right were the car-rental companies.”

A recent article in The Chicago Tribune described a continuing debate in business schools over whether their enrollees should be regarded as “customers” rather than as traditional students. Should the students have more say over what they are taught and even how they are judged? What’s the risk of the student-consumer approach in M.B.A. programs? And does the issue reflect broader issues in higher education?

Students are investing time and money with a purpose in mind. The school that does not serve that purpose will not survive.

The best students don't view themselves as customers, and they shouldn't be treated as such.

Treatment of students as customers is not about grades or unrealistic expectations; it is about a new paradigm of shared governance.

The "student as customer" philosophy has created an underworked and overindulged group of future national leaders.

To deny that higher education is a product and students are customers is to duck the tough questions we should be asking.

---

Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

The type of university needed for the new age of higher education will have to engage in a continuous process of self-review and refocusing over its lifetime. This will require systematic and purposeful processes of strategic planning that draw on the active participation of a broad range of stakeholders who, in their work together, align the institution’s policies, processes, and practices to make them more responsive to the changing needs of students.

Before this, however, the university needs to commit to a core purpose centred on student learning and what this means to how it does business. How do we get to this purpose? Surely, developing an innovative mission statement, hiring the best practitioners money can buy, and mimicking best practices should do the job for us.

Sadly, it does not.