Practice-Oriented Education:
A New Model of Undergraduate Learning
By President Richard Freeland
Something remarkable is happening among undergraduates that should command
our attention. Consider these trends:
· A generation ago, most bachelor's-degree recipients from elite
institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton went directly to graduate
school for some form of professional training. Today, those same universities
send most of their students directly into the job market. Recent data and
anecdotal reports indicate a similar phenomenon at a wide range of colleges.
· Until quite recently, programs that incorporated a component
of field or work experience were rare at American colleges. Today, however,
the American Council on Education reports that nine out of ten campuses
offer unpaid internships, two-thirds provide paid internships in at least
some fields, and fifty-seven percent sponsor cooperative education programs.
· Enrollments have shifted drastically in the direction of fields
that explicitly prepare students for the workplace. Between 1970 and 1994,
the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in technical and professional
fields grew much more rapidly than those in the liberal arts and sciences,
accounting for eighty percent of total growth in the degrees awarded.
Today's students, then, are clearly interested in using college to prepare
for the challenges of careers and adult life. Why have the shifts that
I've noted occurred? Some see a decline in appreciation of the arts and
sciences and a heightened materialism among the young. Others see only
a cycle in ever-shifting student interests. The economically minded point
to the unprecedented levels of debt that burden recent college graduates.
Some educators note that more and more graduate schools emphasize the value
of practical experience, so that many college graduates now work for a
while before continuing their studies.
There is merit in each of those explanations, but I do not believe that
any of them gets to the core of the matter for a significant number of
students. What we are seeing is something much more important than a periodic
zig or zag of student interest, and quite different from a long-term shift
away from the liberal arts. The trends that I have cited suggest to me
that traditional forms of undergraduate education-forms that require young
people to choose between the arts and sciences or professional education,
and to separate classroom learning from practical experience-are failing
to meet important educational needs.
Many students do not want to be forced to choose between subjects that
stimulate their minds and souls, and subjects that help them succeed in
the practical world. Students do not want to choose between four or more
years of intellectual activity in an ivory tower and full-time work. Nor
should they be forced to make such choices. The time is ripe for a new
model of undergraduate education that gets beyond our rigid academic categories
and combines the best aspects of liberal education, professional education,
and practical experience. I call that new model "practice-oriented"
education.
To see how it compares with traditional approaches, let's take a quick
look at the way the academy has organized students' undergraduate choices.
The classic tradition is the liberal arts college, initially developed
in small, freestanding institutions, later absorbed as a self-contained
unit into the modern university. That form of higher education has always
represented the best the system can offer, and, as higher education grew
in the years following World War II, the liberal arts approach was replicated
in new or expanded institutions-most of which served students with a much
wider range of abilities and interests than the social and economic elite
for whom the model was developed.
Reliance on that model placed the expanded student populations of the
postwar years in a bind: If they wanted to experience the great academic
traditions that college represented, they had to pursue a course of study
that was not oriented toward helping them advance in the world, the very
hope that had drawn them into college in the first place. Indeed, they
often found themselves invited into an intellectual world that disparaged
those impulses, that made a quasi-religion out of separation from the practical
world, and that asked them to accept a kind of art-for-art's-sake view
of intellectual activity.
Some of the movement away from the arts and sciences today represents
a deep skepticism among students about curricula that do so little to prepare
them for the realities of adult life. And they are right to be skeptical.
A common complaint among employers (as well as parents) is that many college
graduates, even those from very selective (and expensive) institutions,
lack the clarity of purpose, emotional maturity, and practical skills to
cope efficiently with the demands and responsibilities of the workplace.
The major alternative to the liberal arts has been professional education,
in which course work is designed to prepare students for practical pursuits
such as engineering, health care, or business. Even students in professional
programs, though, frequently have felt confined by the requirements of
highly prescribed, rigid curricula that leave little room to explore any
of their other interests. Happily, in recent years, key professional fields
such as business and engineering have moved away from those prescriptive
approaches, allowing more room for undergraduates to shape individual courses
of study.
But the gulf between the arts and sciences and professional subjects
remains wide and deep, and only the most enterprising students find ways
to bridge it. Ironically, moreover, to conform to the values of academe,
many practical fields have worked hard to become more theoretical, with
the result that large portions of their curricula are disconnected from
the world of practice, and many faculty members have little knowledge of
how their disciplines can actually be put to use outside the classroom.
Indeed, many engineering and business faculty members have never practiced
the fields they teach and are more likely to advance professionally by
publishing articles in academic journals than by making successful contributions
in real-world settings.
A third alternative-of which neither liberal arts nor professional education
has made much use-is the great tradition of apprenticeship and on-the-job
learning. Many academics in the liberal arts tend to follow a dogma of
withdrawal from the practical world, and thus, until fairly recently, programs
that linked classroom learning and practical experience were scarce, marginal,
and experimental. That has been true in many professional fields as well.
Exceptions have existed, including the required practicum in teacher
education and the clinical experience required in many health fields. But
other equally practical fields such as engineering, business, public administration,
and journalism have not made systematic use of field-based learning. Cooperative
education, which alternates periods of full-time study and full-time work,
has its roots in engineering education, but it has been adopted on a large
scale by only a handful of engineering schools. Business programs have
done even less with the idea. That history makes the recent explosion of
internship programs especially remarkable.
The premise of the practice-oriented education that I espouse is that
each of the three traditional forms of learning-liberal arts education,
professional education, and practical experience-can contribute to the
others. Students in academic fields will better grasp the significance
and power of their subjects if they have a chance to see them put to use
in more practically oriented course work. A student who has encountered
ethical ideas in a philosophy course will understand them more deeply through
testing their applicability in a business case study involving environmental
policy.
Similarly, students interested in professional fields will get more
out of their studies if they also take courses in the basic disciplines
that typically provide the underpinnings of applied work. Software developers,
for instance, can be far more productive when their knowledge of computer
systems is combined with the communication skills that enable them to effectively
interview users to find out what those users need, as well as when they
have developed the logical and deductive reasoning skills that enable them
to create complex programs and eliminate errors. Students in both liberal
arts and professional fields will appreciate more fully the power (and
limitations) of the ideas they encounter in their classes if they have
a chance to test them in practical settings.
At its heart, practice-oriented education seeks to connect academic
knowledge to non-academic life. It is animated by the belief that the phrase
"learning for its own sake" is academic jargon, and that, for
most people, learning is compelling chiefly to the extent that it expands
their understanding, widens their experience, increases their skills, and
elevates their spirits. The undergraduate experience is not a time to set
aside non-academic challenges, but rather a time of transition from adolescence
to adulthood, during which adult intellectual and emotional skills can
be nurtured through thoughtfully designed experiences that link academic
work to real-world activity.
Most colleges and universities already offer some version of all three
of the traditional forms of learning-liberal arts, professional education,
and practical experience. Colleges or schools of arts and sciences exist
in almost every university, and most universities contain some set of professional
schools. Programs that provide workplace experience-such as cooperative
education, internships, or field placements-are also available on many
campuses. What most institutions have not done is to create organized programs
of study that make it easy for students in basic disciplines or professional
fields to combine those three forms of education into an integrated experience.
The most enduring learning will occur when colleges and universities enable
students to move back and forth among the three educational traditions
and to reflect on the insights they gain as they do so.
Fostering practice-oriented programs is not as difficult as it might
appear, as the experience at my university suggests. At Northeastern, which
includes several professional colleges, a college of arts and sciences,
and the largest program of cooperative education in the country, our efforts
have followed two basic paths.
First, we are developing many curricula that permit students to combine
course work in a professional field with course work in the arts and sciences.
Double majors offer virtually limitless possibilities for meeting a student's
diverse interests. More-focused dual majors link two fields in an organized,
streamlined sequence of courses, as in our programs of art and multimedia
studies, or international business and foreign languages. We are also developing
more-specific major/minor combinations, including criminal justice and
sociology, and English and technical communications. None of those curricular
forms are new, of course; what will be distinctive at Northeastern is the
range of such programs and the extent to which we encourage our students
to pursue them.
Beyond recasting curricula, the second key element of practice-oriented
education at Northeastern is integrating cooperative education with classroom
experience. In our program, and in most other cooperative education programs,
students alternate periods of full-time study and full-time paid employment.
Traditionally, we have sought to place students in co-op jobs that are
broadly related to their studies, but we have done very little to integrate
the two types of learning.
Now, however, we are developing courses in which professors in both
liberal and professional subjects systematically draw on their students'
on-the-job experiences, and we are creating opportunities for students
to reflect explicitly on what their co-op placements have taught them about
the subjects they are studying. We are also finding ways to bring classroom
instructors, supervisors of students on co-op jobs, and employers into
much more intense communication in shaping students' education.
One introductory course in our engineering college, for example, uses
teaching teams made up of engineering faculty members and co-op advisers.
Students are introduced to the concept of ethical responsibility in decision
making as it applies to them personally in the classroom, and as part of
a team in the workplace. Another course brings employers into the classroom:
At one session, the president of a small start-up company discussed how
managers screen résumés. While advanced course work and work
experience were valued, he noted that community involvement can help candidates
stand out. One applicant's volunteer history-he had taught computer skills
at a homeless shelter and set up a computer lab for a day-care center-was
what gave him the edge in landing a job with the company.
Practice-oriented education is no educational panacea. It is almost
certainly not appropriate for all students. Some will continue to flourish
in more-traditional programs in either the liberal arts and sciences or
the professions. Others will have no interest in building practical experiences
into their college years. Practice-oriented education calls for a maturity
of outlook that not all adolescents have, but that a growing number of
college students do.
Practice-oriented education is, however, highly applicable at two kinds
of institutions, which together account for a large and growing percentage
of undergraduate students: those with strong traditions of professional
education at the undergraduate level, and those that send a significant
percentage of their arts and sciences graduates directly into the work
force. By the time they graduate, students from well-thought-out programs
that integrate classroom and real-world experiences have impressive work
histories that give them demonstrable advantages in seeking initial employment,
and employers and educators alike are impressed by their intellectual and
social maturity.
Practice-oriented education also will appeal to students at all kinds
of institutions who plan careers outside academe; who are stimulated by
the interactions between the theoretical and applied; and who are skeptical
about the value of intellectual activity disconnected from professional,
civic, and personal life. For many institutions, practice-oriented education
is an intellectually sound way to respond to the trends in student interests
and attitudes that are already so well developed-and yet so worrisome-to
many faculty members and administrators.
This article first appeared in the Chronicle
of Higher Education on February 19, 1999.
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