Monthly Archives: September 2015

Honors Education: An Antidote to the “Neoliberal,” Vocational Trends in Higher Ed

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Editor’s Note: Following the introduction, please see excerpts from a recent post by Joel Hunter, Ph.D.

In his latest post, Honors Education: A Parallel College?, Joel Hunter, Ph.D., continues his response to William Deresiewicz, author of a much read essay at The New Republic and now another at Harper’s.

Deresiewicz believes that higher education has entered “the age of neoliberalism.  Call it Reaganism or Thatcherism, economism or market fundamentalism, neoliberalism is an ideology that reduces all values to money values. The worth of a thing is the price of the thing. The worth of a person is the wealth of the person. Neoliberalism tells you that you are valuable exclusively in terms of your activity in the marketplace — in Wordsworth’s phrase, your getting and spending.”

Citing New York Times columnist David Brooks, Deresiewicz notes that higher education used to have, or should have, “three potential purposes: the commercial (preparing to start a career), the cognitive (learning stuff, or better, learning how to think), and the moral (the purpose that is so mysterious to Pinker and his ilk). ‘Moral,’ here, does not mean learning right from wrong. It means developing the ability to make autonomous choices — to determine your own beliefs, independent of parents, peers, and society. To live confidently, courageously, and hopefully.”

Now, he argues, “Only the commercial purpose now survives as a recognized value. Even the cognitive purpose, which one would think should be the center of a college education, is tolerated only insofar as it contributes to the commercial.” The result, according to Deresiewicz, is that universities ostensibly dedicated to the development of deep critical thinking skills are increasingly functioning as “parallel colleges,” where the true focus is on internships, institutes, entrepreneurship, and vocational disciplines.

From “Honors Education: A Parallel College?”, by Joel Hunter, Ph.D.

Among the disputed points, Dereciewicz argues that the development of a “parallel curriculum” and “parallel college” is symptomatic of higher education’s abandoning its traditional mission to develop in its students “the ability to think and live” for both personal and public enrichment, and instead reorganizing the function of education around neoliberal aims and purposes. I described in my earlier post why I think this analysis is flawed. In this addendum, I will focus on one example of why we should be hopeful rather than alarmed about some of these “parallel” initiatives: the growth in numbers of and accessibility to public Honors programs and colleges.

Honors programs arose in the 1920s and 30s as “Great Books” programs in private colleges. These programs were developed by a group of academics who sought to (re)introduce the liberal arts tradition as the center of American higher education, thus broadening what they viewed as a too-narrow specialization that had emerged in response to the growing economy and culture of industrial scale manufacturing in the late nineteenth century. The growth of the early Honors programs stalled during World War II, the immediate post-war period, and during the Korean War. The launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union spurred unprecedented federal investment in higher education and reinvigorated the growth of Honors programs.

Honors colleges are an even more recent phenomenon. According to the National Collegiate Honors Council NCHC), a survey of their member institutions showed that of those responding, 60 percent of Honors colleges had been established since 1994. And 80 percent of those had evolved from an earlier Honors program. As of May 2015, there were nearly 200 Honors programs and colleges in the U.S. (NCHC guide). The period of this historical development coincides with the very period Deresiewicz claims that neoliberal values appear triumphant. If he were right that higher education has been debased to a mere instrumental good since the 1960s, the rise and growth of these humanistic, interdisciplinary, “Great Ideas” and “Great Books” programs should not have occurred over that same period. Honors programs and colleges express their mission in the very terms that Deresiewicz thinks has all but disappeared in the age of Reagan, Walker, “Third Way” DLC Democrats, and Obama: learning how to think critically and independently, developing an individual’s personal and intellectual welfare, and creating self-governing citizens with a sense of social responsibility, capable of pursuing the common good and sustaining a democratic society.

Thriving Honors education at public institutions all over the country – Macaulay at City University of New York, Western Kentucky University, the University of Alabama, the University of Florida, Michigan State University, the University of Cincinnati, UCLA, and the University of Arizona – constitutes a substantial counterexample to Deresiewicz’s dire view of the current and future states of liberal arts education.

[Quoting Ted Humphrey, founding Dean, ASU Barrett Honors College]: “For a number of complex reasons, I came to think of it in terms of the habits of mind we were engendering by emphasizing the importance of the Great Books tradition. This perspective makes the reason for focusing on the Great Books the development of specific intellectual dispositions, most importantly, the abilities to read, think, and discuss core issues of human experience analytically and disinterestedly. Further, the Great Books are models of good and effective writing. Although the Great Books provide invaluable insight into human nature and values, into the reasons for and goals of social existence, they are yet more valuable as examples of those habits of mind that give rise to humanity’s self-understanding and attempts to progress to a more fulfilled state. Thus, it seems to me, honors education is better served by taking the Great Books as paradigms of certain habits of mind than as the particular repositories of human wisdom that all must master.”

If a public institution of higher education is committed to serving highly qualified students able to undertake rigorous course work, then the challenge becomes organizing the college under an inclusive conception of honors education.

This task consists of three parts: first, to attract and bring together identifiable cohorts of able and ambitious students who commit themselves to the project of becoming educated members of a democratic society; second, to help them understand that they are pursuing an education for life, citizenship, and career, in that order; and third, to create a set of curricular and co-curricular opportunities that can provide such an education, that is, to organize the resources of the university for those students’ benefit. In sum, the honors dean’s job is to provide the campus with cohorts of superb students and to make sure the campus opens its resources to them.

Given that this precise effort has been duplicated in dozens and now hundreds of public colleges and universities, a handful of which I listed above, we may well ask how Deresiewicz overlooked the phenomenon of Honors education in his article. For it seems to embody the very values he applauds as a “real” education, a vanguard against neoliberal values and ideology. Perhaps Honors education is insufficiently committed to inclusiveness or egalitarian values insofar as it is confined to a particular population in the university, and for whom the university establishes a “parallel college.” Is Honors education elitist?

The answer is, “Could be.” Honors programs and colleges are, by their very nature, selective. They exist in part to enable the academically bright young adults to flourish in a curriculum that often includes Socratic seminars, enrichment opportunities in their disciplinary courses, and access to independent study and projects with faculty eager to engage in “the vigorous intellectual dialogue you get to have with vibrant young minds.” My experience has been that many Honors students “will seek you out to talk about ideas in an open-ended way” and “care deeply about thinking and learning,” just like their most dedicated faculty.

Does the selective admissions process for Honors programs and colleges institutionalize systemic elitism? Do such programs create an academic upper class, diverting resources and opportunities away from the lower tier underclass, a 99% left outside the gates of the Honors community? This is a serious concern, especially for public institutions of higher education, who are commissioned to serve all of the citizens of a state and contribute to the commonweal. Can the danger of elitism and exclusivity be avoided or overcome? Let’s consider this objection.

An elite enjoys privileges difficult or impossible to obtain by the general population. Having different access to advantages and resources than the masses, elites live and work on an uneven playing field. At a public college or university, if funding and resources are unequally transferred to special cohorts or schools, that appears to be fundamentally at odds with the mission of public institution that exists to serve the public good rather than the private good of particular individuals. The benefits of the education underwritten by the citizens of a state are not (or should not be) prioritized by the good that is served to individuals, but to the common good. Since Honors education is organized in such a way as to benefit a small percentage of the student population, it seems that such programs are illegitimate and inconsistent with public supported higher education.

This objection demands an answer. Is it legitimate to divert revenue obtained from one large group of students to benefit a smaller group of students? Yes, sometimes this disproportionate allocation is a legitimate response to serve the overall public good. Funding diversions are recognized and routinely practiced for students with documented disabilities and students for whom English is not their first language. Disability resource centers and intensive English language programs exist to make a college education attainable for all citizens, including those with special needs. Additional services, such as tutoring and accommodations for attending and participating in amateur sports, are provided for athletes. If institutions of public education are obligated to support each individual’s need to fully realize their potential, then differential support from the public treasury is necessary. Are Honors students one of those populations with special needs? Yes, I believe so, and for two reasons.

Honors students are comparable to athletes. Competitive amateur sports in college have been recognized for over one hundred years as a means for enabling able and ambitious students to pursue their physical development, which, unless we take a disembodied view of the student, is a legitimate component of their full potential. Students admitted into Honors programs are the academic athletes of the college or university. If sport athletes are a population of students who require support to meet their special needs, then Honors students are as well. It is clearly a legitimate special allocation of resources to develop “appropriately conceived and rigorous course work for able and ambitious students.” If the analogy with athletes holds, then able and ambitious students are one of the university’s diverse, special needs populations.

The second reason Honors students are a group with special needs in a public institution of higher education is related to the first. The reason institutions of public education are obligated by charter or institutional values to support each individual’s need to fully realize their potential is bound up with the point of education itself. Education refines the individual, nurtures creativity, and contributes to the overall commonweal of the state by the general effect of conviviality encouraged within the institution’s society. By these means public education equips students to contribute more fully and richly to the economic and cultural welfare of civil society. If Honors students are not provided with an appropriate level of course work and academic challenge, the public would be impeding its own economic and cultural development by handicapping some of its brightest citizens from achieving their full potential. Whatever private benefits accrue to students provided with accommodations, and the student with a documented disability, the athlete, and the Honors student all surely do, states have long recognized that legitimate justification for reallocating resources to meet these students’ special needs is the important contribution they make to the public good.

Contrary to Deresiewicz’s claim, public Honors education is not a parallel curriculum developed by students for careerist aims or institutions for neoliberal aims. The values underpinning Honors programs are not “encased in neoliberal assumptions,” based on meritocracy, or “generating a caste system.” On the contrary, my own experience, and the experience of thousands of faculty members who teach Honors students speak to the very principle that Deresiewicz thinks has all but disappeared: the “counterbalancing institutions” that advance a set of values in deep tension with, and at important points in opposition to, neoliberalism. He asks “What is to be done?” For starters:

1. Develop and encourage Honors education at all public colleges and universities, including community colleges.
2. Establish broad-based faculty support for Honors education, particularly in institutions with strong professional and technical colleges.
3. Ensure equal access to Honors education by not levying fees or required student expenses over and above those already assessed by the broader institution.

Deresiewicz says that the fundamental problem with efforts to push back against neoliberal education “is that we no longer believe in public solutions.” He says “[w]e only believe in market solutions, or at least private-sector solutions.” I do not know who this “we” is, because when I consider the growing movement of public Honors education, I see a strong commitment to a public solution. It may not solve the problems in private higher education, but the residential Honors college developed in public universities has been exported and adapted to some of the most prestigious of private institutions as well. “Real” education, contrary to Deresiesicz’s false alarm, is readily available to all students in this country, in spite of social and political forces that may wish to suppress it.

William and Mary Creates an Inclusive Path to “Highest Honors”

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The William and Mary Scholars Undergraduate Research Experience: Excellence with a Mind Towards Equity, by Anne H. Charity Hudley, Cheryl Dickter, and Hannah Franz of The College of William and Mary. ahchar@wm.edu

Editor’s Note: On other pages, we note that the College of William and Mary, like UC Berkeley, does not have a separate honors college. The entire college could be considered an “honors” experience given the relatively small size of the undergraduate population and the record of high achievement that every student brings to the campus. But while other public institutions pursue an honors path that to some extent separates honors students from non-honors students, especially during the first two years of study, the William and Mary Scholars Program seeks out students who can benefit from more inclusiveness and participation. Read more from the authors, below….

In 2014, U.S. News & World Report listed the College of William and Mary as the top public institution with a strong commitment to undergraduate teaching. In 2013, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported that William and Mary had the smallest gap between white and black students’ graduation rates of all public institutions.

From 2003-2013, William and Mary has been successful in increasing the diversity of our undergraduate student body, growing from 14% students of color in 2001 to 30% today, including 7.1% Black or African American students and 9.1% Hispanic/Latin students. One contributor to this achievement is the William and Mary Scholars Award. This award was established in 2002, and uses institutional resources to provide over forty in-state merit scholarships per enrolling class to academically distinguished students who have overcome unusual adversity and/or are members of groups who contribute to campus diversity.

In addition to academic merit, the selection process for William and Mary Scholars takes into account consideration of diversity, adversity and financial need. The William and Mary Scholars Award has been successful in drawing outstanding students to the College of William and Mary. In the past five years, two of the five Ann Callahan Chappell Award winners for the most outstanding Phi Beta Kappa initiate at The College of William and Mary were African-American women who were William and Mary Scholars.

By taking into account both academic achievement and the lingering impact of educational inequality, William and Mary is able to address Frank Bruni’s observation–that “honors colleges in some ways replicate, within a public school, the kind of stratified, status-conscious dynamic at play in the hierarchy of private schools”–by attracting strong students without furthering the divide. (The Bruni column was generally supportive of honors colleges.)

In order to fully support students chosen for the scholarship and to provide even greater access for students who are historically underrepresented, The William and Mary Scholars Undergraduate Research Experience (WMSURE) was created in 2010. This program provides formalized mentoring, programming, and increased research opportunities in order to nurture the academic skills and leadership potential of all students at the College of William and Mary, particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds. While the program supports the William and Mary Scholars, it is not exclusive to only them.

WMSURE provides weekly workshops and comprehensive advising and mentoring on a regular basis, all of which engage scholars throughout all four years of their college experience. The program has several unique features when compared to honors programs at other universities.

First, the program is led by tenured faculty with noted reputations for research excellence, which provides students with consistent advising and mentoring relationships with faculty at the college who are knowledgeable about many different areas of academic achievement and can help to demystify the academy for the scholars.

Second, the program is also personalized around each student’s academic and professional goals, with a focus on finding the right resources for each student based on their individual research and academic interests.

Finally, WMSURE is research-based, in that data are consistently collected regarding students’ academic and personal needs to ensure that appropriate programming and services are provided and to measure academic and social success and challenges. Our evidence shows that prior to the creation of WMSURE, underrepresented students were less informed about research at William and Mary, were less likely to engage in research, and were less likely to have a mentor.

Today on our campus, students who participate in WMSURE are more likely to engage in research, more likely to consider graduate school, feel more supported, are more likely to have an articulated mentor, and are more likely to feel supported in their academic endeavors.

What Students Face

Underrepresented students face multiple challenges which may affect their access to academic success upon arriving on campus, including solo status, stereotype threat, impostor syndrome, colorism, and microaggressions. In WMSURE, we address these challenges for underrepresented scholars in the academy. In particular, we detail how such experiences can negatively impact academic performance, self-esteem, overall well-being, and sense of belonging. Then, we give students multiple tools for use in confronting challenges in a comprehensive manner that attends to both academic and social needs. We have an emphasis on community-based learning and using research for the public good.

The Office of Admissions makes decisions about the William and Mary Scholar Award. But we tell students: If you receive a William and Mary Scholarship award, you should be proud of your accomplishments and all that you bring to the William and Mary community. But we also recognize that achievements in high school and standardized test scores do not even begin to tell your story. What makes you WMSURE? You do. The fact that you are here at William and Mary, one of the top ten public universities in the country makes you WMSURE. How do you become part of WMSURE? You just have to show up!

And show up they do. We see between 20-40 people at our weekly workshops, and just as many appear in WMSURE faculty office hours, in lab meetings, in dress rehearsals, and in other campus activities.

Our inclusive approach mitigates the gatekeeper effect and under-matching—students who could have been in honors or more challenging courses, or at a magnet school—but were not referred or declined to attend them because they received inaccurate or incomplete information.

WMSURE students have published with faculty, written honors theses, presented at national and international conferences, and contributed to books, including the book Highest Honors that is being written by WMSURE program chairs Anne Charity Hudley and Cheryl Dickter, along with graduate assistant Hannah Franz, so that more students may be privy to the insights of the undergraduate hidden curriculum, the unwritten and often unintended lessons that students learn in college.

Highest Honors: A Guide to Undergraduate Research prepares students for undergraduate research in college. The text is designed to help students take full advantage of the academic resources and experiences that the university setting has to offer so that students will actively be on the path to achieving highest honors/summa cum laude. The book is designed to appeal to all first and second year college students and as such, has a specific focus on the experiences of students who are underrepresented in the academy. Highest Honors provides students with detailed research-based tools that will prepare them for the social and academic transition from high school classes to college research.

The Issue of “Elitism” in Honors Colleges and Programs

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It is close to a given that whenever the subject of public university honors programs receives widespread attention in the media, many comments from readers point to the alleged unfairness–the “elitism”–of such programs. Some readers, understandably, lament the disproportionate allocation of resources to a relatively small number of students, arguing that the resources should benefit all students.

Comments along these lines appeared most recently in response to Frank Bruni’s New York Times column on honors programs. The opening of the new Honors Living/Learning Residence at Rutgers Honors College likewise brought forth the expression of similar views.

First, as to the basic charge of elitism, the term clearly applies if it is used to characterize the official membership of highly qualified students in honors colleges and programs. In general, they are among the top 5-10 percent of the entire student body, based on high school gpa’s and standardized test scores.

Second, it is true that specific components of honors programs, especially honors “benefits,” serve to set honors students apart from the overall student body. Prominent among these benefits are special honors dorms and one form or another of priority registration for honors students. (But some honors programs, most notably those at UW Madison, do not provide separate housing because of a conscious effort to avoid charges of elitism.)

Third, all honors programs offer smaller class sections to their students, especially during the first and second years of study. In order to provide these sections, academic departments must sacrifice “production” ratios in the interest of staffing these smaller classes.

If Professor A normally teaches three sections of microeconomics, each with an enrollment of 100, and then replaces one of these with an honors section of 20 students, the production ratios of both Professor A and the econ department are a little less impressive in the provost’s eyes. The emphasis on “productivity” in public universities has become a sort of mantra in the eyes of many critics of state universities, many of them on the political right.

After conceding the above, the justification of special treatment actually depends on  (1) whether public honors programs yield sufficient benefit to the whole university to warrant the emphasis they receive; (2) whether their target audience–honors students–really deserves special support, as do other groups (athletes, under-represented ethnic and geographical groups, low-income students, first-generation students, students requiring remedial classes); (3) whether the state and region benefit enough from the continuing presence of honors students; and (4) whether honors programs fill a need by providing slots for high-achieving students, in the absence of a sufficient number of places at, well, elite colleges.

The fact is, many honors colleges and programs allow motivated and proven non-honors students to take honors classes. As former Penn State Schreyer Dean Christian Brady wrote in a recent article on this site, honors can be a “gateway” to transfer and non-honors students who find, after their first year or two in college, that they want to embrace greater challenges. (Dr. Brady is now Dean of the new Lewis Honors College at the University of Kentucky.)

Similarly, the University of Georgia’s Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities, though under the banner of the school’s outstanding honors program, actually serves any undergraduate who wants to join in the excitement and promise of undergrad research. Another excellent program, Honors Carolina at UNC Chapel Hill, invites non-honors students with a strong academic record to participate in honors classes.

Dr. Jeffrey Chamberlain, Dean of the Hicks Honors College at the University of North Florida, agrees with Dean Brady that “Honors raises the game for the whole university. I am told repeatedly how good it is to have Honors students in non-Honors classes (and Honors students never take all of their classes in Honors).  Furthermore, Honors students help non-Honors students in every imaginable way—Honors students are math and science tutors, writing consultants, even RAs, so they contribute to student success across the board.” And, by the way, at a savings to the university.

Some states, such as South Carolina and Alabama, look to honors colleges to attract bright students to the state–and to keep such students from leaving the state to attend college. Avoiding a brain drain from a state or a region is, in its own way, an effort to maintain equity and to support and sustain the state’s economy.

Finally, what should a student do if there is a shortage of places at highly selective colleges and the student has the same credentials as those who are lucky enough to enter the selective schools? We have shown that, despite what some observers claim, there really are not enough places in public and private colleges for all the brightest students in this nation. Is it not fair–equitable, even–to provide places in public honors programs?

Honors News is a regular (not always daily) update, in brief, of recent news from honors colleges/programs and from the world of higher ed. Occasionally, a bit of opinion enters the discussion. These brief posts are by John Willingham, unless otherwise noted.

The New Yorker on the Real Value of a College Education

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The title of New Yorker writer John Cassidy’s insightful article in the September 7 issue of the magazine is College Calculus–What Is the Real Value of a College Education? The use of the word “calculus” is more than a nod to the subject many college students dread; it is also an accurate term for the subtlety and complexity facing students and parents as they try to sort out what makes the increasingly expensive college experience worthwhile.

Cassidy describes the evolution of concepts that have defined the value of a college degree.  Once upon a time a degree, in almost any subject, from almost any college, was a “signal” of achievement, the degree itself providing sufficient entree to a broad range of vocations as well as to widespread respect in society.

Then came the concept of “human capital,” a term defining the instrumental value of a degree. The more one learned in a discipline with vocational promise, the more one’s “capital” increased.

But how does either term apply now in a nation where about half of the citizens aged 25 to 34 possess some form of college credential? The “signal,” once loud and clear, has become attenuated as it has spread. And even the idea of human capital, still ascendant, is subject to the whims of a world economy in which today’s dream vocation is tomorrow’s robotic solution. Added to this is the demand by employers for the lowest cost employees, with the most recent take on what is sure to be a passing bit of expertise. We want you now, they say, knowing that once your moment has passed–or your pay has risen–you will be gone.

The signal that the degree now conveys for all too many graduates is that they are likely to be more employable than people without degrees for jobs that in fact…do not require a degree.

Are there exceptions? Yes, but they are reassuring to only a few. Graduates of the most prestigious colleges still carry a strong signal to employers and the world. Is this because the graduates are in fact better educated, more articulate–or just more efficient cognitive machines?

Citing the work of Lauren Rivera of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, Cassidy writes that the “recruiters didn’t pay much attention to things like grades and majors.” Instead, as Rivera says, “It was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige.”

So prestige alone works if a student can get into a college that rejects 80-95 percent of its applicants, with about three-fourths of those rejected applicants actually possessing the requisite ability to succeed at those institutions. And this at a time when many colleges gin up the number of applicants to they will look more selective by rejecting almost all of them.

No wonder many parents and students opt for the seemingly safer “human capital” approach. Cassidy writes that Peter Cappelli of Penn’s Wharton School is skeptical about this concept of value, too, his work showing that only about a fifth of recent STEM grads find jobs in their fields.

“The evidence for recent grads suggests clearly that there is no overall shortage of STEM jobs,” Cappelli said. (Here we should add that most engineering grads are, for the time being, much more in demand than “overall” STEM degree holders, many of whom have degrees in biological sciences.)

Faced with this situation, even students among “the talented tenth” need to plan very carefully. With no pretense of capturing the calculus of Cassidy’s informative piece, we argue that students should develop what we will call, inelegantly, “differentiators.” Unable to win the lottery of gaining admission to a super prestigious college, where the signals are a legacy to grads who may or may not be individually deserving, students can still develop a formula for developing real, lasting skills and knowledge that might make them more balanced and successful in their lives. In the end, the seeming disadvantage of not gaining the automatic cred of a degree from Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Virginia, or Yale could turn into an array of advantages, all of them earned.

  • Go to the best public or private college that you can afford, really afford.
  • If there is an honors college or extensive honors program, apply.
  • If you are an engineering or tech major, regard the liberal arts, sciences, and social sciences as critical elements in your development.
  • If you are a humanities or social/behavioral science major, regard math and the sciences as critical elements in your development.
  • Give serious thought to pursuing a minor that contributes to your personal growth or provides more career potential.
  • Take advantage of seminars and discussions. Learn to think about what you say, understand and accept criticism, and anticipate arguments against your own.
  • Pursue an honors option that includes a thesis or a capstone project. It’s more work, but that’s the point. They are hard evidence of persistence, depth, and sophistication. They are “signals.”

At the end of his article, Cassidy quotes Cappelli, the Wharton scholar, and the quote is worth remembering:

“To be clear, the idea is not that there will be a big financial payoff to a liberal arts degree,” Cappelli writes. “It is that there is no guarantee of a payoff from very practical, work-based degrees either, yet that is all those degrees promise. For liberal arts, the claim is different and seems more accurate, that it will enrich your life and provide lessons that extend beyond any individual job. There are centuries of experience providing support for that notion.”

Honors News is a regular (not always daily) update, in brief, of recent news from honors colleges/programs and from the world of higher ed. Occasionally, a bit of opinion enters the discussion. These brief posts are by John Willingham, unless otherwise noted.