Making Higher Education Better
Editorial by Dennis Littky and Jamie Scurry
October 3, 2009
FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIRMAN Ben Bernanke said in a 2008 speech at Harvard that “the best way to improve economic opportunity and to reduce inequality is to increase the educational attainment and skills of American workers.”
The need to revamp higher education is critical. Wildly underreported is the frightening percentage of college students who fail to graduate. It is difficult to meet Chairman Bernanke’s challenge when students cannot finish their intended programs.
The American Enterprise Institute finds that the graduation rate for all students at four-year colleges is dismal — with fewer than 60 percent graduating in six years. Most disturbing is the failure of first-generation college students, whose graduation rate after six years is just 11 percent.
Moreover, businesses are saying that college graduates do not have the 21st Century skills of problem solving, creative thinking and application of knowledge. According to the National Leadership Council for Education & America’s Promise, “63 percent of employers believe that too many recent college graduates do not have the skills they need to succeed in the global economy.” And a majority of employers believe that “only half or fewer recent graduates have the skills and knowledge needed to advance or be promoted in their companies.”
Big Picture Learning has spent 15 years attacking the dropout problem in high schools. Today, we run 80 schools across the United States, and our unique approach has reduced dropout rates significantly. Our schools have delivered a 40-percent better graduation rate than the other public schools in our respective communities.
Our success in transforming high school learning coupled with the critical need to create a more successful college experience for students has driven us to create a better college program.
Last month, we launched College Unbound in Providence — a program designed to harness the goals and passion of first-generation college students to enhance their college and professional work success.
The initial College Unbound campus located in South Providence is in partnership with Roger Williams University. Together, we are working to take the best of the innovation that has developed in higher education. We are leveraging the most successful initiatives at keeping students in school and developing their talents. The students from the first class are being challenged. They began with an intense pre-college program (20-day academic bus trip across America to each student’s hometown) and they now work three days a week in the region’s best companies, where they are challenged to find and explore their academic passions.
Our approach is fundamentally different, and our goal is that no student will fall through the proverbial cracks. Students have a lead professor and a professional adviser assigned to them through their years at College Unbound. They will work to ensure that their academic program, their workplace experience and their passions are aligned.
Cost, which is a major factor for low-income students, is dealt with by putting an emphasis on teaching using talented postdoctoral fellows interested in teaching coupled with business mentors who pay for the students to work with them. Students also participate in work-study to help run the college — i.e., admissions, development, research and curriculum.
The students will not have summers off and will just take off two weeks at Christmas and two weeks during the summer. Their summer work will be done overseas. With 48 weeks per year, the students will graduate in just three years, saving them the cost of a fourth year of college and beating their peers to the workplace.
Our goal is that not only will the students have a much higher graduation rate than their peers, but they will have broad knowledge as well as showing that, as Tom Wagner writes in The Global Achievement Gap, “they have exhibited the skills that our workforce is asking for — i.e., critical thinking, collaboration, leadership, agility, adaptability, initiative, oral and written communication, the ability to analyze information and curiosity.”
In sum, College Unbound is designed to build a better experience, higher completion rate and greater success for students now missing the opportunity. If successful, the benefit to the students, employers and our economy will be powerful.
Dennis Littky is the co-founder and co-director of Big Picture Learning and the Met Center, in Providence. Littky and Jamie Scurry are Co-Directors of College Unbound, a Big Picture Learning Initiative.