Higher Education Curriculum

During the 1980s and 1990s critics and advocates of U.S. higher education issued numerous reports calling for reform of the college and university curriculum. These reports–from individuals, panels of experts assembled by federal agencies, educational lobbying organizations, and private foundations–responded to changes in postsecondary curricula implemented in the 1960s as the baby boom generation swelled college and university enrollments; and as the civil rights movement, the women's liberation movement, and Vietnam War protests led to demands for more relevant and student-centered curricula.

As the era of economic prosperity that fueled the educational innovations of the 1960s ended, a number of social and political forces converged to produce a climate conducive to calls for reform of the undergraduate curriculum. Then the economic recession of the 1970s focused the attention of businesses, students, and parents on employment prospects for graduates and the marketability of a college degree. A downward trend in college admission test scores and related concerns about a decline in U.S. economic competitiveness resulted in calls for higher educational standards at elementary, secondary, and postsecondary levels. At the same time, a Republican administration decentralized responsibility for educational expenditures in an effort to hold the states more accountable for educational improvements, and legislators committed to cost-effectiveness trimmed allocations to higher education.

In 1983 concerns about the widespread public perception of problems in the U.S. educational system were the impetus for the widely read report, A Nation At Risk (1983), issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. In 1981 Terrel Bell, then U.S. Secretary of Education, directed the commission to examine the quality of education in the United States. Although the commission focused primarily on high school education, selective attention was also paid to higher education, elementary education, and vocational and technical programs. The commission's findings regarding decreases in high school students' preparation for college, declines in standardized college admission test scores and college selectivity, and general concerns about the quality of elementary and secondary education raised concerns about the impact of these problems on undergraduate education. Secretary Bell, and his successor, William Bennett, encouraged further scrutiny of college and university education and prompted calls for accountability at the postsecondary level.

An Emphasis on Curricular Content

The reports on higher education of the 1980s and 1990s often stressed the need to include specific courses or course content in postsecondary curricula, which had recently experienced a period of experimentation. Acceding to student demands for more choice of majors and elective courses, many colleges and universities in the 1960s and 1970s had relaxed requirements for the baccalaureate degree by reducing the number of required courses needed for graduation and permitting more elective courses–or by increasing the number and kinds of courses that would fulfill the requirements. Additional changes had occurred in major concentration programs, allowing students in many institutions to select from an array of courses to fulfill basic requirements or create majors based on their personal interests. Advances in knowledge and the creation of new disciplines, fields of study, and specializations also contributed significantly to changes in the college curriculum. Increased course options, increasing faculty commitment to advancing their disciplines, and growing departmental autonomy led to curricular fragmentation, while the combination of increased disciplinary specialization and student desire for degrees that would lead directly to employment created conditions conducive to the growth and diversification of postsecondary curricula.

In 1984 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), under the leadership of William Bennett, issued one of the first reports examining higher education. In To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education, Bennett, a former humanities professor, maintained that colleges and universities had lost a clear sense of the purpose of education. Defining the primary goal of education as learning about civilization and culture, he contended that students should study Western literature, history, and culture to obtain an understanding of the origins and development of their civilization and culture, as well as a sense of major trends in art, religion, politics, and society. Few college graduates, he argued, received adequate instruction in their own culture because faculty had succumbed to pressure for enrollments and to intellectual relativism, rather than assume "intellectual authority" for what students should learn (p. 20). Bennett also criticized faculty who taught the humanities in a "tendentious, ideological manner" that overtly valued or rejected particular social stances (p.16). According to advocates of the Western canon such as Bennett, the push for student choice and relevance in the curriculum had backfired, leaving U.S. democracy and society in disarray.

Bennett believed that knowledge of Western civilization and culture should be fostered through careful reading of masterworks of English, American, and European literature. He also recommended that students become familiar with the history, literature, religion, and philosophy of at least one non-Western culture or civilization. Five years later, Bennett's successor at NEH, Lynne Cheney, issued 50 Hours: A Core Curriculum for College Students. Arguing, as did Bennett, that a common core curriculum was essential to a coherent education, Cheney proposed a required curriculum that stressed the study of Western civilization, but also included the study of additional civilizations, foreign languages, science, mathematics, and social sciences.

From Curricular Content to Educational Processes

At the same time that Bennett issued To Reclaim a Legacy, a study group convened by the National Institute of Education (NIE) issued Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of American Higher Education (1984). Rather than prescribe the content of the curriculum, the NIE group recommended that institutions emphasize three conditions of excellence in undergraduate education: (1) student involvement, which would result in improvements in students' knowledge, skills, capacity, and attitudes; (2) high expectations, which must be clearly established and communicated to students; and (3) assessment and feedback, defined as the efficient and cost-effective use of student and institutional resources to realize improvements.

Whereas the reports of Bennett and Cheney emphasized improvements in programs of study and the quality of teaching, Involvement in Learning focused primarily on students and their learning. The report urged faculty and chief academic officers to agree upon and disseminate a statement of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required for graduation, and to systematically assess whether expectations for student learning were met. It contended that individualized and integrated education, learning communities, and the use of active rather than passive instructional processes would foster greater student involvement. Finally, Involvement in Learning called upon undergraduate colleges to expand liberal education requirements to two full years of study, and urged graduate schools to require applicants to have a broad undergraduate education to balance their specialized training.

Higher education associations and other concerned parties issued responses to these federally sponsored calls for reform. All accepted the need to improve liberal or general education and decried the perceived erosion of curricular quality. In 1985 the Association of American Colleges (AAC) published Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to the Academic Community, which described the work of the AAC Project on Redefining the Meaning and Purpose of a Baccalaureate Degree. The AAC committee responsible for the report argued that contemporary students were less well prepared for collegiate study, were more vocationally oriented, and were more materialistic than those in previous generations. The baccalaureate credential, the committee argued, had become more important than the course of study, and colleges and universities had surrendered to the demands of the marketplace rather than developing creative approaches to a changing environment. The report also chided faculty for abdicating their corporate responsibility for the undergraduate curriculum.

In Integrity in the College Curriculum, the AAC claimed that faculty were "more confident about the length of a college education than its content and purpose" and that the major in most institutions was little more than "a gathering of courses taken in one department" (p. 2). The committee identified nine content-related experiences that constitute a "minimum required curriculum." This set of experiences, intended to provide students with the general knowledge, behaviors, and attitudes needed by citizens and workers in the contemporary world, consists of: (1) inquiry (abstract logical thinking and critical analysis); (2) literacy (writing, reading, speaking, and listening skills); (3) understanding numerical data; (4) historical consciousness; (5) the sciences; (6) values; (7) art; (8) international and multicultural experiences; and (9) study in depth (one's major specialization). The AAC urged faculty to take responsibility for designing educational experiences that provided students with a "vision of the good life, a life of responsible citizenship and human decency" (p. 6). The committee also recommended that educational programs help students see the connections among domains of knowledge as well as connections among areas of study, life, and work.

The critique and recommendations that Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation, offered in College: The Undergraduate Experience in America (1987), greatly resemble those of Integrity in the College Curriculum. Boyer noted eight points of tension in the curriculum, including the curriculum itself, the conditions of teaching and learning, and the priorities of the faculty. Boyer argued that vocationalism, intense departmentalism among faculty, the fragmentation of knowledge, and the loss of cultural commonalities and coherence in general, had weakened the undergraduate curriculum.

Boyer asserted that colleges should develop students' proficiencies in reading, writing, and composition, as well as their capacity for social and civic engagement. He recommended a set of general education objectives that emphasized seven areas of inquiry: language, art, heritage, society, nature, ecology, work, and identity. Boyer urged educators to stress the connections among these discipline-driven areas of inquiry, to relate knowledge to life experiences, and to emphasize the application of knowledge beyond college. He discussed the undergraduate major as well, arguing that such specializations should have both an identifiable intellectual content and the capacity to enlarge students' visions of the world. Boyer believed that a coherent educational experience would help students develop as individuals, and would also foster a community of learners.

An emphasis on the quality of student learning experiences in reports issued by AAC, the Carnegie Foundation, and others replaced the focus on programs and good teaching common to the NEH reports. In College, Boyer reasserted the NIE's call for greater student involvement in learning and urged faculty to incorporate active learning techniques in their classrooms. Both Boyer and the AAC included discussions, small group and collaborative projects, out-of-class assignments, and undergraduate research among the active learning strategies that faculty should employ to engage students in the educational process and to convince them to take greater responsibility for their learning. In 1988, in A New Vitality for General Education, a second AAC task force summarized the increasingly shared sentiment that what was taught was likely less important than how it was taught.

The task force responsible for A New Vitality asked faculty to engage students not only as active learners, but to see them as co-inquirers who must become reflective about their own learning. The task group noted that rather than simply suggesting useful teaching techniques, it was redefining teaching: "We propose approaches that make it possible for us to find out not just what our students learn but how they learn it and what motivates them. Informing students about the purposes of our courses and program, obtaining sophisticated feedback from them, and collaborating with them are indispensable activities under this expanded definition of teaching"(p. 39).

Continuing Scrutiny of General Education and the Major

Where Integrity spotlighted the undergraduate course of study in general, A New Vitality examined the rationale, purposes, and scope of general education, as well as issues of implementation. The report eschewed both normative proposals like those of the NEH and the typical distribution requirement system that "sidestepped" important debates about the content of the curriculum and instead offered "a conglomerate of courses conceived along specialized disciplinary lines" (p. 48). A New Vitality argued that general education programs should develop specific competencies and abilities in students, and that these competencies (e.g., critical thinking, problem solving, inquiry in writing) must be grounded in content. The question of what content was suitable for all students, the task group acknowledged, was complicated by the diversity of the student body, which differed by "age, race, sex, social and economic background, abilities, attitudes, ambitions, and goals" (p. 6).

The task group proposed a broad plan for improving general education that included integrating general education throughout the undergraduate years, improving student advising, involving commuter students and improving residential life on campuses, expanding cross-cultural experiences, creating cross-disciplinary seminars for faculty and students, and organizing campus think tanks to explore the issues of undergraduate and general education. The report also called for student involvement in the assessment of general education, and of administrative support for creative efforts toward improvement of general education programs.

The AAC issued a second report on general education in 1994, titled Strong Foundations: Twelve Principles for Effective General Education Programs. This report was based on the experiences of seventeen institutions that had revised their general education curricula. Claiming that flawed conceptions of general education as breadth requirements that merely exposed students to different fields of study needed to be replaced with a new understanding, the report outlined twelve principles focused on communicating the value of general education and fostering support for it among students, faculty, and administration.

Concerns about course requirements and the proper content of general education curricula, however, continued. In 1996 the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a group known for conservative educational ideals, published The Dissolution of General Education: 1914–1993. Based on a study of fifty elite colleges and universities, the report claimed that since 1964, many of the required basic survey courses that taught students about the historical, cultural, political, and scientific foundations of their society had been purged from the curriculum. Course requirements in foreign languages, the sciences, mathematics, history, literature, and philosophy were reduced or virtually eliminated, and students now chose courses from broad and formless distribution categories. As a result of decreases in general education requirements, students were not learning a common core of knowledge.

Another AAC task force focused specifically on the undergraduate major (or study-in-depth). The Challenge of Connecting Learning (1991) presented the results of a three-year review of liberal arts and sciences majors in the context of liberal education. Members of the AAC national advisory committee developed a set of organizing principles that guided the work of disciplinary task forces appointed by twelve participating learned societies. In its charge to the task forces, the committee asked the learned societies to address (1) faculty responsibility for shaping major programs; (2) organizing principles for study-in-depth; (3) processes for integrating learning; and (4) relations between the major and other parts of the undergraduate curriculum. Students, the committee contended, had a right to expect coherent and integrated curricula that addressed and encouraged relationships among subjects of study. Integrity in the College Curriculum urged faculty to help students develop critical perspectives on what they studied and to aid them in connecting what they learned to their lives and to the world of work. Finally, the committee appealed to faculty to create more inclusive communities of learners by reducing barriers to underrepresented students. Abridged reports of the twelve individual task forces were published in Reports from the Fields (1991).

In 1988 a report of the Professional Preparation Network, Strengthening the Ties That Bind: Integrating Undergraduate Liberal and Professional Study, argued that educators could use different plans to achieve similar purposes. A national task force of instructors from liberal arts and professional fields identified ten student outcomes that were common to both professional and liberal arts education, as well as specific outcomes unique to either type of program. The authors hoped that recognition of common purposes might ease tension in the debate between liberal and professional education and provide opportunities to develop proposals for integration.

General Commentaries on the State of Higher Education

A few reports of this era examined higher education in general rather than the undergraduate curriculum specifically, and these reports often included some recommendations for curricular reform. A 1985 Carnegie Foundation Special Report, Higher Education and the American Resurgence, argued that education was essential to the advancement of key national interests. To ensure political, economic, and social health and progress, higher education must produce individuals who can think creatively and act with conviction and concern. A coherent general education program would educate students for civic responsibility. To develop graduates who would think creatively and act responsibly, the report advocated active learning in the classroom and experiences in public service.

In To Secure the Blessings of Liberty (1986), the National Commission on the Role and Future of State Colleges and Universities expressed similar concerns about a constellation of social, political, economic, and educational conditions. According to this report, high dropout rates, poor achievement of underrepresented minority students, adult illiteracy, and the growth of the U.S. underclass jeopardized American society. Thus, the report recommended the integration of experiential and service learning into the undergraduate curriculum in order to expand knowledge about the workplace, cultivate a commitment to the public good, develop students' international perspectives and communications skills through the study of foreign languages and cultures, and improve graduates' abilities to understand science and technology so they could contribute knowledgeably to public discussions. The commission also urged state institutions to provide remedial education.

In 1986 the Education Commission of the States, in an attempt to identify how the states might effectively support improvements in postsecondary education, published Transforming the State Role in Undergraduate Education: Time for a Different View. Noting the challenges facing higher education (including student preparation for a changing society and workforce, diversity, and student involvement), the report recommended student assessment at all levels. The National Governors Association, in its 1986 report, Time for Results, also considered assessment a key to improving undergraduate education, arguing that assessment results should not only be used for improvement but also shared with the public. The recommendations on assessment in To Secure the Blessings of Liberty were more cautious, with the authors advising that assessment be used primarily to enhance program quality rather than as a means to ensure accountability.

In January 1993 four leading private foundations convened a working group to examine the question of what society needed from higher education. The resulting report, An American Imperative: Higher Expectations for Higher Education, echoed concerns about student dropout rates, low educational standards, and credentialing: "The simple fact is that some faculties and institutions certify for graduation too many students who cannot read and write very well, too many whose intellectual depth and breadth are unimpressive, and too many whose skills are inadequate in the face of the demands of contemporary life" (Wingspread Group on Higher Education, p. 1). The report challenged higher education institutions to model the values they taught, to offer students' educations opportunities to experience and reflect on their society, and to include moral and spiritual development among their goals. Furthermore, institutions needed to recommit themselves to student learning by setting higher expectations for learning and by effectively helping students to meet those expectations. Finally, the report urged institutions to align education with the personal, civic, and workplace needs of the twenty-first century. Many of the specific recommendations of the report focused on setting, communicating, and assessing goals and expectations.

The higher education community has responded in different ways to these various reports. Some colleges and universities have used the reports to stimulate discussion about the curriculum on their campuses, while a number of campuses have revised their major and general education programs. It is unclear, however, which of these actions were directly attributable to the calls for reform. The reports also had their critics. Feminists and pluralists disagreed with the NEH recommendations for assuming that a canon of works that all students should study could be identified, and for insisting on a Western humanities curriculum that excluded ideas from individuals of different classes, ethnicities, nationalities, faiths, and gender. Others challenged the ideas that students should passively accept tradition and that liberal education truly served society. For example, Daniel Rossides (1987) claimed that liberal education masked a conservative social agenda focused on preserving the self-interest and power of social elites. According to Rossides, the humanities were no longer relevant because the world they interpreted had disappeared.