A new model of undergrad education!

When I speak with our younger generation, particularly the urban youth, I am more and more inclined to believe that most of today’s students are clearly interested in using higher education merely to prepare for the challenges of lucrative careers.

Some experts see a decline in appreciation of the liberal arts and a heightened materialism among the young. Others see only a cycle in ever-shifting student interests.

There is merit in both of those explanations, but I do not believe that any of them gets to the core of the matter. What we are seeing is something much more important than a periodic zigzag of student interest. The trend suggests that traditional forms of undergraduate education are failing to meet important educational needs.

A common complaint among employers is that most of the public university graduates lack the clarity of purpose and practical skills to cope efficiently with the demands and responsibilities of the workplace.

That is why 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 would call that new model “practice-oriented” education.

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 medical, engineering, architecture, health care, or business.

Even students in some professional programs, 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, most of the key professional fields 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 professional subjects remains wide and deep, and only the most enterprising students find ways to bridge it. Ironically, many fields of study have become more and more theoretical, with the result that large portions of their curricula are disconnected from the world of practice.

At least, one reason for this “disaster” is obvious. Many arts and commerce 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.

They tend to follow a dogma of withdrawal from the practical world, and thus, programs that linked classroom learning and practical experience were scarce, marginal, and experimental. That has been true in many fields of liberal arts study.

The premise of the practice-oriented education that I recommend 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.

IT students, 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.

The logical and deductive reasoning skills thus gained will 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.

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.

One does not expect a doctor to practice medicine without practical experience, and law practice is no different. I believe now we should be heading for a closer integration of skills training with graduate education.

As we move in this direction, it should come as no surprise that the tools of technology not only enhance our ability to deliver skills training in the campus but also provide the potential for allowing students working in remote locations to tie their experiences into an online classroom experience.

Practice-oriented education requires better methods of education-delivery than the traditional classroom bounded by four walls. The university dons are uniquely placed to push the authorities forward in that direction.