Two big topics today, one about why be educated and what education is supposed to amount to--about strategy, in some sense; and then, second, about how education may proceed--about the tactics, as it were.  I'll do them in two posts.  First on the why:

Here's a nice piece on my friend and old colleague Johann Neem, an American historian who has begun to have a second career as a theorist of the point of higher education, and who has just published What's the Point of College? Seeking Purpose in an Age of Reform (Johns Hopkins University Press).  He says:

"If the purpose of college is to create more insightful generally educated people curious about the world, the benefits of that education are real (for the individual and our country) no matter what job a person chooses to do." 

What he says about the "Yoga option" is interesting too--and I think a lot of people are opting for that instead.  I actually think that things like The Great Courses and the whole MOOC rush are trying to fill this gap in a financially profitable way.  I don't begrudge them their success (I'm not that much of a hypocrite), I just wish we had more people in full-on non-profit higher education thinking about how to meet this need.  It's a need, people!  And we can help others, and further explain the power of what we do.  For people seek the kind of transformation that liberal education can promote, and that it can promote in a way no other cultural practice can do so.  Or so I think.

That raises the question: how can we measure that change?  And here, on another front, I see that Richard Arum, co-author of Academically Adrift, a big splash book on higher ed and the failure of students to learn anything, is doing a larger study of "college learning outcomes" than the one on which that book was based.  This will be a good thing, since I'm share the view of a lot of people who have studied this issue a lot more carefully than me, that the reception of Academically Adrift was distorted into "everything is horrible" and also that the book itself actually was making some large claims based on a very slender data foundation.  

While it's easy to be defensive on this (at least it's easy for me), I think that Arum's aims here are wholly admirable, and everyone in higher ed should care deeply about "outcomes," if we can properly identify what they are.  I understand that that language has been weaponized in bad ways by bad actors, but I also think that if we don't have some palpable effect on our students, it's not clear what we're in this business to do.  I mean, everyone who teaches today was pushed into this vocation by being reached by professors of an earlier generation, and many of those who look back fondly on their college years are not looking back on those years because of the keggers, but because of those moments, those classes, those teachers, when their horizons were dramatically expanded.  I'm not being a starry eyed romantic when I say this--we all know these things happen.  And none of us should be indifferent to any help we can find in figuring out how to make them happen more often, and to more of our students.  

Just consider this--we're only a century or so into this idea that higher ed can be a decisive factor in shaping everybody's lives, not just the pre-certified elite; if we can make this dream more real, we should do so.  We've all already dedicated our lives to it, by the way; we should want all the knowledge about how to do this well that we can gather.  If we believe in the vision that Neem propounds, I think we should welcome sincere efforts of the sort that Arum proposes.