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   Whatever Happened To Undergraduate Reform?
By Theodore J. Marchese

In 2000 I left my post at the American
Association for Higher Education (AAHE) and the
Change editorship to become a search consultant.
This year, hoping to catch up with the issues of
undergraduate reform I've cared deeply about
throughout my career, I signed up for several
higher education conferences. I heard smart
presenters talk about the importance of general
education, the necessity of assessment, the
imperatives of diversity, the need for civic
education. What I seldom heard was anything I
hadn't heard back in the '90s. It felt as though
time had stood still. Since then, I've been
asking colleagues: Whatever happened to
undergraduate reform? Has that effort, once so
vigorous and far-reaching, run out of new things
to say? Has it stalled? Did it die?

The final two decades of the last century-the
'80s and '90s-were a remarkable period for
innovation in undergraduate education. In the
prior two decades, huge gains in access to higher
education spawned institutions swollen in size,
often with less well prepared student bodies. A
new generation of faculty and administrators saw
that old routines of "tell 'em and test 'em" just
didn't work anymore. Many of our newest entrants
were being "chilled" out of the system;
completion rates stalled; the National Assessment
of Educational Progress showed how underprepared
college graduates were.

The search for better ways was fueled by a series
of reports that came out in the mid-'80s, notably
those from the National Governors Association
(Time for Results) and the National Institute of
Education (Involvement in Learning), buttressed
by Ernest Boyer's widely read book, College.
"Accountability for results" became an issue, and
by 1988 several states and all accreditors were
insisting on assessment.

Many of higher education's earlier waves of
reform had focused on curricular issues, on what
should be taught. But the new reformers by and
large ignored curriculum and went to what they
considered the heart of the matter, the how of
teaching and learning. A host of pedagogies, new
and old, sprang to the fore, including
collaborative learning, problem-based learning,
case-method teaching, classroom assessment,
competency-based education, service learning, and
undergraduate research. Capstone courses,
freshman-year programs, living-learning units,
leadership learning, peer tutoring and
supplemental instruction, writing and math across
the curriculum, and technology-assisted
instruction all flourished. To prompt reflection
and metacognition, student journals and
portfolios were introduced. Teaching for
"critical thinking" and "problem-solving" became
a mantra. Half the universities in the country
set up teaching and learning centers. Important
new ideas-the scholarship of teaching, the ethic
of continuous improvement-emerged. New tools like
the National Survey of Student Engagement and the
electronic portfolio were introduced. In 2000,
the National Academy of Sciences published a
landmark report, How People Learn, lending
support to those who would make learning the
centerpiece of teaching. There were so many
mini-movements that their partisans were all but
in competition with one another for faculty time
and administrative support.

Fueling these movements was a massive infusion of
foundation dollars, especially from Pew, Kellogg,
and Atlantic Philanthropies. By the late '90s,
these foundations were pumping tens of millions
of dollars into various projects designed to
improve undergraduate education. Every innovation
seemed to garner foundation support or a FIPSE
grant, which meant that it had champions funded
to spread its message, newsletters and Web sites,
demonstration campuses, workshops and retreats,
even now and then some research. Organizations
like AAHE and the Association of American
Colleges and Universities played important roles
in spreading the word through their publications
and conferences. In short, there was almost no
way not to hear about portfolios and capstones
and service learning-and, of course, assessment.
The improvement of undergraduate education seemed
on a roll, bursting with energy and new ideas.

*******

So, what happened? The short version is that the
sponsoring foundations withdrew from higher
education grantmaking (and FIPSE got overwhelmed
by earmarks). Compounding that, AAHE-it, too, had
been a major recipient of foundation monies-lost
those monies, entertained other agendas, and
eventually went out of business, wiping out a
major platform for undergraduate reform. The
events of 9/11 certainly had a chilling effect on
optimism for reform. Or perhaps you believe (I
don't) that all these innovations went through an
inevitable cycle of rise and fall and, in the
end, were fads.

This is not to say that important work on
undergraduate reform has ceased-far from it.
Those teaching and learning centers are still
there, technology continues to drive course
redesign, the Freshman Year Experience people
just attracted 1,700 to a 25th anniversary
conference in Atlanta, FIPSE is back in business,
and assessment is more rooted than ever. The
point, again, is not that good things are not
happening but that, for whatever combination of
reasons, new ideas now seem in short supply. Take
assessment, for example. Go to a conference
session on the topic these days or listen to the
buzz around the National Commission on the Future
of Higher Education, and you'll hear people
announcing insights that were old news a decade
ago. The education press reports as ever on
legislative battles, policy proposals, campus
scandals-but seldom these days does it find
anything to report about developments in the
classroom. For many readers, out of sight becomes
out of mind and the imperatives for undergraduate
reform fade from view.

What's at stake? Does this matter? Does it matter
that university completion rates are 44 percent
and slipping? That just 10 percent from the
lowest economic quartile attain a degree? That
figures released this past winter show huge
chunks of our graduates who cannot comprehend a
New York Times editorial or their own checkbook?
That frustrated public officials edge closer and
closer to imposing a standardized test of college
outcomes? Does it matter that we look to our
publics like an enterprise more eager for status
and funding than self-inquiry and improvement?

*******

All of this may have a bit of the elephant about
it-the one the blind men see so differently
depending on where they lay their hands. The fact
is, it's hard to know for sure where we are with
undergraduate reform, hard even to know what
evidence would assess our progress. But of this
I'm sure: Any industry-be it computer chips or
potato chips, airlines or banking or
healthcare-needs a constant bubble of questioning
and innovation to stay fresh and move ahead. When
our absolute core function-undergraduate teaching
and learning-runs on yesterday's ideas, it runs
on empty. Good as yesterday's ideas may be, I
fear we are not asking hard, new questions about
that function, producing new intellectual
capital, and hatching new idea champions.

So I present the reader with these questions: Is
the hypothesis correct? Are we indeed lacking new
ideas? Have undergraduate reform efforts stalled?
If so, what would it take to change that?

______________________________

Theodore J. Marchese is a senior consultant with
Academic Search Consultation Service. He
previously served as vice president of American
Association for Higher Education (AAHE) and
editor of Change magazine.