Date: Thu, 6 Jan 1994 11:27:23 -0800 To: acstaff From: jpl AN AMERICAN IMPERATIVE: Higher Expectations for Higher Education An Open Letter to Those Concerned about the American Future Report of the Wingspread Group on Higher Education ------------------------------------------------------------------------ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Wingspread Group on Higher Education An American Imperative ISBN 0-9639160-0-9 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 93-061441 1. Education, Higher--United States. COPYRIGHT (C) 1993 BY THE JOHNSON FOUNDATION, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FIRST EDITION ------------------------------------------------------------------------ An electronic version of the report of the Wingspread Group on Higher Education is available on INTERNET through anonymous ftp at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. To locate the report, ftp to csd4.csd.uwm.edu, change directory to pub/wingspread/report.txt. If you have questions, call 414-229-6151 or send E-mail to [h--p] at [csd4.csd.uwm.edu.] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Reproduction of this entire document for non-commercial purposes is encouraged. Partial or commercial reproduction requires prior permission in writing from The Johnson Foundation, Inc., except that Appendix A may be reproduced separately and as a whole without permission. (C) 1993, The Johnson Foundation, Inc. Wingspread and the Wingspread design are federally registered service marks of the Johnson Foundation, Inc., and may be used only with the foundation's permission. To order a published copy of the complete report, call 414-554-2434 or write: The Johnson Foundation, Inc. P.O. Box 2029 Racine, WI 53404. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Members of the Wingspread Group on Higher Education Patricia Aburdene Author Megatrends, Limited Gilbert F. Amelio President and Chief Executive Officer National Semiconductor Corporation Michael E. Baroody President National Policy Forum William E. Brock Chairman The Brock Group, Ltd. Martha Layne Collins President St. Catharine College Robben W. Fleming President Emeritus University of Michigan Mitchell S. Fromstein Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Manpower, Incorporated Roger W. Heyns Retired President The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Robert H. McCabe President Miami-Dade Community College District Constance Berry Newman Under Secretary The Smithsonian Institution Sr. Joel Read President Alverno College Albert Shanker President American Federation of Teachers Peter Smith Dean, School of Education and Human Development The George Washington University Adrienne K. Wheatley Student, John F. Kennedy School of Government and Trustee of Princeton University Blenda J. Wilson President California State University, Northridge Joe B. Wyatt Chancellor Vanderbilt University ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The members of the Wingspread Group on Higher Education would like to express their respect and appreciation for the support they received from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Johnson Foundation, Inc., Lilly Endowment Inc., and The Pew Charitable Trusts. While they all helped at every turn, we are certain they would agree that The Johnson Foundation and the staff at Wingspread deserve particular thanks for the gracious competence of the support they provided us. We also want to acknowledge our gratitude for the warm hospitality offered us by Miami-Dade Community College, and in particular our thanks to Kati Gomez. The individuals who contributed the essays included in this volume also deserve our thanks, perhaps most notably John Gallagher, whose essay provided an important historical context to our deliberations. Beyond that, he served as our continuing rapporteur; his summaries of our discussions were immensely helpful in keeping us on course. In the same spirit, we would like to acknowledge our debt to James J. Harvey, whose long experience with education was invaluable and who helped compose this report. Like so many others involved in this effort, he is a professional's professional. Finally, every human endeavor has an unsung hero or heroine. In this case, it is Jo Ann Weibel of The Johnson Foundation, whose cheerful competence, grace under pressure, and devotion to "the Wingspread Way" eased our work at every point. We want her to know how grateful we are. CONTENTS Chairman's Preface An American Imperative: Higher Expectations for Higher Education A Changing America and a Changing World Warning Signs Three Central Issues Taking Values Seriously Putting Student Learning First Creating a Nation of Learners First Steps: Challenges for Higher Education Appendices A. A Self-Assessment Checklist B. Resources and Documentation C. Members of the Wingspread Group D. Contributed Essays E. The SCANS Agenda ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAIRMAN'S PREFACE The world our children inhabit is different, radically so, than the one we inherited. An increasingly open, global economy requires--absolutely requires--that all of us be better educated, more skilled, more adaptable, and more capable of working collaboratively. These economic considerations alone mean that we must change the ways we teach and learn. But an increasingly diverse society, battered (and that is not too strong a term) by accelerating change, requires more than workplace competence. It also requires that we do a better job of passing on to the next generation a sense of the value of diversity and the critical importance of honesty, decency, integrity, compassion, and personal responsibility in a democratic society. Above all, we must get across the idea that the individual flourishes best in a genuine community to which the individual in turn has an obligation to contribute. None of us is doing as well as we should in this whole business. We are all part of the problem, if only because we acquiesce in a formal education system that is not meeting our needs. We must not forget that no nation can remain great without developing a truly well-educated people. No nation can remain good without transmitting the fundamental values of a civil society to each new generation. No nation can remain strong unless it puts its young people at the forefront of its concerns. America is falling short on each of these counts. It has much to do. Believing these things, I was very pleased when in January 1993 the president of The Johnson Foundation suggested that I chair a working group sponsored by four leading private foundations--The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Johnson Foundation, Inc., Lilly Endowment Inc., and The Pew Charitable Trusts--to examine the question: "What Does Society Need from Higher Education?" The foundations assembled a working group of talented and experienced men and women (Appendix C) and provided us with a remarkable collection of essays written for our use by 32 individuals representing diverse social, professional, and economic perspectives. Indeed, we found the essays so helpful that we have appended them to this report for the benefit of others (Appendix D). The Johnson Foundation made the magnificent setting of its Wingspread facilities and, more importantly, the talents of its staff available to us. We were encouraged to define our own agenda and to begin our work. Some of what we have to say in the attached open letter will not be easy reading for our friends and colleagues in higher education. We understand that; some of it was not easy writing, either. We have, however, tried to avoid finding fault and pointing fingers. Our comments should be understood as an effort by close and affectionate friends to express concern and to offer suggestions to colleagues whose labors we respect and badly need. An additional point: there is no single silver bullet cure. Much as it would simplify our national task, no single act will transform the incredibly diverse world of higher education into an enterprise routinely producing graduates with all of the qualities, competences, and attitudes we would hope for them. Rather, our suggestions and our questions will require of each institution--campus by campus--honest introspection and some very hard and even controversial new thinking about its roles and responsibilities, principles, and priorities. I want to express our gratitude to all those who have assisted our work in so many thoughtful and gracious ways, beginning with the four sponsoring foundations. I should note that their support and the assistance of others (including the scores of individuals from education, business, public life, and philanthropy who offered helpful comments on a preliminary draft of this document) does not imply that any of them subscribe to the conclusions we have reached or the challenges we advance. Finally, I think it only fair to point out that although every member of our group supports the major themes of our open letter, none of us necessarily subscribes to every detail. That should be little surprise. The Wingspread Group was composed of 16 accomplished, thoughtful individuals, all with strongly held views. On the big questions--the conviction that American education faces serious problems, the belief that we need to develop new ways of thinking about higher education, and the conclusions and challenges in this document--we are unanimous. We hope this open letter to those of our fellow Americans who share our concern for the future will stimulate the national debate about higher education that we consider essential. William E. Brock Chairman AN AMERICAN IMPERATIVE: HIGHER EXPECTATIONS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION "Everything has changed but our ways of thinking, and if these do not change we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." ---Albert Einstein A disturbing and dangerous mismatch exists between what American society needs of higher education and what it is receiving. Nowhere is the mismatch more dangerous than in the quality of undergraduate preparation provided on many campuses. The American imperative for the 21st century is that society must hold higher education to much higher expectations or risk national decline. Establishing higher expectations, however, will require that students and parents rethink what too many seem to want from education: the credential without the content, the degree without the knowledge and effort it implies. In the past, our industrial economy produced many new and low-skill jobs and provided stable employment, often at high wages, for all. Now the nation faces an entirely different economic scenario: a knowledge-based economy with a shortage of highly skilled workers at all levels and a surplus of unskilled applicants scrambling to earn a precarious living. Many of those unskilled applicants are college graduates, not high school dropouts. Like much of the rest of American education, the nation's colleges and universities appear to live by an unconscious educational rule of thumb that their function is to weed out, not to cultivate, students for whom they have accepted responsibility. An unacceptably high percentage of students leaks out of the system at each juncture in the education pipeline. This hemorrhaging of our human resources occurs despite the low standards prevalent in American education and the existence of a wide diversity of institutions offering many options for students. It is almost as though educators take failure for granted. Education is in trouble, and with it our nation's hopes for the future. America's ability to compete in a global economy is threatened. The American people's hopes for a civil, humane society ride on the outcome. The capacity of the United States to shoulder its responsibilities on the world stage is at risk. We understand the explanations offered when criticisms are leveled at higher education: entrants are inadequately prepared; institutional missions vary; we are required by law to accept all high school graduates; students change their minds frequently and drop out of school; controlling costs is difficult in the labor-intensive academy; cutting-edge research consumes the time of senior faculty. All of these things are true. But the larger truth is that the explanations, no matter how persuasive they once were, no longer add up to a compelling whole. 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. These conclusions point to the possibilities for institutional decline given that an increasingly skeptical public expresses the same sense of sticker shock about college costs that is now driving health care reform. The withdrawal of public support for higher education can only accelerate as students, parents, and taxpayers come to understand that they paid for an expensive education without receiving fair value in return. The seeds for national disaster are also there: the needs of an information- and technology-based global economy, the complexities of modern life, the accelerated pace of change and the growing demands for competent, high-skill performance in the workplace require that we produce much higher numbers of individuals--whether high school, community college or four-year graduates--prepared to learn their way through life. Most Americans and their policymakers, concerned about the quality of pre-collegiate education, take heart in the large numbers of Americans who receive associate's and bachelor's degrees every year. The harsh truth is that a significant minority of these graduates enter or reenter the world with little more than the knowledge, competence, and skill we would have expected in a high school graduate scarcely a generation ago. What does our society NEED from higher education? It needs stronger, more vital forms of community. It needs an informed and involved citizenry. It needs graduates able to assume leadership roles in American life. It needs a competent and adaptable workforce. It needs very high quality undergraduate education producing graduates who can sustain each of these goals. It needs more first-rate research pushing back the important boundaries of human knowledge and less research designed to lengthen academic resumes. It needs an affordable, cost-effective educational enterprise offering lifelong learning. Above all, it needs a commitment to the American promise--the idea that all Americans have the opportunity to develop their talents to the fullest. Higher education is not meeting these imperatives. A Changing America and a Changing World --------------------------------------- American society has never been static, but now change is accelerating. The United States is becoming more diverse: by the year 2020, about one-third of Americans will be members of minority groups, traditionally poorly served by education at all levels. New information and technologies are accelerating change: with a half life of less than five years, they are reshaping the way the world lives, works, and plays. Our society is aging: in 1933, 17 Americans were employed for every Social Security recipient; by 2020, the ratio will have dropped from 17-to-1 to 3-to-1. In 1950, the Ford Motor Company employed 62 active workers for every retiree; by 1993, the ratio dropped to 1.2-to-1. These statistics are a stark reminder of our need to assure that American workers are educated to levels that maximize their productivity and, hence, our collective economic well-being. A generation ago, Americans were confident that the core values which had served our nation well in the past could guide it into the future. These values were expressed in homey statements such as: "Honesty is the best policy"; "Serve your country"; "Be a good neighbor." Today we worry that the core values may be shifting and that the sentiments expressed are different: "Don't get involved"; "I gave at the office"; "It's cheating only if you get caught." Too many of us today worry about "me" at the expense of "we." A generation ago, our society and its institutions were overseen by white males. Immigration policy favored peoples from Northern Europe. The television images of "Ozzie and Harriet" were thought to reflect the middle-class American family. Almost all of that has changed as women and members of minority groups increasingly have assumed their place at the table, and immigrants and refugees from once-distant lands have remade the face of the United States. A generation ago, computers took up entire rooms; punch cards for data processing were the cutting edge of technology; operators stood by to help with transatlantic calls; many families watched the clock each afternoon until local television stations began their evening broadcasts. Today, microprocessors, miniaturization, and fiber optics have made information from the four corners of the world instantaneously available to anyone with a computer, transforming the way we manage our institutions, the way we entertain ourselves, and the way we do our business. A generation ago, our society was affluent, richer than it had ever been, with the prospect that its wealth would be more widely and deeply shared than ever before. The American economy--our assembly lines, our banks and farms, our workers and managers--dominated the global economy. Ours was the only major economy to emerge intact from World War II. Trade barriers limited global competition. Our industrial plant and national infrastructure were the envy of the world. As a people, we believed we could afford practically anything, and we undertook practically everything. Those days are behind us. Global competition is transforming the economic landscape. Fierce competitors from abroad have entered domestic markets, and one great American industry after another has felt the effects. We have watched with growing concern as our great national strengths have been challenged, as the gap between rich and poor has widened, and as the nation's economic energy has been sapped by budget and trade deficits. We have struggled--so far unsuccessfully--to set the country back on the confident, spirited course we took for granted a generation ago. We can regain that course only if Americans work smarter. Otherwise, our standard of living will continue the enervating erosion that began two decades ago. Individual economic security in the future will depend not on job or career stability, but on employability, which itself will be a function of adaptability and the willingness to learn, grow, and change throughout a lifetime. Americans may be aware of all of this, but we are prisoners of our past. Our thinking and many of our institutions, including our educational institutions, are still organized as though none of these changes had occurred. The 3,400 institutions of higher learning in America come in all shapes and sizes, public and private. They include small liberal arts institutions, two-year community colleges, and technical institutions, state colleges and universities, and flagship research universities. In each of these categories, models of both excellence and mediocrity exist. Despite this diversity, most operate as though their focus were still the traditional student of days gone by: a white, male, recent high school graduate, who attended classes full-time at a four-year institution and lived on campus. Yesterday's traditional student is, in fact, today's exception. There are more women than men among the 13.5 million students on today's campuses. Forty-three percent of today's students are over the age of 25, including 300,000 over the age of 50. Minority Americans now make up about 20 percent of enrollments in higher education. Almost as many students attend part-time and intermittently as attend full-time and without interruption. More college students are enrolled in community colleges than in four-year institutions. And there are more students living at home or off-campus than there are in dormitories. Fixed in our mind's eye, however, the image of the traditional student blocks effective responses to these new realities. These demographic, economic, and technological changes underscore the mismatch between what is needed of higher education and what it provides. Because we are now a more diverse people, society needs a much better sense of the things that unite us. Because the global economy has had such a profound effect on American standards of living, individuals in our society and the economy as a whole need to be much better prepared for the world of work. In short, we need to educate more people, educate them to far higher standards, and do it as effectively and efficiently as possible. Warning Signs ------------- Institutions, like organisms, must respond to changes in their environment if they are to survive. Not surprisingly, given higher education's slow adaptation, real problems shadow the real successes of the nation's colleges and universities. CRISIS OF VALUES. The nation's colleges and universities are enmeshed in, and in some ways contributing to, society's larger crisis of values. Intolerance on campus is on the rise; half of big-time college sports programs have been caught cheating in the last decade; reports of ethical lapses by administrators, faculty members and trustees, and of cheating and plagiarism by students are given widespread credence. From the founding of the first American colleges 300 years ago, higher education viewed the development of student character and the transmission of the values supporting that character as an essential responsibility of faculty and administration. The importance of higher education's role in the transmission of values is, if anything, even greater today than it was 300 or even 50 years ago. The weakening of the role of family and religious institutions in the lives of young people, the increase in the number of people seeking the benefits of higher education, and what appears to be the larger erosion of core values in our society make this traditional role all the more important. In this context, it is fair to ask how well our educational institutions are transmitting an understanding of good and bad, right and wrong, and the compelling core of values any society needs to sustain itself. While there is a paucity of concrete data, enough anecdotal evidence exists to suggest that there is too little concerted attention, on too many campuses, to this responsibility. In the final analysis, a society is not simply something in which we find ourselves. Society is "we." It is our individual and collective integrity, our commitment to each other and to the dignity of all. All of the other accomplishments of higher education will be degraded if our colleges and universities lose their moral compass and moral vocation. THE COSTS OF "WEEDING." Few thoughtful observers believe that our K-12 schools are adequate for today's needs. About half our high school students are enrolled in dead-end curricula that prepare them poorly for work, life, or additional learning. Too many of the rest are bored and unchallenged. Too few are performing to standards that make them competitive with peers in other industrialized countries. Half of those entering college full-time do not have a degree within five years. Half of all students entering Ph.D. programs never obtain the degree. In short, our education system is better organized to discourage students--to weed them out--than it is to cultivate and support our most important national resource, our people. THE UNEDUCATED GRADUATE. The failure to cultivate our students is evident in a 1992 analysis of college transcripts by the U.S. Department of Education, which reveals that 26.2 percent of recent bachelor's degree recipients earned not a single undergraduate credit in history; 30.8 percent did not study mathematics of any kind; 39.6 percent earned no credits in either English or American literature; and 58.4 percent left college without any exposure to a foreign language. Much too frequently, American higher education now offers a smorgasbord of fanciful courses in a fragmented curriculum that accords as much credit for "Introduction to Tennis" and for courses in pop culture as it does for "Principles of English Composition," history, or physics, thereby trivializing education--indeed, misleading students by implying that they are receiving the education they need for life when they are not. The original purpose of an undergraduate education, the development of a broadly educated human being, prepared, in the words of Englishman John Henry Cardinal Newman, "to fill any post with credit", has been pushed to the periphery. That purpose, restated, was the essential message of a commission convened by President Harry S Truman 45 years ago. According to the Truman Commission, higher education should help students acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to enable them "to live rightly and well in a free society." The 1992 transcript analysis cited above suggests that educators need to ask themselves how well their current graduates measure up to the standards of Newman and the Truman Commission, and to the needs of American society for thoughtful citizens, workers, and potential leaders. For without a broad liberal education, students are denied the opportunity to engage with the principal ideas and events that are the source of any civilization. How then are they to understand the values that sustain community and society, much less their own values? Educators know better, but stand silent. There is further disturbing evidence that graduates are unprepared for the requirements of daily life. According to the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), surprisingly large numbers of two- and four-year college graduates are unable, in everyday situations, to use basic skills involving reading, writing, computation, and elementary problem-solving.(1) The NALS tasks required participants to do three things: read and interpret prose, such as newspaper articles, work with documents like bus schedules and tables and charts, and use elementary arithmetic to solve problems involving, for example, the costs of restaurant meals or mortgages. The NALS findings were presented on a scale from low (Level 1) to high (Level 5) in each of the three areas. The performance of college graduates on these scales is distressing: - in working with documents, only eight percent of all four-year college graduates reach the highest level; - in terms of their ability to work with prose, only 10 percent of four-year graduates are found in Level 5; and - with respect to quantitative skills, only 12 percent of four-year graduates reach the highest level. In fact, only about one-half of four-year graduates are able to demonstrate intermediate levels of competence in each of the three areas. In the area of quantitative skills, for example, 56.3 percent of American-born, four-year college graduates are unable CONSISTENTLY to perform simple tasks, such as calculating the change from $3 after buying a 60 cent bowl of soup and a $1.95 sandwich. Tasks such as these should not be insuperable for people with 16 years of education. GROWING PUBLIC CONCERN. Opinion polls leave no doubt that Americans have a profound respect for higher education. They consider it essential to the nation's civility and economic progress, and to advances in science, technology, and medicine. Americans are convinced that an undergraduate degree is as important to success in today's world as a high school diploma was in yesterday's. But, simultaneously, the polls reveal deep public concern about higher education. The public is overwhelmed by sticker shock when it considers college costs. According to the polls, the overwhelming majority of the American people believes that colleges and universities--both public and private--are overpriced and lie increasingly beyond the reach of all but the wealthy. Public confidence in the "people running higher education" has declined as dramatically with respect to education leaders as it has with respect to the leadership of medicine, government, and business. While the public is most interested in achievement, costs, and management, it believes that the academy focuses instead on advanced study and research. Several of the essays written for our study echo a number of the conclusions of the 1992 report of the President's Advisory Council on Science and Technology. Both remind us that the academic culture and rewards system too frequently encourages graduate education and research at the expense of undergraduate education. What emerges is a picture of academic life which only grudgingly attends to undergraduate learning, and to the advice, counseling, and other support services students need. The dominant academic attitude, particularly on large campuses enrolling most American students, is that research deserves pride of place over teaching and public service, in part because many senior faculty prefer specialized research to teaching, and in part because institutions derive much of their prestige from faculty research. Indeed, the ideal model in the minds of faculty members on campuses of all kinds is defined by what they perceive to be the culture and aspirations of flagship research universities. Three Central Issues -------------------- It is hard not to conclude that too much undergraduate education is little more than secondary school material--warmed over and reoffered at much higher expense, but not at correspondingly higher levels of effectiveness. The United States can no longer afford the inefficiencies, or the waste of talent, time, and money, revealed by these warning signs. Indeed, the nation that responds best and most rapidly to the educational demands of the Age of the Learner will enjoy a commanding international advantage in the pursuit of both domestic tranquillity and economic prosperity. To achieve these goals for our country, we must educate more people, and educate them far better. That will require new ways of thinking. Given the diversity of American higher education, there can be no single formula for change common to all, but we do believe that there are at least three fundamental issues common to all 3,400 colleges and universities: - taking values seriously; - putting student learning first; - creating a nation of learners. The nation's colleges and universities can respond to the agenda defined in this open letter. They can do so by reaffirming their conviction that the moral purpose of knowledge is at least as important as its utility. They can do so by placing student learning at the heart of their concerns. They can do so by working toward what educator John Goodlad has called "a simultaneous renewal" of higher education and the nation's K-12 schools as one continuous learning system. To focus what we hope will be a vigorous, widespread national debate, we have distilled the results of six-months' work and discussion into a compact document designed to make our line of reasoning as clear as possible. Our purpose is not so much to provide answers. Rather, we hope to raise some of the right questions and thus encourage Americans and their colleges and universities to consider and adopt a new direction. That is why we close this document not with a set of recommendations, but with a set of challenges for American higher education, for the public, and for its representatives. We begin our discussion in the pages that follow with an argument for putting first things first: the need for a rigorous liberal education that takes values seriously and acknowledges that value-free education has proven a costly blind alley for society. TAKING VALUES SERIOUSLY "The Holocaust reminds us forever that knowledge divorced from values can only serve to deepen the human nightmare; that a head without a heart is not humanity." ---President Bill Clinton Democratic societies need a common ground, a shared frame of reference within which to encourage both diversity and constructive debate about the common good. A free people cannot enjoy the fruits of its liberty without collaborative efforts in behalf of community. Higher education has a central obligation to develop these abilities. There are some values, rooted in national experience, even defined in the Constitution, that Americans share. These "constitutional" values have evolved into a set of civic virtues: - respect for the individual and commitment to equal opportunity; - the belief that our common interests exceed our individual differences; - concern for those who come after us; - support for the freedoms enunciated in the Bill of Rights, including freedom of religion, of the press, of speech, and of the right to assemble; - the belief that individual rights and privileges are to be exercised responsibly; - respect for the views of others; and - the conviction that no one is above the law. If values are to be taken seriously, the place to start is by reaffirming the primacy of the visions of Newman and the Truman Commission: liberal education is central to living "rightly and well in a free society." We do not believe that a history major needs to know as much chemistry as a forest management major, that an engineering major needs to know as much literature as an English major. But every student needs the knowledge and understanding that can come only from the rigors of a liberal education. Such an education lies at the heart of developing both social and personal values. If the center of American society is to hold, a liberal education must be central to the undergraduate experience of all students. The essentials of a liberal education should be contained in a rigorous, required curriculum defined on each campus. We believe, too, that every institution of higher education should ask itself--NOW--what it proposes to do to assure that next year's entering students will graduate as individuals of character more sensitive to the needs of community, more competent in their ability to contribute to society, and more civil in their habits of thought, speech, and action. We are also convinced that each educational institution must, openly and directly, begin the kinds of discussions that promise to build campus consensus on the civic virtues it most treasures. The questions concluding this section, and repeated in Appendix A, define some of the issues that need to be addressed. What do these issues mean in practice? Several implications appear obvious: campuses must model the values they espouse; they must help students experience society and reflect on it as an integral part of their education; they must act on their understanding that matters of the spirit reflect such a profound aspect of the human condition that they cannot be ignored on any campus. With respect to modeling values, a former president of Yale University, A. Bartlett Giamatti, once said: "[A]n educational institution teaches far, far more, and more profoundly, by how it acts than by anything anyone within it ever says." Mr. Giamatti was echoed by one of our essayists, Robert Rosenzweig, who wrote, "American society needs colleges and universities to be active exemplars of the values they have always professed...." In both statements, the critical emphasis is on ACTING and EXEMPLIFYING, not simply proclaiming. On campus, as elsewhere, the dictum "Do as I say, not as I do" is an invitation to cynicism among our citizens, particularly students. We want also to stress that society's needs will be well served if colleges and universities wholeheartedly commit themselves to providing students with opportunities to experience and reflect on the world beyond the campus. Books and lectures provide an intellectual grounding in the realities of the marketplace and of the nation's social dilemmas. But there is no substitute for experience. Academic work should be complemented by the kinds of knowledge derived from first-hand experience, such as contributing to the well-being of others, participating in political campaigns, and working with the enterprises that create wealth in our society. Last but not least, we want to suggest that matters of the spirit have a far more important role to play in institutions of higher education than has been encouraged in recent years. We do not argue for one system of belief or another, one denomination or another, or for compulsory religious observance of any kind. Certainly we understand that campuses must be dedicated to free inquiry, ungoverned by either faddish orthodoxy or intolerant ideology. But we do argue that faith and deep moral conviction matter in human affairs. Because they do, they must matter on campus. We believe that the concept of a value-free education is a profoundly misleading contradiction in terms, a blind alley with very high costs to personal life, community, and even workplace. A campus community whose members cannot readily give answers to the following questions is a campus without a purpose: - What kind of people do we want our children and grandchildren to be? - What kind of society do we want them to live in? - How can we best shape our institution to nurture those kinds of people and that kind of society? (2) Initiating and sustaining discussions and initiatives of the sort suggested above will be difficult on large campuses, but not impossible. Organizing and sustaining community service programs for large numbers of students both inside and outside the classroom is difficult, but not impossible. Encouraging collaborative learning is perhaps more difficult than grading on the curve, but it is not impossible. Yet activities such as these both model and teach the skills of community. The questions raised in the realm of values may, on occasion, be deeply troubling. In our view that is all to the good. If the journey is too comfortable, the right questions are probably not being asked, and asking the right questions is essential if higher education is to rise to Pericles' standards: Pericles knew that any successful society must be an educational institution. However great its commitment to individual freedom and diversity, it needs a code of civic virtue and a general devotion to the common enterprise without which it cannot flourish or survive. It must transmit its understanding of good and bad and a sense of pride, admiration, and love for its institutions and values to its citizens, especially the young. (3) It is fashionable to decry the quality of American leadership, public and private. Yet virtually all our leadership emerges from one institution of higher education or another. As students are groomed on campus, so shall they live and lead. Pericles understood. Do we? Taking Values Seriously ----------------------- - How does our educational program match the claims of our recruiting brochures, and where is it falling short? - How does our core curriculum of required courses respond to the needs of our students for a rigorous liberal education enabling them to "live rightly and well in a free society?" Where does it fall short? - In what ways does our institution model the values and skills expected in our community? Where and how are we falling short? - What steps might we take to improve the general climate of civility on our campus? - How comprehensive and effective is the code of professional conduct and ethics for our faculty and staff? When was it last reviewed? - In what ways does our institution and its educational program promote the development of shared values, specifically the civic virtues listed below, among our students? - respect for the individual and commitment to equal opportunity in a diverse society; - the belief that our common interests exceed our individual differences; - support for the freedoms enunciated in the Bill of Rights, including freedom of religion, of the press, of speech, and of the right to assemble; - the belief that individual rights and privileges are accompanied by responsibilities to others; - respect for the views of others; and - the conviction that no one is above the law. - What moral and ethical questions should we be putting to the student groups and organizations we sanction on campus? What standards of conduct do we expect of these groups? How have we made these standards clear? - How do the activities of our athletic programs square with our institution's stated values, and where do they fall short? - What steps will we take to assure that next year's entering students will graduate as individuals of character more sensitive to the needs of community, more competent to contribute to society, more civil in their habits of thought, speech, and action? - What other related questions should we address at our institution? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PUTTING STUDENT LEARNING FIRST "The future now belongs to societies that organize themselves for learning." ---Ray Marshall and Marc Tucker If it is time to take values seriously on campus, it is also time to redress the imbalance that has led to the decline of undergraduate education. To do so, the nation's colleges and universities must for the foreseeable future focus overwhelmingly on what their students learn and achieve. Too much of education at every level seems to be organized for the convenience of educators and the institution's interests, procedures and prestige, and too little focused on the needs of students. Putting students at the heart of the educational enterprise requires that we face a difficult truth: academic expectations and standards on many campuses are too low, and it shows. Institutions that start with learning will set higher expectations for all students, then do a much more effective job of helping them meet those expectations, points to which we return below. Putting learning at the heart of the enterprise means campuses must: - understand their mission clearly and define the kinds of students they can serve best; - define exactly what their entering students need to succeed; - start from where the students begin and help them achieve explicitly stated institutional standards for high achievement; - tailor their programs--curriculum, schedules, support services, office hours--to meet the needs of the students they admit, not the convenience of staff and faculty; - systematically apply the very best of what is known about learning and teaching on their campuses; - rigorously assess what their students know and are able to do in order to improve both student and institutional performance; and - develop and publish explicit exit standards for graduates, and grant degrees only to students who meet them. Interestingly, steps such as these are among the recommendations recently advanced by some of this nation's most distinguished African-American leaders. (4) As they note, their recommendations for improving the learning environment for minorities will inevitably work to the advantage of all students, including disadvantaged MAJORITY learners. We were struck by how congruent their analysis and recommendations are to our own. Putting learning at the heart of the academic enterprise will mean overhauling the conceptual, procedural, curricular, and other architecture of postsecondary education on most campuses. For some students this will mean greater independence. For others, the academic experience may change little outwardly; internally, it will be far more challenging and exciting. For many others--particularly those whose learning needs are being served poorly now--academic life will be more directive, more supportive, and more demanding. It will be more directive on the assumption that institutions are responsible for evaluating and responding to the learning needs of students. It will be more supportive because it will be focused on what students need in order to succeed. It will be far more demanding because it will be aimed at producing graduates who demonstrate much higher levels of knowledge and skills. SKILLS. Traditionally, the acquisition of skills essential to life and work has been considered a by-product of study, not something requiring explicit attention on campus. We know of only a handful of the nation's colleges and universities that have developed curricular approaches similar to, for example, the list of critical skills developed by the Secretary of Labor's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS--see Appendix E). But skills such as these--written and oral communication, critical analysis, interpersonal competence, the ability to obtain and use data, the capacity to make informed judgments, and the skills required in community life--are essential attributes of a liberal education when they are accompanied by discipline-based knowledge. These skills can be learned. If they are to be learned, however, they must be taught and practiced, not merely absorbed as a result of unplanned academic experience. We believe that the modern world requires both knowledge AND such skills and competences. Neither is adequate without the other. STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT. There is growing research evidence that all students can learn to much higher standards than we now require. When they do not, the flaw is most likely to be in the system, not the individual. We agree with those who make the important point that the truly outstanding educational institution graduates students who achieve more than would have been predicted on entry. (This is a standard, incidentally, that challenges even the most prestigious of our great universities and small liberal arts colleges, the institutions routinely enrolling the best secondary school graduates.) There is a growing body of knowledge about learning and the implications of that knowledge for teaching. What is known, however, is rarely applied by individual teachers, much less in concert by entire faculties. We know that teaching is more than lecturing. We know that active engagement in learning is more productive than passive listening. We know that experiential learning can be even more so. We know we should evaluate institutional performance against student outcomes. We know all of this, but appear unable to act on it. It is time to explore the reasons for our failure to act. No group has a greater stake in the new evidence relative to student achievement than socially and economically disadvantaged students, particularly disadvantaged minority Americans. At the elementary and secondary levels, the achievement gap separating minority and majority students is slowly closing. These results appear to reflect a combination of factors including minimum competency standards, on-going assessment, and programs to provide the special support many of these young Americans need. These were vitally important steps, but we share the distress of many Americans, including educators, that they have not gone far enough: minimum competency is not enough. Many minority Americans are still being left behind by an education system that is not serving their needs. We also know that support services work. From a host of small experiments it is clear that when students--particularly those less advantaged in life--know their institution is unambiguously committed to their success, performance rises dramatically. Yet too few campuses have done much more than offer perfunctory, often inconvenient, student-support services. Too few have created one-stop "success centers" where students can find assistance with the full range of their concerns when they most need help--which is frequently before 9 a.m. and after 5 p.m. In the most impressive of these centers, a student enters into a relationship with a single individual who becomes an advocate for the student, responsible for marshaling all of the institution's assets and focusing them on the student's success. ASSESSMENT. Finally, our vision calls for new ways of thinking about assessing what students know and are able to do. In medicine, testing and assessment are used to define the best course for future action. They provide data for both doctor (the teacher) and patient (the student) as to what steps to take to improve the individual's health (learning). In contemporary colleges and universities, however, such use of assessment is rare. Examinations in educational institutions (including elementary and secondary schools) normally establish competitive rankings and sort students. They rarely diagnose strengths and weaknesses, examine needs, or suggest what steps to take next. In almost no institution are a student's skills systematically assessed, developed, and then certified. This assessment issue transcends the needs of learners. In an institution focused on learning, assessment feedback becomes central to the institution's ability to improve its own performance, enhancing student learning in turn. New forms of assessment should focus on establishing what college and university graduates have learned--the knowledge and skill levels they have achieved and their potential for further independent learning. Only a few scattered institutions have instituted exit assessments. The sad fact is that campuses spend far more time and money establishing the credentials of applicants than they do assessing the knowledge, skills, and competences of their graduates. Indeed, the entire system is skewed in favor of the input side of the learning equation: credit hours, library collections, percentage of faculty with terminal degrees, and the like. The output side of the equation--student achievement--requires much greater attention than it now receives. That attention should begin by establishing improved measures of student achievement, measures that are credible and valued by the friends and supporters of education, by testing and accrediting bodies, and by educational institutions themselves. We understand that the changes we suggest will be difficult and demanding. We recognize that they will require new attitudes on the part of faculty and institutions and, most critically, new skills and ways of doing business. There will be costs associated with these changes--though relatively modest costs in the context of overall institutional budgets--notably for staff development and student support services. We believe it reasonable to suggest that campuses devote a greater percentage of revenues to these needs. Finally, we want to stress that responsibility in a learning institution is a two-way street. Students, at any level of education, are the workers in the educational process. They have a major obligation for their own success. Too many students do not behave as though that were the case, apparently believing (as do many parents) that grades are more important for success in life than acquired knowledge, the ability to learn throughout a lifetime, and hard work on campus. Educational institutions, having accepted students and their tuition, have a positive obligation to help these students acquire the knowledge, skills, competences, and habits of intellectual self-discipline requisite to becoming productive citizens and employees. Students, parents, and community leaders will have to be willing to support the high expectations and hard work that superior student achievement will require. Too many campuses have become co-conspirators in the game of "credentialism." Many campuses still do not offer the guidance and support all students require to reach the higher levels of achievement contemporary life requires. Too few are sufficiently engaged in effective collaboration with other learning institutions, notably K-12 schools, to assure that students arriving on campus are prepared intellectually and are received in ways which enhance their prospects for success. Institutions of higher education must reach out much more effectively to colleagues elsewhere to help create a nation of learners and reduce the barriers to their learning. Putting Student Learning First ------------------------------ - How recently have we reviewed our program offerings to assure that they match our mission and the needs and goals of the students we admit? - In what ways could we do a better job of helping our students to attain higher levels of both knowledge and skills? - What steps should we take to establish or improve a rigorous curriculum requiring core knowledge and competences of our students? - How have we tried to integrate curricular offerings for the benefit of students and faculty? Is "course sprawl" contributing to our budgetary problems and making it more difficult for students to register in courses required for graduation? What might be done? - To what extent are our educational programs, class schedules, registration, and other administrative and support services organized around the needs of learners rather than the convenience of the institution? What improvements can we make? - How do we encourage and assist students to develop the basic values required for learning, e.g., self-discipline, perseverance, responsibility, hard work, intellectual openness? - In what ways are we assessing learning to diagnose needs and accomplishments? How could we improve feedback to students and faculty on student performance in order to enhance both teaching and learning? - How does our institution assure that students have demonstrated a high level of achievement, consistent with our published standards for acquiring both knowledge and skills, as a basis for receiving our degrees or certificates? Can we raise our standards? - In what ways are we applying what is known about learning to the teaching practices of our faculty and graduate students? How do our pedagogical approaches enhance learning, and where do they fall short? - How do we support faculty initiatives to improve learning and teaching? In particular, is our faculty well grounded in the available research concerning adult learning? If not, what will we do to improve our record? - How could we do a better job of helping students learn at lower overall cost to our institution? How would we reinvest the savings? - What other related questions should we address at our institution to improve the quality of learning? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CREATING A NATION OF LEARNERS "The fixed person for the fixed duties, who in older societies was a blessing, in the future will be a public danger." ---Alfred North Whitehead We must redesign all of our learning systems to align our entire education enterprise with the personal, civic, and workplace needs of the 21st Century. In the last generation, higher education has been swept up in the tide of social and economic change. The horizons and aspirations of women and members of minority groups have expanded. Older students have arrived on campus, many for the first time, seeking help to improve their skills, develop career prospects, and respond to new developments in technology. Family mobility is on the rise, and with it mobility from campus to campus. The modern workplace, open to global competition, requires levels of knowledge and skills beyond anything we have aspired to in the past, and well beyond what our schools and universities are now producing. These changes demand that American education transform itself into a seamless system that can produce and support a nation of learners, providing access to educational services for learners as they need them, when they need them, and wherever they need them. This is not an argument for merger or homogeneity. But colleges and universities need to understand that their business is ALL of education--learning. they can no longer afford to concern themselves exclusively with HIGHER education. They must address themselves much more effectively to the other key pieces of the education enterprise. Americans and their educators are now handicapped by an education legacy from the past when what they need is a solution for the future. Our current educational institutions worked reasonably well in a society that had little need for large numbers of educated adults. Why question that structure when 90 percent of the population left school after 8th grade (the turn of the century); when only 50 percent of the population graduated from high school (1940); or even when only one-third of high school graduates enrolled in higher education (1950)? Now the need has changed. There can be no justification for such a system in today's world with its growing demand for better-educated people. In this new environment many more educators must be prepared to say: "All of us, from pre-school to post-graduate, are in this together. It is not enough to complain about each other's failings. It is time to stop addressing the problem piecemeal. We must begin to work collaboratively on the system as a whole." It is no longer tolerable for so many in higher education to complain about the quality of those they admit, but do nothing to set higher standards and work with colleagues in K-12 schools to help students attain those standards. Our education system is in crisis; business-as-usual is a formula for national disaster. Assessment and achievement are critical components of an enhanced education system. Experts today are thinking about the need for summary educational documents, not just grades, attendance records, and test scores, but data representing genuine learning achievements across a lifetime of educational and training experiences. The Educational Testing Service, the American College Testing program, and the American Council on Education are already piloting initiatives of this kind--Work Link, Work Keys, and the External Diploma Program respectively--which aim to revise quite radically how we think about and use assessment. These efforts deserve encouragement from everyone interested in improving the quality of learning, and in particular from the American business community. They will increasingly assure that learning, wherever it occurs, is valued and given credit; they will, in and of themselves, help to create a national culture encouraging lifelong formal and informal learning. We are aware that a number of institutions work with local schools, and that some are very serious and effective in these efforts. But as one of our essayists put it, "the sum of it all adds up to considerably less than a response to an urgent need that is grounded in both self-interest and national interest." We join others in calling for a simultaneous renewal of both higher education and the nation's K-12 schools. A serious, sustained dialogue should start by identifying shared needs and problems: - a clear public definition of what students should know and be able to do at each educational level; - standards of entry AND EXIT for higher education; - increasing the use of assessment to diagnose learning needs and enhance student achievement; - improving both the theory and practice of teaching and learning; - recruiting and educating more effective teachers at all levels; - bringing education's resources to bear on issues of character and its development; - reducing the barriers to inter-institutional transfer among institutions of higher education; and - exploring the implications for college admissions practices of the six National Education Goals established in 1989, and the potential for collaboration with K-12 schools. The entire education establishment has a self-evident interest in this kind of collaborative dialogue and action. If a community college has developed an outstanding student support system, even the most prestigious research university should consider it as a benchmark. If a public school system has created a successful school-within-a-school to relieve the negative impact of size on students, public mega-universities should consider the possibility that they have something to learn from it. Any educational institution should want to practice existing, innovative, research-based approaches for applying to teaching what is known about learning. Where innovations in self-paced and distance learning are succeeding, any institution concerned about productivity and cost containment should examine them carefully as potential contributors to its own efficiency and effectiveness. Every campus has an interest in emulating those colleges and universities that have extended a collaborative hand to elementary and secondary education. Such collaboration can enhance course content and standards across the board, and raise the motivation and confidence of students who might otherwise not be considering postsecondary education. Nor is the opportunity to learn from others restricted to the traditional world of education. Where a corporation has developed effective educational innovations, campuses should investigate the implications for their own work. Many museums are currently developing innovative and effective approaches to teaching and learning about science, history, and art. But all of these advances--and many others--are taking place independently of each other at a time when America needs a more collaborative, cost-effective and better-articulated way of responding to the lifelong learning needs of growing numbers of its citizens. Creating A Nation Of Learners ----------------------------- - In what ways have we organized our programs to develop and support a capacity for lifelong learning among our students? - How might we provide the same level of service and support to "non- traditional" students, and students in non-traditional learning programs, as we do for traditional full-time students? Within our mission, when have we examined alternative, more flexible, and student-oriented ways to provide for student learning? - How often do we survey employers of our recent graduates--and the graduates themselves--to discover how and under what circumstances graduates succeed or fall short? How can that process be improved? - In what ways do we work with K-12 systems to enlarge our understanding of their difficulties, encourage teachers and administrators to see us as resources, and enlarge our own competences? In what ways have we relegated this effort to our school of education? How have we tried to involve the entire campus? - How are we working with high schools and other educational institutions both to communicate to them the knowledge and skills that students will need to be successful in higher education and to help students meet those requirements? - How do our departments provide graduate students and professors with training in how people learn and what that means for teaching? What needs to be done to make this institution-wide and to set institution-wide standards? - How is our campus working with local schools and other colleges and universities to bring teaching and learning to state-of-the-art standards from kindergarten through the undergraduate years? What more can we do? - How might we bring our teacher recruitment and teacher education programs into better alignment with the real needs of both society and students? What are our benchmarks? - What provisions might a statewide compact contain if we wished to ease student transfer between institutions? - In what ways are we organized to make use of educational achievements from non-traditional organizations and settings? - What other related questions should we address in an effort to reduce the institutional barriers to learning and to make our institution more responsive to the needs of others, e.g., K-12 education, employers, and other institutions of higher education? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ FIRST STEPS: CHALLENGES FOR HIGHER EDUCATION "For every right that you cherish, you have a duty which you must fulfill. For every hope that you entertain, you have a task that you must perform. For every good that you wish to preserve, you will have to sacrifice your comfort and your ease. There is nothing for nothing any longer." ---Walter Lippmann Our wake-up call places a heavy burden on the shoulders of the men and women in higher education. It will require rethinking the assumptions of the education enterprise and reinventing many of its ways of doing business. Educators, particularly faculty members, must demonstrate that they have noted the warning signs, understand the potential for institutional and national decline, and are ready to act. Solutions for the problems we have described will require vigorous, creative, and persistent leadership on campus, in the community, in state capitols, and in Washington. On the other hand, the problems of undergraduate education cannot effectively be addressed by bold strokes of state or national public policy. They can best be solved campus by campus with the active involvement of faculty, staff, students, trustees, and their friends and supporters off campus including, notably, state legislators. Hence, our solutions are cast not as recommendations for policymakers to impose from on high, but as challenges to be taken up on each of the nation's 3,400 campuses. Diversity and autonomy are among the great strengths of American higher education, as they are of American society itself. They are strengths to be respected and drawn upon as each institution decides for itself how it will respond. As first steps in what will be a long journey, we issue five challenges. For colleges and universities: ------------------------------ - WE CHALLENGE you to evaluate yourselves against the questions in the attached "Self-Assessment Checklist," and to commit yourself publicly to an institutional plan that builds on the strengths and remedies the deficiencies you identify. - WE CHALLENGE you to define and publicly state your standards of entry and exit in terms of the knowledge, skills, and abilities you expect from both applicants and graduates, and to put in place measures to assure student and institutional attainment of those standards by a fixed date. - WE CHALLENGE you to develop a curriculum that will assure all graduates--our future citizens, employees, and leaders--the benefits of a liberal education. - WE CHALLENGE you to assure that next year's entering students will graduate as individuals of character more sensitive to the needs of community, more competent to contribute to society, and more civil in habits of thought, speech, and action. For trustees, regents, legislators, alumni, and funders in particular: - WE CHALLENGE you to respond to institutions that take up the first four challenges by giving them the regulatory and financial flexibility they need to get the job done. Institutional creativity, not micro-management, is the essential precondition to change. But we do urge you to urge them on. One of the best ways to do so is to insist that the campuses for which you have stewardship responsibility undertake the attached self-assessment. We understand that some institutions will believe it unnecessary to respond to the challenges above. Perhaps they are correct, although we suggest that even the best can be better. Institutions hesitant to undertake a comprehensive self-assessment might consider administering the National Adult Literacy Survey instrument to a representative sample of graduating seniors. By permitting comparison of institutional performance with a nationwide sample of graduates of either two- or four-year institutions, the NALS instrument can provide a minimally acceptable performance benchmark for any institution. No campus has anything to lose by turning to NALS, and it is difficult to imagine that most would not want to know where they stand. Some may be satisfied with the results, but many will be surprised. Finally, we issue a challenge to the broader public, specifically to students, parents, employers, and citizens. This agenda for higher education is ambitious. It will not be accomplished easily or soon; nor can it bear fruit without your participation and support. All of us have contributed to the situation in which higher education today finds itself; we too must play our part in responding to the imperatives of the future. Every American must accept the fact that in an open, global economy, education is a critical national resource. A generation ago, we told educators we wanted more people with a college credential and more research-based knowledge. Educators responded accordingly. Now we need to ask for different things. Students must value achievement, not simply seek a credential. Students (and parents) should look to the value added to their lives, not simply to the prestige of the institutions they attend. Employers must make clear to educators what they value in new employees. Without new public attitudes, higher education will find it difficult to persevere in the task ahead. One of these difficulties is financial. Higher education's claim on public and private funds increasingly competes with a growing list of other compelling claims. One consequence is that after rising every year since the end of World War II, total state support for public higher education declined for two successive years as the 1990s began, and there is little reason to expect net new resources for the foreseeable future. Since at least World War II, higher education's growth has been made possible by an expanding national economy. However, the post-World War II surge in productivity which fueled remarkable growth in our national wealth will not repeat itself unless educational institutions make a determined, successful effort to enhance the knowledge and skills Americans bring to the workplace. Thus, higher education's best financial hope rests on helping itself by helping expand the nation's wealth, by providing the knowledgeable and highly skilled workforce that can enhance our productivity, revitalize our communities, and rebuild our sense of "we." We are convinced that those colleges and universities that demonstrate that they are doing more with what they have--those doing the best job of preserving strong, core programs and eliminating the less essential--will find not only that they have freed up resources to reinvest in themselves, but they will also have made a compelling case for additional external support. We also believe that institutions that defer change until new resources are available will find themselves waiting for a very long time. Financial salvation will begin on the campus, or it will probably not begin at all. But as campuses begin to respond to the kinds of challenges we issue, there must be solid public and financial support for higher education. It IS a critical national resource. Finally . . . ------------- Higher education and the society it serves face a fork in the road. Either educators and other Americans raise their sights and take the difficult steps described in this open letter, or we all face the certain and unpleasant prospect of national decline. No one can look squarely at the quality of our undergraduate education, and its graduates, and come to a more optimistic conclusion. We are guardedly hopeful that higher education will respond positively to the kinds of change we believe essential to our national well-being. That hope rests on the active participation of faculty members, administrators, and the public, many of whom understand the need for change and are working to effect it. That hope rests on the fact that so many Americans understand how critical a productive and affordable system of higher education is to the American future. Even the most severe critic of higher education understands its importance and wishes it well. Most significantly, there is hope, because when the nation has called on colleges and universities to adapt in the past, higher education has always responded. We cannot believe it will hesitate now. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (1) Results of the NALS survey, conducted by the Educational Testing Service for the U.S. Department of Education, were released in September 1993. The largest effort of its type ever attempted, the survey offers a comprehensive analysis of the competence of American adults (both college- and non-college-educated) based on face-to-face interviews with 26,000 people. We note with concern that the 1993 survey findings reflect a statistically significant decline from those of an earlier survey conducted in 1985. (2) Questions taken from Howard Bowen, "The State of the Nation and the Agenda for Higher Education." San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1982. (3) Donald Kagan, "Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy." New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. (4) John Hope Franklin, et al., "The Inclusive University: A New Environment for Higher Education." Washington: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 1993.