What does an education guarantee?
‘[A]n undergraduate education merits nothing less than a lifelong warranty.”
When I read this statement by Sanford Pinsker, an emeritus professor at Franklin & Marshall College (in Lancaster, Pennsylvania), my first reaction was outrage.
One of the greatest challenges we face as educators is working with students who think their success is someone else’s responsibility. “You didn’t tell us we had to …” (It was written in the instructions.) “I didn’t know we were supposed to …” (If you been in class the day I said it, you would have known.) “My mom told me I should …” (Excuse me, is your mom in our class?)
But I’m not writing to condemn Pinsker’s essay. I can’t possibly disagree with this:
At its best, a college education produces trained minds who know when somebody is speaking rot. Put another way, a liberally educated person understands that pursuing the truth, wherever it may lead, is a lifelong process. The result focuses on the two questions that matter above all others: Who Am I? and How Should a Good Person Live? The first speaks to the individual soul; the second to one’s responsibility to help make a better, more just world. All too often, parents think of college as an investment that will pay enormous dividends in their children’s future.
The problem with offering a warranty in the envelope with the bachelor’s degree (about which Pinsker is not really serious) is this: If you work hard at it, you can get pretty good grades for four years and not learn much of anything.
Before you succumb to outrage, let me explain. First, there are the kinds of “goofy” courses Pinsker criticizes in his essay — “courses so tied to vagaries of popular culture (Madonna, the Sopranos) that they surely won’t last and probably shouldn’t have been offered.” The students who seek out as many of these as possible are making their own bed, and they will lie in it. Second, there is a fair amount of cheating that goes on, although educators and administrators work hard to stop it and to instill a sense of honesty and integrity in the grade-obsessed students who are prone to cheat. And third, there are honest students who truly are so focused on meeting the requirements to get an A that they actually fail to absorb the material — because learning is not their goal; the grade is.
How Much They Have Learned (or Failed to Learn)
The vast majority of our students who complete the bachelor’s degree really do know a lot more than they did at the start of the process. Some of what they have learned is how to live on their own, to meet deadlines, to balance workloads, to compromise, to negotiate with crazy roommates. These too are part of the undergraduate experience.
But some have done everything they could to cut corners, to make a passing grade with the minimum effort, to fill their schedule with courses that allowed them the maximum time for socializing. They have worked the system — sometimes with their parents’ encouragement and blessing — so that they qualify for the degree on paper, but not in their hearts and minds.
I wish parents would ask their kids “What did you learn today?” instead of “What mark did you get on that test?” I wish the students would ask each other: “Did you encounter any new ideas in that class?” or, “Did it make you think hard?” instead of, “Was it easy?”
If universities gave graduates a warranty with their degree, there could be no loopholes in the system — no cheating, no soft courses, no overworked or undertrained teachers. Pinsker is focused on courses in the liberal arts (not the sciences) when he suggests students should seek out “courses worthy of at least a ten-year warranty.” For him, the trash education results because the trash courses exist.
I disagree. It takes a concerted effort for a student to load up his or her schedule with trash courses. By talking with professors and other students, it’s usually possible to find out which courses are fluffy and not very challenging. Sure, you might choose badly a couple of times in four years. But for the most part — especially after your first semester — you should be able to find out which courses are worthwhile before you sign up.
If you avoid those courses and choose fluff instead, I don’t think that’s the fault of the university.
Journalism Education Could Pass Muster
When I apply Pinsker’s “worthy of … a ten-year warranty” advice to journalism, I think a lot of our courses meet the test — and beyond. Ethics, for example. The examples are new, but the tenets are the same as they were in my journalism ethics course 20 years ago. The Reporting course also offers the same basic principles of truth, accuracy and the inverted pyramid. In journalism, we do have some core courses that could withstand even a lifelong warranty.
With the continuing changes in journalism practice and journalism businesses, though, we must continually experiment with new approaches and new subject matter. Having a 10-year warranty shouldn’t mean the student from 10 years ago is angry because many newsrooms have switched from, say, Quark to InDesign. The standards of broadsheet page design have changed as well. If the student completed a good print design course, however, he or she should have the mental tools to adapt, to change with the times.
In this field, imagining a 10-year warranty is almost frightening. No one knows what we’ll see in 10 years — the past 10 years have taught us that!
Yet as I try to prepare young journalists for exactly the world they will be entering — an unknown, a place where change must be expected — I try to teach them skills that will last a lifetime. These include the ability to evaluate, think for themselves, teach themselves to use new tools, ask questions, solve problems, be curious, find examples to learn from and build on, never be satisfied with shoddy results.
Above all, they need to take responsibility for their own work and their own career. A warranty? So they can come back later and complain it’s not working out? Huh-uh. No. That won’t make education better, and it certainly won’t produce graduates who can succeed in a world where they’ve got to keep on learning, forever.
You may have seen elsewhere that I’m skeptical of J-schools in part because the tools of the trade change a little more frequently than, say, Plato’s work. I get so tired of seeing people chime in on the Online-News list that professors need to be teaching “X, Y and Z,” when at least two of those three are faddish technologies that will be forgotten by the time the kids graduate.
Not that it’s bad to expose students to the latest technologies. It simply shouldn’t be a focus. The roots have to be elsewhere.
And so the 10-year warranty, and your response to it, are good things to consider.
To nit-pick with some of the criticism — you can have a “soft course” on Shakespeare just as easily as you can have a “soft course” on the Sopranos. Steven Berlin Johnson has the definitive word on that topic. I’d just add that kids could do a lot worse in college than figuring out what they’re actually saying on “The Simpsons.”
At NextNewsroom.com, they’re asking whether Duke should have a media literacy requirement. I think it might be poorly received — some bloggers would surely see a left-wing conspiracy in academia teaching kids how to deconstruct the media — but I’d love to find a way to get students to discern valid sources from invalids.
August 31, 2007 at 10:41 amStony Brook University has an ambitious plan to require a news literacy course of every student in the entire school. I was skeptical of this at first, especially the $1.7 million grant they got to do it. But then I saw and heard the brains behind the initiative — Howard Schneider, former editor and managing editor of Newsday — speak about the course, and I was an instant fan. Do not scoff unless you have heard Schneider explain the course content — it is awesome.
August 31, 2007 at 11:11 amPerhaps you’ve already seen this:
http://www.dumblittleman.com/2007/07/become-autodidact-10-ways-to-become.html
In particular:
“2. Online Courses. Today you can learn from the best colleges and universities, from the comfort of your own home. Just a few of the online offerings: Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame.”
Surely you’ve heard of MITs OpenCourseWare:
http://ocw.mit.edu/
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm
I think J-schools need to completely restructure their programs as well as the way they teach journalism to maintain relevancy.
Education is free online, what’s not free is the diploma or the discussion and debate you can experience in classrooms. As expensive as college has become, it seems to become more and more of a scam in light of the same info being free online.
I think J-schools need to adopt more of a [socratic] seminar process, with computer touch screens in front of everyone that are hooked up to the interweb. Circular classrooms..
Multimedia Multiversities, so to speak:
http://www.lightstalkers.org/multimedia_multiversity
Thant’s my two cents.
September 1, 2007 at 12:26 amI try to set a tone in my classroom that students should worry about the learning and forget about the grade. I tell them that a less than optimal grade is simply a signal that they don’t completely grasp the concept - yet. It doesn’t mean they are stupid. It means they haven’t mastered the material and that they need to find a way to do that. We can do that together.
September 1, 2007 at 8:51 amBut for many, a B or less means failure. And in the real world, they are sometimes right. I’ve had students tell me that they understand the good learning vs good grades issue. In a perfect world they’d worry about the learning.
But they aspire to go to law, medical or graduate school. Forget the learning. They need the grades.
I tell my journalism students that a good university education [which they assist in creating by actively learning] gives them a competitive edge in the workplace and labour market. It also sets them up to be the leaders of the future, instead of being the followers.
This applies equally well in journalism as in law, medicine and engineering … it’s just that law, medicine and engineering mandate participation at uni by law, whereas journalism mandates its graduates’ participation by market force.
September 3, 2007 at 8:42 amMany of Pinsker’s comments seem to me to hold true, but how is the value of a college education changing, especially now that more and more universities offer online degrees?
September 3, 2007 at 11:16 pmAnd another thing … I think I understand very well the irate student who values a verifiable grade over a professor’s protestations of “perceived learning but low grade” … a student who is doing well ought to receive a grade that reflects the achievement and the academic should not muck about with the truth by saying “you did OK, i just didn’t give you a good mark”. The grade SHOULD reflect the work. If the student successfully jumps through the “A” hoop, he or she should receive an “A”. If not, then the academic owes the student the truth.
September 4, 2007 at 7:36 amI agree, and I think most educators give fair value for a grade. I know I do. As long as there’s no indication of cheating, the work itself earns points regardless of what I think the student put into it.
One of my favorite grade complaint stories is about a student who had never used Photoshop before and was rather phobic about using software. The assignment was to create a simple logo and turn in a GIF file. Hers earned a grade of C. It was quite mediocre.
Her protest: “But I worked so hard on it! I worked for HOURS!”
I appreciate that. Really, I do. But the end product didn’t look good. We’d gone over principles of color and typography, and how to use the Type tool and layers, but in the end, what she turned in was worth a C. It doesn’t matter how long she worked on it.
September 4, 2007 at 9:04 amYes, this is a valid story the world over. Maybe there’s a research funding proposal waiting to be written … Q: how to quantify student effort as a component of university assignments?
This has great professional significance of course: many reporters and editors (producers, photographers, copy subs, layout and design) spend countless hours banging away industriously at work which others (normally higher ups) later decide (for whatever reason, but hardly ever using a graded criteria sheet as we academics do) will not be published. “Story does not come together”/ “layout does not ‘work’ for me” / “too little time left in the bulletin for this … hold it over (forever)”. The number of times I’ve felt like screaming “But I’ve worked so HARD on this!” …
We all accept this is a professional reality but perhaps this aspect is underdeveloped in our journalism grading/formation criteria: how to prepare a journalist (or anyone for that matter) for their *effort* (specifically) to be undervalued? Because sometimes — we should acknowledge this upfront — our professional efforts (and the students’ efforts) ARE actually plenty good enough for the task to be published (or for the student to receive an A-grade) but other circumstances intrude. That’s a fact of life too.
I suspect we would get a useful answer from an education assessment professional — Mindy, know anyone qualified and willing to advise on this?
September 4, 2007 at 7:20 pmMindy, I read Pinsker’s comment and had the opposite of your reaction. I feel it’s absolutely true.
Something I’ve struggled with as a journalism major is that I don’t much believe in journalism school. We spend most of our time learning skills in a fictitious setting rather than under the real pressure of a newsroom. I find most of my peers feel no need to get the real experience that would make their journalism education more meaningful. It seems to put them so far behind that oftentimes I feel like I’m stuck in a remedial class.
The other day I had an epiphany about this. I’m taking Chaucer with R.A. Shoaf, an impressive and serious Chaucerian who’s been teaching the course for 20-plus years. We’re doing a take-home essay this weekend. He put three grammar points on the board. If you commit the first mistake (using the wrong “its”) you lose an entire letter grade. The next mistake would cost you half a letter grade, the last one (a comma splice) a fourth — for each instance. THIS is how you teach grammar. It is basic, basic stuff. Stuff we learned in elementary school. Stuff any journalism major should already know from having written, and written, and written. Stuff that shouldn’t require an entire 50 minutes to explain.
In this class, the substance is Chaucer. In journalism classes, the substance should be real work. A journalism department should be like a newsroom, with students reporting and other students editing for publication, where a mistake is out there for the world to see. That is the real penalty of ignorance or carelessness, and it’s the only way to teach journalism students the importance of the comma or the well-checked fact.
Moreover, I think journalism departments should put more emphasis on students’ taking outside courses and receiving that classical liberal arts education that Pinsker advocates. I’m taking Rhetorical Criticism in the English department, and we’re reading a lot of famous speeches politicians have delivered (like Checkers and Chappaquiddick). I think it’s going to be a key class for my development as a journalist because I’m learning to see through the rhetoric used to manipulate Americans, including journalists. If anyone can benefit from learning to scrutinize information and stories, it’s us. But we’re stuck in Editing, watching fishes eat each other to learn passive voice, while history and English majors fine-tune their minds and their sense of context.
September 20, 2007 at 3:59 pmStephanie, that’s a great comment. Thank you. I agree with just about everything you said.
While it is certainly true that journalism students (a) should take more high-level courses outside journalism, and (b) get more practical experience in the newsroom, there are many factors affecting how the reality plays out.
Some professors spend their whole course teaching you stuff you should have learned in high school. Some do not. Some courses tend to be fairly remedial because — in spite of that — few students can manage to get an A.
As for the outside courses — the requirements are designed to force our students to take a fair number of outside courses. Some students choose to take Chaucer, or an upper-level course in religion, anthropology, or computer science. Other students choose “Man and His Food,” which I hear is an easy A.
An education is like a lot of things in life — you get out of it what you put into it.
September 20, 2007 at 9:03 pm