Postliberal Education

As the saying goes, the plural of anecdotes is not data. While individual stories or anecdotes can be compelling and informative, they do not constitute reliable evidence, which requires systematic collection and analysis.

Still, I suspect if you teach a college class that my experience resembles yours.

Classroom attendance has become much more irregular. Student expectations about instructors’ willingness to grant extensions and make other kinds of accommodations have escalated sharply. Final exams have increasingly become a thing of the past. Average grades have risen steeply, while assigned reading and writing requirements have fallen.

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It’s all too easy to view these trends through a declensionist lens, as a retreat from rigor and quality, driven by changes in student demographics, institutional survival strategies, and cultural shifts. Certainly, a host of intersecting developments have contributed to these tendencies:

• The increasing number of students who are juggling academic, work and familial responsibilities.
• Students from a broader range of educational backgrounds, many of whom received an uneven education in high school and have a host of learning needs.
• The pandemic’s impact, which challenged traditional attendance expectations and the use and necessity of final exams.
• The pressure to improve student retention and graduation rates, which has led to policies that make it easier for students to achieve good grades.
• A consumer mentality, which views education as a service that families are purchasing, resulting in heightened expectations for flexibility and personal accommodations.

Yet, I suspect, something bigger is going on. This is a shift from an earlier ideal of a liberal education toward a postliberal conception of college.

Much as liberalism as a political, economic and moral philosophy has come under attack, so, too, has the idea of a traditional liberal education—for reasons both good and ill.

What do I mean by postliberal education?

This is a broad term that can take various forms, much as postliberalism as a political philosophy can take a conservative form, emphasizing family, community and nation, or left-wing forms, stressing participatory governance and communal and collective well-being.

On the one hand, a postliberal education can emphasize personalization and choice, or, alternatively, practical outcomes, like employability, over process or content oriented educational goals.

In either case, postliberal education:

• Values student well-being and mental health alongside academic achievement. It considers excessive stress, such as that from an overemphasis on grades and exams, to be detrimental to students’ learning. This philosophy encourages instructors to adopt alternative assessment methods that may reduce stress and encourage more in-depth learning, such as project-based assessments and continuous evaluation.

• Seeks to be more inclusive and supportive of diverse student populations. It seeks to support all students, including those with disabilities, different learning styles and varied cultural backgrounds. Accommodations such as extended test times, alternative assessment formats and attendance flexibility are part of these efforts, aiming to provide an equitable educational environment where all students have the opportunity to succeed.

• Maximizes student choice. It allows students to fulfill graduation requirements in a wide variety of ways.

A key question is whether these trends will dilute the quality and rigor of college education or create a more responsive educational system that better prepares students for a diverse and rapidly changing world.

I have mixed feelings about this question.

I have no doubt that we can make the college experience more engaging, relevant, developmental and impactful. But if we are to do this, the faculty must clearly identify their institution’s essential learning goals and ensure that students actually achieve those aims.

Here’s what we know:

• Greater flexibility in assessment can actually increase academic rigor by allowing students to engage more deeply with material in a manner that suits their learning styles.
• Universal design for learning principles, which involve designing course materials, teaching methods and assessments to be accessible for all students from the outset, can create an inclusive educational environment that respects the needs of all students while upholding the integrity and rigor of their academic programs.
• Multiple forms of assessment, such as projects, presentations, portfolios and other ways to demonstrate mastery, can accommodate different learning styles and abilities without lowering standards.
• Alternatives to the standard lecture and discussion courses can make learning more relevant to students’ future careers and personal growth. Approaches that are inquiry- and project-driven and experiential can cultivate deeper connection between students, their professors and their fields of study, resulting in more robust and durable educational outcomes. They also enhance soft skills such as communication, teamwork and problem-solving, which are crucial in any professional setting.

Here are some examples:

Clinicals offer training that involves applying theoretical knowledge in real world environments under expert supervision to gain practical skills. This approach can be adapted outside of medical education, for example, through teaching or counseling practicums, legal clinics, business or engineering consulting projects, programming bootcamps, and social work field placements.

Field- or community-based education takes place within an environment relevant to the student’s area of study. Examples include geological or archaeological digs, social work in community settings, and environmental research in natural habitats.

Mentored research can be lab-based, but can also involve archival research, data analysis, environmental policy research, ethnographic research, interviews, market research and policy analysis.

Service learning integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility and strengthen communities. Students might take part in tutoring and literacy projects, river cleanups, reforestation, community gardens, health awareness campaigns, food security projects, nonprofit business consulting, technology education, support for vulnerable populations, public arts installations, or community theater.

Studio courses, which are common in fields such as art, architecture, design, and digital media, involve a feedback process where students present their work and receive critiques from instructors and peers. This approach can certainly be adapted to other academic fields, for instance, through:

• Public presentations and peer review sessions in humanities and social science courses, where critique focuses on methods and interpretation.
• Debates and round-table discussions on controversial or complex topics, where students must critically defend their positions.
• Lab reviews where students can present their experimental designs, data and conclusions for peer and instructor feedback before finalizing their lab reports.
• Data analysis sessions, where students collaborate and critique each other’s data interpretation and the statistical methods employed to enhance analytical skills and scientific rigor.
• Design reviews, where students present their engineering projects, software, or hardware designs and receive structured feedback similar to that in architectural studio courses.
• Hackathons and design sprints, where students develop solutions to problems quickly and then receive constructive feedback.
• Business or marketing plan competitions that focus on feasibility, creativity and practicality.
• Case study reviews, where students must present solutions and strategies that are critiqued by peers and instructors.
• Supervised internships, where students work in a professional environment under the guidance of a supervisor or mentor.

Liberalism of all kinds is currently under attack from multiple directions. The reasons are obvious: Liberalism’s emphasis on competitive markets has led to increased inequalities of wealth and income and resulted in environmental degradation. Its preoccupation with individual rights has undermined social cohesion and community values and contributed to cultural and social fragmentation. Its promotion of globalization has harmed local industries. Its foreign policy, which claims to advance democracy, has, in practice, been interventionist and sought to uphold Western interests.

A traditional liberal education, too, faces intense scrutiny due to its perceived failures and shortcomings, including its cost, inequities, uncertain outcomes, and, yes, questionable value.

American higher education is changing right before our eyes. The growth of online education and the increased reliance on technology are only the most glaring symbols of change. We are also witnessing far-reaching shifts in demographics and enrollment in majors. We’ve also seen an increased focus on students’ well-being and improving support services.

But from my perspective, higher ed hasn’t changed too much; it has changed too little. For all the superficial transformations, the educational experience that we offer still closely resembles the one I received four decades ago. Change needs to occur not only on the pedagogical level but on the curricular level, if we are to produce graduates who possess essential 21st century knowledge and skills.

As much as I personally admire a structured undergraduate core curriculum, like Columbia’s, in which all students receive a common grounding in moral and political philosophy; masterworks of literature, art and music; and exposure to the frontiers of science, I understand that such an approach is almost impossible to duplicate outside of honors programs.

Most faculty members feel unprepared to teach such courses, while students crave flexibility and choice.

That said, there are steps campuses can take to ensure that many more students graduate with the well-rounded education a college diploma should signify. That will require the faculty, which control the curriculum, to:

1. Clearly identify the essential literacies that every student should master: cultural, financial, historical, mathematical, statistical and scientific (including the behavioral, natural, psychological and social sciences).
2. Reimagine their gen ed curriculum not as a smorgasbord of various discipline-based introductory courses, but, rather, as a more cohesive, coherent educational experience.

It’s not enough, in my view, to require students to take one or two introductory courses in key disciplines. Those courses need to be redesigned to truly instill the competencies and coverage we deem essential.

This can be done in a various ways: Campuses can offer courses with a broad thematic focus, like cultural intermixture, democracy, equality, ethnicity, geography and climate, the frontiers of science, globalization, justice, rights (including human rights), or technology and society.

Another approach is to incentivize participation in areas of high importance, for example, by awarding certificates or diploma recognition to students who:

• Attend artistic performances and exhibitions, integrated with reflective or analytical assignments.
• Complete a sequence of cultural studies courses that involves the comparative analysis of diverse cultures and subcultures.
• Study a number of pressing global challenges from a variety of disciplinary angles.
• Fulfill a quantitative reasoning program that demonstrates that they are conversant with basic statistics, data analysis, and mathematical reasoning skills.
• Have been introduced to the leading edges of scientific and social scientific analysis.

I know: An undergraduate education can’t cover everything. But we can certainly do a better job of ensuring that our students graduate with the rudiments of a liberal education and with the range of learning experiences that they should encounter in college. That’s the true postliberal education we need.