Higher Education is about transformation

Introduction

We hear a lot about crisis in higher education: crises of funding, crises of access, the student debt crises… but these crises are not very often linked to the education that is offered by universities.

When they are, it tends to be about universities failing to produce employable graduates or students failing to develop generic skills. This is because public debates over the value of an undergraduate education have been dominated by oversimplified accounts of their educational purposes. This has distorted our understanding of what a high-quality undergraduate education looks like.

We need to re-focus our attention on the educational purposes of undergraduate higher education. This involves developing a clearer understanding of the transformational nature of an undergraduate education.

How do we develop a vision of an inclusive, transformational higher education system rather than an elitist, reproductive one?

This question is motivated by the ways in which elite higher education continues to be positioned and normalised as the ideal form of higher education, even though its attractiveness is built on excluding far more people than it educates.

The most dominant simplified account of the purposes of undergraduate education is the argument that the key purpose of higher education is to provide students with the generic skills that employers value, which will support individual prosperity and economic development.

Next Section: What is undergraduate education for?

What is undergraduate education for?

While, at first, seeing the purpose of undergraduate education in terms of the development of generic skills might look convincing, it falls apart when we examine what this means in relation to specific skills.

It does not follow that if a student can solve a problem in chemistry, they can solve a sociological problem. This is because skilful acts of communication or problem-solving require knowledge about the subject matter that is the focus of the act, knowledge of the situation the student is in and knowledge of the people with whom the student is acting. Without such knowledge, these skills are useless.

This highlights the central role that knowledge plays in shaping the meaning of what students have gained from their university experiences. Take for example the following quote from a student from the sociology study: “There is no destination with this discipline… There is always something further and there is no point where you can stop and say ‘I understood, I am a sociologist’. … The thing is sociology makes you aware of every decision you make: how that would impact on my life and how it could impact on someone else. And it makes the decision harder to make.”

This quotation highlights how the student’s engagement with knowledge has changed her view of the world and her role in it. As part of this project, in a survey of over 700 sociology students from four universities, we found that the more students engaged with sociological knowledge the more they gained in social confidence and the more they wanted to change themselves and society. Interestingly, we also found that the more they engaged with this knowledge, the more they felt they had developed both academic and employability skills.

These changes give an insight into how engaging with knowledge at university changes students’ understanding of their disciplines, the world and themselves. This is a process that is so much more than the development of generic of skills or the gaining of information that can be found on the internet. It is a process that fundamentally changes who students are and what they can achieve in the world.

Next Section: Changes in students' sense of self

Changes in students' sense of self

We need to develop undergraduate degrees that focus on both who the students are and the knowledge with which they are engaging. This approach positions teaching in higher education as about designing ways in which particular students can develop an understanding of particular bodies of disciplinary and-or professional knowledge.

This approach also highlights that the transformational potential of undergraduate degrees lies in changes in students’ sense of self through their engagement with disciplinary and professional knowledge. This involves students relating their identities to their disciplines or professions and the world and seeing themselves implicated in knowledge. It is important to be clear that this does not always happen. It requires students to be intellectually engaged with their courses and to see it as an educational experience. This is dependent on both students and the quality of their educational experience.

Next Section: A transformative curriculum

A transformative curriculum

This way of offering an educational justification for the power of an undergraduate education suggests that we need to design curricula that are focused on providing students with access to knowledge that will transform their sense of who they are and what they can do in the world.

To do this, we need to have a clear sense of who our students are, how the knowledge we will give them access to is powerful, and who it will enable them to become in their wider lives as well as in their careers. This suggests educators have a responsibility to know how they think students will benefit by studying with them. It is also important to be clear that this is demanding work – it does not always work – and teachers need to continually collect, analyse and discuss evidence with their colleagues about how well their approaches to curriculum design and teaching are working.

If we understand the educational role of undergraduate degrees in this way, then this will have an impact on how we measure the quality of these degrees. In doing so, rather than graduate labour market outcomes, we would focus on how degree programmes are designed to give students access to powerful knowledge, the extent to which they are successful to providing students access to this knowledge and what students gain from their engagement with this knowledge.

It is worth noting that this is far more educationally demanding of degree programmes and universities than measuring labour market outcomes. It would also provide students with much more useful information about the quality of education offered by different degree programmes.

Next Section: Inclusive transformation

Inclusive transformation

We need to develop stronger educational arguments for the power of undergraduate education that offer clearer accounts of why the knowledge is powerful and who it will enable students to become in the future.

Universities need to commit to finding ways of making this powerful knowledge accessible to all of their students, so that we work towards building an inclusive, transformative higher education system.

This is challenging and difficult work that will involve a renewed focus on educational priorities. However, if we don’t commit to this then we will be left at the mercy of oversimplified accounts of the purposes of an undergraduate education that reinforce a reproductive, elitist higher education system.

This is an extract from “Higher education is about transformation”.

Higher Education is about transformation

Introduction

What is undergraduate education for?

Changes in students' sense of self

A transformative curriculum

Inclusive transformation

In this section

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Higher Education is about transformation

Introduction

What is undergraduate education for?

Changes in students' sense of self