Too few students are leaving colleges and universities with the skills, knowledge, and dispositions that prepare them for work, life, and responsible citizenship. This is especially true for “new majority” students from traditionally underserved populations whose success and flourishing are critical for our shared future economic and civic well-being.
Our country needs more postsecondary graduates with high-quality degrees and certificates. Currently our higher education system is not meeting these needs.
Too few students are graduating from college, and too many students who do graduate are underprepared, lacking the proficiencies needed for twenty-first-century work and citizenship (Gaston, forthcoming). Among students who begin their education at community colleges with the intent of earning a four-year degree, only one in seven students—and fewer than one in ten Latino or African American students—have completed the degree after six years (Hillman et al. 2014). For students who do graduate, there is “abundant evidence that too many students are falling short” in terms of learning gains and outcomes (Finley 2012, vii; see also Bok 2006).
Worse, these failures fall hardest on traditionally underserved groups—minorities, first-generation and returning students, and those from lower-income groups. The nation’s promise of genuine educational opportunity and equitable results has yet to be met. As Witham et al. (2015) note, “despite years of increasing diversity in overall postsecondary enrollment, educational opportunity in the United States—and the economic and social benefits it affords—remains markedly stratified along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines” (8). Students from low-income families and communities of color are less likely to go to college, less likely to graduate, and are more typically “tracked toward less-selective colleges and universities, where they are more likely to need remedial instruction… and less likely to be offered rigorous and engaging learning experiences that will help them fulfill their aspirations” (Witham et al. 2015, 12-13).
Providing all students with a rigorous liberal education will promote economic competitiveness, democratic vitality, and personal development.
To be economically competitive, we will need more individuals with a demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve difficult problems (Board 2010). For the individual, study after study suggests that achieving the degree is essential to fully participating and prospering in an everchanging economy. Employer surveys indicate that students are best prepared by an engaged liberal education that includes and integrates both broad-based knowledge and skills and specific skills and knowledge in a major or field of study (Hart Research Associates 2013).
Equally important, a liberal education is essential for the development and empowerment of students as citizen leaders and in their personal lives. We face complex civic and global problems that demand a citizenry capable of sorting information, doing analysis, and taking action to solve complex problems; or as the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences puts it in The Heart of the Matter, “our need for a broadly literate population is more urgent than ever.... As a nation, we need to provide an educational foundation for our future stability and prosperity—drawing on all areas of knowledge” (2013, 18). At its best, a liberal education broadens students’ perspectives and engages them in problem-centered inquiry about pressing and perennial issues. By bringing students into communities where they learn from those whose experiences and views are different from their own, it also builds important capacities we need to succeed as a diverse and collaborative democracy.
To meet our society’s and our students’ needs, colleges and universities should adopt a broad-based, comprehensive reform of undergraduate education, beginning with general education. This reform in support of a new vision of higher education must be a collaborative and cooperative effort across all parts of higher education.
Unfortunately, too few students are benefitting from the kind of engaged liberal education that best prepares graduates both for economic opportunity and for lives in a complex world. The program and experience that touches almost all students, general education, has failed to contribute as it should to students’ achievement of a sound liberal education. The GEMs initiative addresses this systemic weakness in US higher education.
The current common approach to general education, a menu-driven, check-off system mainly aimed at breadth of content coverage prior to and separate from in-depth study in a major, is inadequate to develop the skills and capacities students need and society values. The menu-driven approach to general education too often results in uncoordinated coursework that does not directly address students’ interests and needs, does very little to develop proficiencies necessary either for work or for citizenship, and is unclear about results. This problem is serious enough at individual institutions, and it is compounded as many students now attend more than one institution and have to deal with differing requirements and programmatic goals and designs. As a result, “most students in most institutions of higher learning experience general education programs ill-designed to accomplish their stated purposes and ill- suited to ensure the wide range of learning outcomes that define degrees ”
(Gaston, forthcoming). The haphazard character of this kind of general education makes it difficult for students, especially as they “swirl” between and among institutions, even to see, let alone reap, the learning benefits higher education should offer.
Because it is the nation’s largest educational program, involving virtually all degree-seeking students, general education provides the site and the opportunity to provide more equitably the kind of undergraduate education—a liberal and opportunity-expanding education—that both individuals and society need. The GEMs initiative provides a proficiency-based, portable approach to general education that is designed to help all students develop mastery of essential skills, knowledge, and capacities that are relevant to their lives, motivations, and goals. Specifically, GEMs will help higher education develop programs for general education that focus on core proficiencies, intentional educational pathways within and across institutions, and students’ engagement in work that allows assessment of their demonstrated accomplishments in inquiry- and problem-based learning. GEMs will strengthen and integrate students’ broad learning across the liberal arts and sciences by connecting general education both to big questions in society and to students’ major fields.
GEMs is designed to elaborate and implement the approach to general education outlined in the Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP) (Adelman et al. 2014). The DQP affirms that general education should extend from first to final year and should both help students place their specialized learning in a larger context and also help students work on the kinds of complex, multidimensional questions—in both science and society—that they will inevitably encounter as citizens (see fig. 1, page 8). GEMs seeks, in other words, to help students reap the full benefits of an education across multiple areas of study by engaging students in questions and problems that extend beyond any single discipline or academic field, connecting their broad academic studies with societal contexts, questions, and challenges.
Building from AAC&U’s LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes (National Leadership Council 2007), the DQP provides a national framework for desired student learning outcomes that can be applied to general education within and across institutional settings, regardless of whether the learning environment is face-to-face, online, or a combination of the two. As students develop a plan of study, it is crucial that their prior academic and other relevant work and experiences be portable and creditworthy, and that it be clear to students how to continue to demonstrate their achievements and make progress toward completion. Similarly, the GEMs Principles and Guidelines provide criteria to assist institutions in developing curricula and programs that will help students develop crucial, lasting capacities or proficiencies wherever they begin their studies and wherever they complete them (Board 2008).
The GEMs Principles and Guidelines are designed to help colleges and universities see themselves as part of a larger, shared, national endeavor promoting students’ progress wherever and whenever they enter or continue the educational process and in diverse modes of instruction.