Let's Make Education Broader, Not Higher

Imagine a company where revenue is generated through a combination of customer fees and government subsidies. The company’s product depends on intellectual capital, and people spend years acquiring the training they need to join the team. Due to its government funding, the company is subject to significant external regulation and also needs to maintain its paying customer base to survive. However, the incentive structure of the organization encourages employees to put their efforts into advancing in their field and exchanging information through professional channels. It does not reward them for sharing their findings with their customers or the public in non-technical ways, and often discourages such efforts by penalizing people who take time away from other job duties to do so. When political or public support for the company drops, or revenues decrease, the prevailing attitude in the corporation is that what they do is too complicated to explain to the general public, who “should” simply accept and respect their expertise.

Welcome to the world of higher education. Humans have managed to dominate the world because we developed the ability to communicate with each other better than any other species. As we moved from verbal means of sharing knowledge to reading and writing and communicating digitally, we have become extremely proficient at sharing information with each other and building complex bodies of knowledge in a variety of areas. But as our expertise increases, so does the need to provide specialized training to facilitate progress. While our existing K-16 educational structure is designed to do exactly that, we continue to face serious questions about how well the system is working.

In 1960, an average of 40% of the population of the United States had at least completed a high school degree, while in 2020 almost 90% of Americans had done so. As of 2019, approximately 30% of Americans had obtained a bachelor’s degree but as of 2018, 36 million Americans had started college but failed to complete a degree. While higher education administrators grapple with how to raise those numbers, the fact remains that many Americans have had no personal experience with college campuses or did not engage in the process long enough to earn a degree. Coupled with the explosive growth of knowledge in fields ranging from traditional STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields to social sciences and the humanities, it has become increasingly clear that relying on a short period of educational exposure to create an informed citizenry is impossible. And yet as a society, we are in dire need of people who have the knowledge necessary to make rational judgments about seemingly intractable topics such as climate change, social equity, and public health crises.

Meanwhile, faculty who are tasked with publishing and obtaining grant funding to keep their job often find that there is little incentive to spend time telling people outside their discipline what they are working on. The typical tenure and promotion guidelines faced by young faculty members and annual review guidelines used to evaluate people on an ongoing basis strongly prioritize research productivity over teaching and give virtually no credit to written materials or public presentations that serve as informal sources of continuing education and enable non-academics to learn about crucial topics in accessible, jargon-free ways. In addition, faculty who attempt to build community-engaged research programs by collaborating directly with colleagues in the community to explore problems and design solutions for mutually engaging issues often find that their research is considered less rigorous or important than more traditional approaches precisely because it is often disseminated in less technical, public-facing ways.

If there is a silver lining to the recent coronavirus pandemic, it is that this worldwide crisis has actually sparked notable increases in scientific literacy and interest in science in general. While we can hope this will result in a more diverse pool of students pursuing careers in science and health-related fields, it also indicates that people are willing to listen and learn about complicated topics when they recognize their real-world relevance and have access to information that is explained in accessible ways. Ironically, those of us who have spent our lives focused on teaching effectiveness already knew that. If we want to promote student learning, we have to help people see why what we are studying matters, to provide them with a means of translating unfamiliar terminology, and motivate them to think critically and creatively about what they are learning. Failing to do so results in student frustration or disengagement, and lost learning opportunities. However, as long as faculty are encouraged to produce, but not to share their knowledge, there is little incentive to spend time translating their work for public consumption.

Given this reality, we shouldn’t be surprised that questions about whether pursuing a college degree is worth the time and effort on the part of students, concerns that colleges and faculty members are wasting public funding, and skepticism about research that is presented as “too complicated” for regular people to understand are on the rise. While it may be true that non-professionals won’t grasp all the nuances of a given topic, we don’t expect toddlers to understand how fires burn before we teach them to recognize and avoid getting hurt when they are near an open flame. Perhaps if we encouraged and rewarded faculty for explaining what they are doing to laypeople as well as their peers, we could work together more effectively to find solutions to our most complex social and scientific challenges. I feel quite sure that a company that refused to explain itself in terms that its shareholders and customers could understand would find itself unable to remain viable in a rapidly changing world. We need to recognize that in higher education.