A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H S T E V E N B R I N T
The classroom is one arena, and the most important one, for learning. But there are other arenas for learning on the university campus. STEVEN BRINT Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, The University of California, Riverside
We also looked at enrollment, which I think has nearly doubled between 1980 and 2015, the years I looked at in the book. It’s the same at the graduate level. If the institution were failing as badly as many scholars feel, and if it were on the brink of being reorganized by online entrepreneurs, I would doubt that there would be such robust growth in enrollment. But it gets only two cheers because of problems we haven’t solved. Perhaps the most important one is the quality of teaching and the amount of learning in higher education. Many students aren’t learning as much as they could. We have problems of cost, affordability. We have online competition that threatens to erode some of the developmental advantages of the physical campus. We have the growth of an adjunct labor force that’s very poorly paid. And we have some speech controversies. I think there’s some truth to what has been said about the climate for speech being non-conducive for certain ideas. So there are reasons for concern. Even though we see a very successful institutional arena, only two cheers because we have a long way to go to solve some of our problems. Moret: When I think of discussions about higher education in the U.S., we get a lot of attention around educational attainment and cost and student debt.
But compared to those two very important things, the amount of focus on learning is way, way behind. In fact, one of the major national higher education institutions a few years ago actually raised an alarm, saying it’s great that we want more people to go to college, but we need them to actually learn the critical thinking and communication skills that we espouse when we talk about higher education. Why do you think there’s not more attention on that topic? Brint: Now, there’s attention also to graduation rates. That’s good. But I couldn’t agree more that sometimes they say equality without quality is hollow. There’s no doubt students could be learning more in college. And we have to look at it in a complex way, because they’re learning outside the classroom, too. In fact, I just published a paper about the co-curriculum of student clubs and organizations. Students gain some adult skills in those arenas, too. They learn how to run meetings, recruit new members, put on events. Many students have those experiences, at least students who go to big universities. There are sometimes as many as 1,000 clubs or more at UC Berkeley. At some of these colleges, there’s one club for eight or nine students. You really have an opportunity there. So the point is that the classroom is one arena, and the most important one, for
learning. But there are other arenas for learning on the university campus. The issues are profound as far as learning goes. There’s very good evidence that students are not reading much of the assigned work. You can do things to increase student engagement and participation, which is one factor. If students are just passively listening, that’s not good. You need to break up the classes, have them talk about problems, and then report out and answer questions constantly in class. Many techniques encourage that. I even give out points to students who have not talked up if they’re willing to hazard an answer to a question. We do a lot of that. Accountability is important, too. Frequently, if not every class session, you have to ask students to write 100 or 150 words about what they read. That creates an accountability for reading. It’s very hard to write well unless you read, and you read deeply. I think it really is up to the individual instructors, with the institution’s help, to take what’s being learned in the research literature, disseminate that, and then help professors bring it into their practice. I also talk about student evaluations of teaching. Students are good evaluators of some dimensions of teaching, but not all. They cannot say whether they are learning as much as they could be learning. I write positively
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