The Development and Future of Higher Education

Introduction

Higher education curriculum and practice responds to cultural, historical, political, and social events. Moreover, the curriculum in higher education institutions is purpose-driven, reflecting the educational theories and philosophies that guide the school’s mission and vision. Some institutions of higher learning aim for a competency-based curriculum, while others develop more subject-oriented or liberal arts-based curricula. Private and public schools may also respond differently to external or environmental pressures and influences. Whereas American higher education institutions had been directly influenced by their counterparts in Western Europe and Britain, more recent generations of American college and university students have received an education that is more specifically American in terms of content, tone, and pedagogy.
Contemporary social priorities and needs also affect higher education curriculum and priorities. Gender equality, racial parity, and other social justice issues can become especially important not just to campus life and the administrative environment, but to curriculum as well. Curricular choices can be driven by student interest, demographics, and demand, or by the professors. Visiting professors can add nuance to a staid curriculum, while tenured professors offer core content that defines the characteristic political philosophies of the school. In fact, social justice impacts administrative level decisions in higher education, including decisions related to hiring and retaining faculty and staff. Deans and other educational leaders in institutes of higher learning can have a strong bearing on curricular decisions, even shaping departmental practices and structures.
Funding may also impact curriculum development, and most notably highlight the potential conflicts of interest in privately funded colleges. Changes to curriculum can be driven from the ground up, led by professors, or from the top down, driven by deans and administrators. The political climate in higher education is also collectively shaped through scholarly and professional organizations and coalitions. It is also important to note the role that admissions policies and programs have on higher education curriculum. Admissions decisions can be politically and socially motivated, such as to increase the diversity of the student body along lines of gender, race, and class. The shift in population demographics and the increasing number of international students accessing American higher education also impacts curriculum and pedagogy, as well as administrative decisions. Access to funding through student loans, grants, and scholarship programs also helps to diversify the student body, which in turn stimulates changes in curricular content. Technology and the growth of online learning opportunities also have a strong bearing on curriculum development and higher educational practices.
Potential future issues in education are in fact as much related to student demographics and demands as they are to administrative choices and school policies. Technology may also shape the curricula of the future in colleges and universities. The job market and international labor market issues may also inspire changes to higher education curriculum, and not just in vocation-focused institutions. Globalization has also increased the flow of students in international programs. Even liberal arts colleges and universities change their curriculum in response to the changing needs of the global economy, as well as to changing political philosophies. The future of higher education may reveal a stronger cleavage between vocational and liberal arts schools, and it may also reveal the growing need for more government-assisted tuition programs to promote social justice and improve the American economy.
Higher Education in Colonial America
England’s historic universities like Oxford and Cambridge provided the foundation and model for the earliest institutes of higher learning in the New World. Cambridge, Massachusetts and Harvard University were overtly and directly modeled after its Old World counterpart. Then Harvard went on to be “the great prototype for all the later colleges of North America,” (Brubacher & Rudy, 2004, p. 3). Yale and Princeton followed suit, as did the College of William and Mary, which were more influenced by Oxford down to their “Oxford-bred faculty,” (Brubacher & Rudy, 2004, p. 4). As with their Old World counterparts, the New World colleges and universities were religious institutions at their heart. Puritan Christianity therefore heavily influenced the curriculum of higher education. The curriculum veered little from that of a seminary school.
Within a few generations of their establishment, though, colonialists recognized that it would be impossible to perfectly mimic the curricular and pedagogical models of Oxford and Cambridge. Even as Enlightenment philosophies infiltrated the curricula, American colleges and universities remained religious. Still, the social and cultural environment, politics, and even the physical environment in the New World required unique approaches to curriculum design and development. The colleges and universities of the New World gradually developed a life of their own. Whereas faculty and staff would have originally consisted of first or second generation settlers, after independence institutions of higher learning became more quintessentially American.
American independence made it apparent that the American system of higher education, while owing its foundation to Britain, needed to respond to the unique demands and needs of settlers. Those demands included appealing to religious and cultural plurality. Higher education curricula needed to remain relevant to diverse settlers with differential needs. Furthermore, the Revolution directly affected universities and colleges. Their administrators and faculty inevitably revealed their political leanings, and the war often impacted the schools. Some universities became philosophical battlegrounds for revolutionary values, while others were physical battlegrounds. As Lucas (2006) also points out, the American Revolution caused the colonial colleges like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to become “embroiled in the turmoil,” partly because of the cleavages that emerged between revolutionary and loyalist allegiances of some faculty and staff (p. 112). Therefore, the first significant historical event that impacted today’s American higher education curriculum was the Revolution.
Diversity in Early American Higher Education
Another one of the most important historical or social situations that impacted the curriculum of today was the diversity of the American population. The population of the United States became increasingly diverse from the 19th century onwards. Even in colonial times, settlers hailed from different religious, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. However, universities remained Protestant in character and curricular content well into the nineteenth century. Cambridge and Oxford curricula, Protestant in nature, still infiltrated the curricula of Harvard and Yale. Thus, American institutions of higher learning retained theological curricula and passed on the tradition of a religiously motivated curriculum to Harvard, Yale, and other colonial universities. In spite of the relative homogeneity of Protestant institutions, student bodies and faculty in the colonies were becoming more diverse than in the New World.
The rise of Enlightenment philosophy and secular values also helped to reshape the curriculum of higher education away from its religious foundations and towards the current liberal arts model. By the late 1700s, colonial colleges and universities were teaching the natural sciences, mathematics, modern languages, literature, and a wealth of other subjects to promote both depth and breadth of knowledge (Lucas, 2006). Although it is hard to imagine a college curriculum today without math and science, the introduction of science and math into higher education was a huge leap from the curricula of colonial schools. Colonial schools did not just serve as proxy seminary schools but also as institutions that instructed students in the classics of the Greco-Roman tradition. The “liberal arts” curriculum was in fact defined by its being mainly about the literature and philosophies of classical Greece and Rome. In this way, colonial and early American colleges and universities differed little from their counterparts in Britain since Medieval times. Many of the Founding Fathers like Jefferson and Franklin had, however, advocated heavily toward a broader liberal arts curriculum that included history, politics, government, and modern languages as well as math and science (Brubacher & Rudy, 2004, p. 14). By the middle of the 19th century, math and science were mainstay subjects even in liberal arts schools. The fundamental purpose of higher education was changing in America, reflecting but also promoting social change.
Social Justice, Gender, and Race
Diversity would later make the next two most important historical developments in higher education in America: the integration of people of color and women into the student body and faculty. Throughout most of American history, women were systematically excluded from higher education. “Serious scholarship, it was widely believed, lay beyond female capabilities,” (Lucas, 2006, p. 122). The first American college to become coeducational was Oberlin in 1833. By 1841, Oberlin had graduated the first three females in the Bachelor of Arts program, the exact same course of studies and curriculum the male graduates received (Lucas, 2006, p. 122). Oberlin also “freely admitted people of color of both sexes,” making it easily the most progressive American college of the 19th century (Lucas, 2006, p. 122). Blacks, like women, were generally excluded from institutions of higher education. Diversity drew attention to the dichotomies in American society, between the egalitarian social values and the outmoded hierarchical ones that were entrenched in Old World views of higher education. Higher education was long considered an elite tradition, perpetuating social hierarchies. American values called into question the elitist nature of university education.
Socio-economic class diversity also changed the American college and university curriculum. Whereas colleges and universities had once catered to the already elite members of society, American culture eschewed the Old World social hierarchies. Like other American social, cultural, and political institutions, universities needed to be egalitarian and accessible to all—or at least all white men. An American university also had to reconcile the admiration of “self-made men,” even those who never attended college or university, with the classist values upon which those very same universities had been founded (Lucas, 2006, p. 122-123). American universities could not just focus on a classics-oriented curriculum of little relevance to farmers and entrepreneurs. The curricula also needed to include pragmatic knowledge, and thus began the change from the liberal arts towards a more vocational-based focus in higher education. Liberal arts curricula remained important in certain social circles and to some universities but the new schools opening up around the country needed to appeal to their communities and the next generation of matriculated students.
Liberal Arts Versus Vocational Curricula
A conflict was brewing in American higher education by the middle of the 19th century. The very concept of a vocational motive or purpose in higher education is a modern one. Prior to the 19th century, “there was no concept that the varying interests or professional plans of the individual student should be taken into account in constructing a curriculum,” (Brubacher & Rudy, 2004, p. 13). Instruction in the classics, including philosophy, religion, Greek and Latin was considered the one and only function of higher education. Higher education imparted a fixed and immutable body of knowledge to the men worthy of its reception (Brubacher & Rudy, 2004). While the curriculum might have some variations, universities would not veer from the central classics. A traditional liberal arts institution also promoted a specific model of education that was residential in nature, with the aim of creating a community of like-minded individuals in “a kind of total immersion in a setting devoted to learning,” (Geiger, 2015, p. 4). As American schools shifted towards a vocational model, the notion of a total immersion institution became something unique to the liberal arts education.
Several cultural, social, political, and historical shifts altered the curriculum of colleges and universities in the United States. One was Westward expansion, and the he role, function, and purpose of higher education changed in North America. Westward expansion played a significant role in higher education curriculum. Land grants to colleges and universities helped to expand access to institutions of higher learning in new American territories. Specifically, the Land-Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 enabled the proliferation of new universities and colleges that did not have the baggage of their colonial counterparts like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Kaufman, 2017). Whereas the latter types of universities were established with elitist and primarily theologically driven curricula, the new universities of the 19th century focused on pragmatism and populism. In the 17th century, 70% of Harvard graduates were clergymen; that number dipped to 45% in the 18th century and only 10% in the late 19th century (Kaufman, 2017). New universities did not necessarily cultivate the same kind of residential campus environment, and were instead “secular institutions built on a practical mandate--to promote agriculture, science, and technology,” (Kaufman, 2017, p. 1). After World War II, the GI bill also enabled greater access to higher learning among populations that would have previously been excluded: especially those of lower socio-economic status.
Social and cultural changes in America impacted even the curricula of the institutions most closely connected to and aligned with the Old World, especially as science and technology started to infiltrate the classic liberal arts curriculum. When the liberal arts institutions included science, math, and technology into their curricula, it legitimized these subjects and led the overall zeitgeist of higher education away from its religious or liturgical function in the Protestant elite world. Universities and colleges did not need to become fully vocational in nature to offer broader instruction in subjects beyond those deemed relevant to the medieval mind.
At first the clash between science and religion in higher education would have informed the division between liberal arts and vocational curricula. However, American colleges started to evolve liberal arts curricula that also included some degree of vocational training. Within the same university, it would be possible to find curricula geared mainly towards academia and scholasticism as well as programs that contained content for professional development. At the same time, American higher education started to cleave between schools that were offering vocational and schools that were offering liberal arts curricula. In fact, the anti-intellectual crisis in American society today is in part due to the inability of universities to successfully resolve their conflicted role. Liberal arts schools promote social justice consciously, while inadvertently playing into the stereotype of ivory tower elitism. Even when curriculum directly covered content promoting egalitarianism, workers’ rights, and social justice, the principles of equality and equal access were tough to achieve in practice. The division of higher education into vocational versus liberal arts institutions reflects also the dichotomous and potentially conflicting views towards how higher educational curricula should be developed.
The Industrial Revolution was also a major historical event that changed higher education curriculum development and content in the United States. Coinciding with the labor rights movement, the Industrial Revolution inspired a shift towards vocational training to prepare workers for the demands of skilled and semi-skilled positions. With vocation-focused curricula, colleges and universities became somewhat less focused on epistemology and more on pragmatism. The goal of higher education became as much about career training as about consciousness raising and promoting higher social values. World War Two again changed higher education when, for the first time in history, women temporarily outnumbered men in enrollments (Forest & Kinser, 2002). The Twentieth Century witnessed more frequent and more significant changes to higher education in America than in the previous two centuries. Not only were civil rights impacting educational practices, pedagogy, and curriculum, but the proliferation of colleges and universities nationwide meant that more and more people were receiving a higher education. Funding programs also expanded, increasing the opportunities for higher learning. The job market had also changed dramatically and continues to change, requiring alterations in approaches to curriculum development.
Technology and Liberal Arts
Higher education curriculum changes reflect changes in educational technology. While technology is often part of educational curricula, the use of technology in education practice and pedagogy also transforms the content and nature of the curriculum. Teaching technology is a direct outcropping of the shift towards specifically vocational training even at elite colleges and universities, which occurred throughout the late 19th century. A major difference between vocational and liberal arts schools was campus life and setting. Whereas a liberal arts school fostered an educational community replete with immersive residences, a technical or vocational school was more utilitarian in function. Interestingly, community colleges once offered students from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to prepare themselves for a liberal arts education; only in the 1970s community colleges started to shift towards vocational training (Stevens & Kirst, 2015). By the 20th century, American higher education had been divided neatly along two lines: institutions of higher learning that promoted the classical liberal arts curriculum and the newer vocationally-minded institutions that focused on preparing students for the job market.
Economic demands and egalitarian social norms radically transformed the focus of higher education curriculum to welcome hard science and technology. This is not to say that philosophy and other classic liberal arts studies were excluded from curricula, but simply that practical skills and knowledge became as important as the liberal arts program. A current shift in higher education is also related to technology, both in terms of curriculum content and in pedagogical practice. E-learning and digital work environments have changed higher education curriculum and pedagogy. Just as the late 19th and early 20th century witnessed a major shift in the opening of new universities, the 21st century offers the opportunity for flexible learning schedules and academic programs. Whereas the liberal arts model of the Ivy League remained relevant, the role of higher education had become more about social justice and increasing access and opportunity for all people.
Digital tools and e-learning are changing leadership and organizational policies in higher education too. “There is a relationship between e-learning policy, organizational change and the implementation of e-learning,” (DeFreitas & Oliver, 2005, p. 81). Whereas curriculum used to take a back seat in higher education, a university activity that does not often receive the attention it deserves,” technology is challenging colleges and universities to reflect on curriculum changes, development, and practice (Barradell, Barrie & Peseta, 2017, p. 8). Political motivations, organizational culture, and budgetary considerations may all play into curriculum decisions. Whereas K-12 public school curricula are restricted by state and federal educational policy, the curricula of universities and colleges is driven by different factors including the need to remain competitive and the need to respond to student expectations. In the United States, the federal government may occasionally shift its funding policies for state universities but even those decisions do not necessarily impact curriculum. The higher education curriculum in the United States responds somewhat to market forces, but many institutions of higher learning exhibit substantive autonomy and academic freedom (Goedegebuure, Kaiser, Maassen & DeWeert, 2014). However, professors at colleges and universities are constrained by their own institutions’’ missions, policies, and philosophies.
Evaluating and Improving Curriculum: The Problem with For-Profit Learning, and “Degree Mills”
A recent trend in higher education has been fragmentation of the market into traditional non-profit colleges and universities. Whether private or public, these institutions of higher learning more closely resemble their colonial counterparts in that they purport to impart a sense of social responsibility and/or vocational training. Technology has also enabled the proliferation of for-profit educational institutions that are not subject to the same types of regulations or oversight as their non-profit counterparts. Although the for-profit institutions are often not taken seriously as institutions of higher learning, they have allowed student-consumers to essentially purchase their degrees to gain entry or access into a professional organization. The for-profit universities are also free to create and disseminate whatever curricula best suits their commercial interests. It is unlikely that for-profit institutions will ever gain the status, reputation, or notoriety of their liberal arts counterparts because of their admissions policies as well as the lack of oversight in their curriculum. Unlike state and private non-profit institutions, for-profit universities respond to market forces and not to the ethics of higher learning. The curriculum in for-profit institutions will continue to respond to market forces, and will also be geared towards vocational training. Profit-driven institutions essentially sell degrees, as students are not necessarily eligible for grants and funding.
Conclusion: Planning for the Future
Future changes to higher education will reflect the social and political climate. Liberal arts schools may change more slowly, in the same way that liberal arts schools do continue to value philosophy, language arts, and the humanities as they did centuries ago. The main curriculum changes will come to individual programs, particularly at the Baccalaureate level. Curriculum has already diversified to become less Euro-centric, welcoming coursework in not just comparative religion, philosophy, art, music, and history, but in-depth analysis of the cultural expressions in non-European societies. The future will likely witness even broader diversification of coursework, as faculty and students will invariably hail from different locales to promote a more inclusive and unique curricular content. Administrators can and should aim for curriculum changes that stimulate creative and critical thought, with a goal of promoting values like inclusiveness and equality. Curriculum should also be responsive to the need for more information literacy, media literacy, and science literacy, even if it simultaneously readies students for a competitive job market. Vocational and business skills can be learned on the job; critical thinking and liberal arts, on the other hand, need to be endemic to the university curriculum.




References

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Stevens, M. & Kirst, M.W. (2015). Remaking College. Stanford University Press.





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