by Ken O’Donnell, Vice Provost, California State University, Dominguez Hills
Earlier this month the UPCEA held its annual conference, convening leaders in professional, continuing, and distance education. Although attending was a first for me, I learned we’ve had this association since 1915.
Coincidentally, that’s the same year as the founding of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. It’s interesting to me that our predecessors felt the same urge to associate, but not with each other.
AAC&U is the champion of liberal learning for undergraduates, with a broad membership that tends to the private and residential. I’ve been its slavish apostle for years. When I worked at a system office I sent so many campus teams to its summer institutes that one year the organizers had to cap my submissions.
Why do I love them? We owe to AAC&U many of the frameworks we use to make sense of educational concepts that are vague but vital, like Essential Learning Outcomes, Valid Assessments of Liberal Undergraduate Education, and High-Impact Practices. They keep giving us words for things that matter, and the word is good.
In recent decades the AAC&U has stretched, getting serious about equity, inclusiveness, and applied learning. Hallelujah.
Cut to: UPCEA, meanwhile, has been courting these same masses all along, with a shameless emphasis on convenience, relevance, and practicality. Its members are just as quality-conscious, but they take their cues from students and employers rather than faculty. Something’s lost in that trade, but much is gained. People who aren’t sure college will pay off can find plenty of reassurance here. Perhaps the biggest gainers are working adults, who need not only a visible payoff but some help fitting college into the rest of their lives, and courses and teaching styles that respect their hard-won experience, cultural assets, and wisdom.
Interestingly, as AAC&U has become more egalitarian, UPCEA is going lofty. Automation and AI mean the work left for humans is getting more personal and intellectual. Every year, the proficiencies on UPCEA’s employer wish list sound a little more like the AAC&U’s Essential Learning Outcomes. Keynoter Michelle Wiese, promoting her book Long Life Learning, observed that the main thing missing between educators and hiring managers is an interpreter.
This message resonates with me, so I bought her book. I wanted to see what reunification might look like.
Her main argument, and her title, arise from a time warp we’re in for: careers are getting shorter, and lives are getting longer. It’s been a generation or two since college was mostly for post-adolescents; in our lifetimes it will probably finish that evolution, and be the thing we all routinely dip back into between professions.
She argues that making that work will mean making even the most abstract intellectual development visible and modular. I think she’s right, but the book is blind to some limitations to this thinking. The learning, certificates, and proficiencies won’t quite snap together like Legos, as Weise hopes.
A National Academies series called How People Learn provides a sobering counterview: the human skills we increasingly count on for our effectiveness and employment – things like communication, interpersonal acuity, persuasiveness, and problem solving – didn’t come to us in a single irreversible step. Instead, this kind of learning is always murky, liminal, iterative, recursive. Some days you think you get it and then you slip back and have to try again. It is a hot mess, warmed slowly over years of time and effort, interrupted by brief periods of cooling. It is utterly unstackable.
But so help us, we have to try. We need the markers and assessments for prior learning in abstract, human skills. We need UPCEA’s knack for respecting maturity, applied to prior learning in general education as reliably as it’s applied to coding, or accounting. And of course, we need to celebrate relevance, instead of eschewing it, and we need to teach our students on their schedules instead of ours. We can’t hit our goals for degree attainment – let alone equity – in any other way.
We’re overdue for the kind of big re-think NASH is calling for. Let’s tear down this wall.