There is no shortage of evidence showing that today’s students are pursuing higher education in order to secure employment. The American Freshman Survey, used by colleges and universities since 1966 to collect data on incoming college students, reports that in 2019, 83.5% of first-year students said getting a better job was a very important reason for attending college, followed by 78.6% who said getting training for a specific job. In contrast, the majority of students entering college in 1975 cited “Being an authority in my field” (73.0%) and “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” (67.3%) as very important reasons.
Regardless of why students are pursuing higher
education and regardless of the discipline they study, a post-secondary
education has the potential to transform learners in ways we cannot articulate
in our learning goals or capture with our assessment measures. To paraphrase
Hamlet (and take liberties with what he said), there are more things in heaven
and earth than are dreamt of in our rubrics.
Stories of student transformation are important to
tell; they have a place in our assessment narrative.
These stories are not to be confused with the student
testimonials found on virtually every college website, quips and quotes from
graduates that credit their academic program with giving them the skills and
confidence to pursue their dreams. Neither are they nestled in the emails
students write their faculty at the close of a term that report how much they
learned in a class and what an inspiration the faculty member was.
In fact, stories of transformation aren’t about us or the institution. They are about
the individual student, the person.
They are the story of a college junior, a young woman
who, after completing a seminar in Willa Cather one summer, embarked on a
cross-country trip with her boyfriend and, rather than visit Texas, planned it
so their itinerary included a trip to Red Cloud, Nebraska, just so she could
see for herself the landscape Cather memorialized in her fiction.
They are the story of a college sophomore who was so
profoundly affected by William Faulkner’s The
Sound and the Fury, she wrote an original musical composition where each
score represented the psyches of the principal characters, the notes ultimately
colliding in a chaos of sound symbolic of the characters’ demise and discord.
These small but significant moments of student
transformation likewise transform us. A visit to Cather’s prairie is suddenly
more accessible. Faulkner’s characters are experienced in an entirely new way through
a different sense.
Anthologizing these stories will help us identify
recurring motifs, present us with a unique portrait of student success, and
provide illustrative examples of how we achieve our educational mission.
In her historical novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather uses parables,
legends, and vignettes to narrate the story of the early Catholic Church in the
Southwest. Why can’t we try something
like this in assessment? Not to replace the quantitative assessments we are
currently doing (just as Cather’s novel didn’t replace actual historical
accounts), but to capture a narrative that currently remains untold.
It’s worth a try, isn’t it?
