Leading Outcome-Driven Education-Implications for Global Leaders in Higher Education

Education can no longer run on the factory mode. Archaic practices in higher education have led students to spend less time on coursework than what their predecessors did 50 years ago, and evidence of their abilities suggests they are in all probabilities learning way less than students once did. A Harvard University researcher, Derek Bok writes in Inside Higher Ed,

The amount that students learn in college has declined in the past few decades, and if present practices and trends continue, learning could further decline in the years to come.

These findings are a clarion call for global leaders in higher education management. Rethinking of education needs to be done to ensure it’s able to deliver skills to cope with new technologies. At all levels of education, from primary, secondary, senior secondary to tertiary, there is a need to personalize learning and motivate students by modeling knowledge as per their needs. This is the only way to bring about an outcome-driven education.

The problem is…

Education leaders, managers, and administrators need to know the part of the problem to correct it.

• Most students don’t feel they are being taught material relevant to their lives. Such sentiments reflect that universities and colleges are not taking enough measures to explain the larger goals of a subject and their practical applications in life.
• Instructors are not teaching in a manner they themselves consider to be important. This is shown by the fact that even though faculties, as well as those in higher education management, consider critical thinking as vital to education, it is rarely reflected in the assessments. Bok shows that though 99% of professors consider critical thinking a vital goal of college education, less than 20% design exam questions to test students for those skills.
• No measures are in place to see if learning objectives of faculties are translating to reality. While it has become a common practice for faculties to define learning objectives at the beginning of classes, it is hardly ensured by the heads and leaders in higher education that stated goals are being implemented by designing courses and instruction in the desired manner.
• Higher education doesn’t know its consumers. Few institutions are aware of the study habits of their undergraduates. Right out of high school, students take time to adapt to the goals of tertiary education. Institutions seeking to become global leaders in higher education first need to be well-aware of their students. This can be done through confidential surveys and reviews.
• Worst of all, institutions are nearing their finish line to attain “better-looking” outcomes. This is being done through grade inflation and decline in the rigor of academic standards.

Bringing fundamental changes

While many higher education leaders are making serious efforts to optimize learning in their institutions, it’s not happening fast enough.

Top universities of the likes of the Wharton School and Graduate School of Education of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and many others are training leaders through executive education higher education management programs to bring fundamental changes in leaders that could yield greater gains in the quality of undergraduate and graduate education. These programs are helping leaders realize fundamental changes in tertiary education by:

• Reconfiguring the graduate programs by leveraging the large body of research accumulated since years on learning and pedagogy. Universities and colleges need to design alternative methods of instruction to devise promising ways of teaching instructions to engage students better in the classrooms.
• Devising strategies to empower students for the outside world by giving them employable opportunities within universities and colleges. Universities have begun to give opportunities to students to teach and in the process also learn better. Institutions are instructing less but facilitating students to take up voluntary learning assignments and equipping them for a career.
• Seeking innovative ways to bring in full-time teaching faculty. More recently the trend is toward institutions limiting the hiring of tenure track faculty and hiring of adjunct and ad hoc faculty on year-to-year basis. This is adversely affecting graduation rates, instruction and student learning. To combat this, innovative leaders in higher education management are creating carefully selected full-time faculty, which are less than tenure track but are appointed for longer than adjunct or ad hoc professors. Appointments are being made for significant term of years with better academic freedom to educators, and adequate compensation, though not via research and promotion as enjoyed by tenure-track faculties.
• New curriculum. The tripartite structure of imparting education, wherein focus is on the field of concentration, which leaves little room for electives (chosen by students) and general education, needs to be changed. Bok is of opinion that the existing structure is designed for the comfort of tenured faculty instead of students. It is unlikely to be changed unless taken head-on by the heads in higher education management. The need is for maintaining a distribution segment wherein an ample segment of the curriculum is devoted to electives, the direction in which the students are most likely to take up their professional careers.

Reforms in higher education are urgent. Provosts, Vice Presidents, Deans, Chief Academic Officers, and other leaders in higher education need to lead such strategic changes in bringing institutional reforms, and others would follow suit.