Five Issues Facing Higher Education in 2018

2018 brings difficult challenges to higher education. Most of these challenges are interrelated. As one issue arises, it impacts all the others.

Five Issues Facing Higher Education in 2018

Higher education in America retains an implicit trust and faith in our culture. It is the support of knowledge and learning. It is the gateway to good jobs and a prosperous life for many of us.

Universities and colleges have always dealt with challenges and issues particular to a time and place. The now-familiar student unrest movements of the 1960s were largely played out on university campuses. As we head into 2018, higher education will face a particular set of challenges and issues.

Each of these issues are highly specific, yet they all impact and interact with each other.

In this article, we're going to dive into five specific challenges universities are facing today.

Issue One: The Rising Cost

One of the primary issues facing higher education is the rising cost of education balanced against the benefit of a college degree.

As valuable as a college education is, the cost is often the first and most important factor people face in weighing the value of universities.

Forbes reports that the rising cost is amplified by a diminishing field of well-paying job opportunities. The result? Many recent graduates are underemployed and face massive student loan debt.

Though success in the workforce usually requires a college education, the ability to pay for college has become difficult for many.

During the recession years, the cost of education actually rose at a higher percentage than today, where it is just over 1.5%.

However, the net cost - the cost balanced against grant aid and tax benefits - are actually costing people more than during the 2008-2009 recession years.

One thing is certain: if the cost of higher education continues to outpace the ability of middle and working class families to pay, the problem will snowball into other areas of higher education.

Of course, colleges are very aware of this issue and doing everything in their power to provide creative financial solutions for strapped students. For example, many colleges are offering online classes so that students don’t have to pay for on-campus housing, a meal plan, etc. The goal is find ways to give students an outstanding, cost-effective education.

Issue Two: Declining Completion Rates

With increasing costs for college, it shouldn't come as a surprise that there's also a rise in the number of students who don't complete their degrees.

Less than fifty percent of students complete their degree within six years. Although many of these students transfer and complete their education at another university, a large number never finish. This includes both two-year and four-years institutions. As many as one in three students drop out entirely and never finish their degrees.

Even as there is an overall rise in enrollment, completion rates have not kept pace.

A college education is considered the primary mark of a well-educated workforce. The low completion rates is an indicator that the United States lags behind other countries with higher rates of completion.

There have been efforts at universities to address this problem and there is some evidence of success. As a report on the declines noted:

Indeed, one might easily conclude that without them the declines could have been even worse for particular types of students or institutions, given the demographic and economic forces at play.

As we continue to stay out of a recession, we should expect to see completion rates go back up, but sustained policy at the local, state and federal levels are required to fully address the challenge.

Issue Three: Growing Privatization of Public Colleges and Universities

State funding for colleges and universities has steadily decreased since the beginning of the 21st Century.

For example, the University of California state system dropped 37% from 1990 to 2004.

This trend is nation-wide and is expected to continue. As funding for higher learning institutions decrease, universities must seek funding from private sources. Some universities have even made some of their high-profit programs, like business schools and law schools, fund themselves through a combination of student tuition, businesses and other private sources.

This creates a pattern of privatization of the public college and university system. The source of funding is no longer the institutions of higher learning but private business interests.

These programs, and therefore a substantial part of the university system itself, are essentially privately owned at this point. The result? They're no longer subject to the same systems of regulation, admission and even academic requirements as rest of the public state system.

The growing privatization of the public higher education system is a growing concern for scholars and administrators. The main concern is that as private interests take over a public university, their business interests may not serve the public good.

Educators and administrators worry that the benefits we've come to expect from the public university system will be diminished as this move toward privatization continues.

Of course, as noted above, universities are working hard to make their programs more financially accessible to students, which in turn could raise admissions and lessen the funding worries that cause them to turn to private businesses.

Issue Four: New Methods and Curricula

In other matters, the changes in teaching methods and curricula brings challenges. By and large, teaching methods are moving away from the old-fashioned model of lectures aimed at passive audiences.

Students are now much more interested in interactive and self-guided approaches. With so much information online and available for free, universities and colleges are restructuring curricula to stay current and equip students to work with emerging technologies.

Universities also recognize that uniform methods of learning and evaluation are becoming outmoded. More student-centered forms of criteria are being used to evaluate learning and success. Things like individual response systems in the form of clickers are being used to allow students to participate directly and immediately.

Team teaching and peer-led teaching models are also emerging as alternatives to the old professor/student dynamic.

For tenured, long-established professors, new curricula and methodologies can be difficult to incorporate into their long established teaching practices. They can find themselves frustrated by having to use teaching methods they don’t like and not knowing how to most effectively implement the new curricula.

In fact, these challenges are becoming so widespread and important that universities are granting leave time for faculty to explore and develop new teaching methods.

Issue Five: The Role of the University, Free Speech and Campus Civility

As is apparent to anyone who watches the news, these issues aren't going away anytime soon. The university has historically been an oasis of freedom of speech and freedom of expression for students and faculty alike.

As centers of learning and research, the university has always been a place where new and potentially threatening ideas often emerge.

It's been the mission of higher education in the United States to ensure that these freedoms are treasured in institutions of higher learning.

However, recent events have challenged these ideals.

The current political climate and the potentially violent threats which have emerged not only on university campuses but also in cities across the country have put university administrators in a difficult place.

They must strike a balance between free speech and maintaining a secure and safe environment on university and college campuses.

Free speech has always been an essential part of college life, and we should expect to see universities working hard to create safe environments for the discussion of various opinions. Additionally, universities are often on the forefront of new ideas, making them easy targets for opponents of free speech. Look for universities to take increasingly strong stands on this issue.

Conclusion

The shape of global culture and economic balances have shifted as we made our way into the 21st century.

The strict divide between public and private has been blurred and new relationships between the private sector and public sector have unfolded in response to global changes.

These shifts and changes are reflected in some of the issues and challenges facing higher education as we enter 2018.

Additionally, the cultural and political climate of the country is being challenged at some fundamental levels, and with this comes disagreement and conflict.

These issues, disagreements and conflicts also present challenges to higher education for the coming year.

Of course, universities have always faced a variety of challenges and have always managed to find solutions. We should expect that to be the case with these challenges. Thankfully, we live in a country where learning matters. We can be confident that universities will be present to both educate us and enlarge our minds.

On top of this, it’s essential to remember that education is critical. Those who miss out on higher learning often find their opportunities limited. Even though many universities are confronting challenges, we shouldn’t expect to see a decline in higher education.

Why?

Because it’s an essential part of our country’s fabric, and without it, we’ll all be worse off.

By Jason Allaire on January 15, 2018

https://www.cornerstone.edu/blogs/lifelong-learning-matters/post/five-issues-facing-higher-education-in-2018

Brain Workouts: How Much More Intelligent Can They Make You?

How much does environment influence intelligence? Several years ago University of Virginia Professor Eric Turkheimer demonstrated that growing up in an impoverished and chaotic household suppresses I.Q. – without nurture, innate advantages vanish. What about genes? They matter too. After decades of research most psychologists agree that somewhere between 50% and 80% of intelligence is genetic. After all, numerous studies demonstrate that identical twins raised apart have remarkably similar I.Q.’s.

A 2008 paper out of the University of Michigan turned all of this on its head. The researchers led by Susanne M. Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now at the University of Maryland, found that participants who engaged in short sessions of “cognitive training” that targeted working memory with a simple but difficult game known as the n-back task boosted a core feature of general intelligence called fluid intelligence. Crystalized intelligence improves with age and experience. Fluid intelligence, in contrast, is the capacity to make insights, solve new problems and perceive new patterns to new situations independent of previous knowledge. For decades researchers believed that fluid intelligence was immutable during adulthood because it was largely determined by genetics. The implication of the 2008 study suggested otherwise: with some cognitive training people could improve fluid intelligence and, therefore, become smarter.

This brings me to a brand new paper recently published in the journal Neuroscience by DRDC Toronto researcher and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto-Scarborough, Oshin Vartanian. In the study, Vartanian and his team asked if working memory training improved performance on a test of divergent thinking known as the Alternate Uses Task. Psychological research demonstrates that divergent thinking “loads” on working memory, meaning that when people engage a divergent thinking task their working memory capacity is accessed accordingly. If cognitive training strengthens working memory then participants should improve their performance on divergent thinking tasks. The researchers also wondered how working memory training affected participants at the neurological level. That is, will participation in a short regiment of working memory training be correlated with greater “neural efficiency” during the Alternate Uses Task? Given that divergent thinking is linked to creativity, it also sheds light on the effect of working memory training for boosting creativity.

To answer these questions Vartanian and his team gathered 34 participants and assigned each of them to either an experimental or control group. In the first part of the study the researchers measured fluid intelligence using Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM), a hallmark of standardized tests since the 1930s. They are visual analogy problems, consisting of two patterns with three shapes and a third pattern with two shapes. The task is to select the missing shape to complete the third triad from a set of alternatives in order match the overall pattern. Participants completed as many RAPM problems in ten minutes as possible, immediately prior to and following cognitive training so the researchers could calculate a possible gain in fluid intelligence.

For the cognitive training portion of the study participants took part in three training sessions on separate days. Participants in the experimental condition completed the n-back task. Here’s how it works. On a monitor a participant sees a series of letters flash in the same location every two and a half seconds. Their task is to indicate if the letter is repeated. The first level is easy because participants must press the space bar every time they see a letter repeated on two consecutive trials (e.g., K followed by K). The second level gets harder – participants must press the space bar every time they see a letter that matches a letter presented two trials earlier. This gets even harder at level three, where they have to make matching decisions compared to three trials earlier. Meanwhile, participants in the control condition completed a 4-choice reaction time task that controlled for task engagement.

Following the RAPM and cognitive training each participant laid in an fMRI scanner and completed the Alternate Uses Task where they generated novel uses for common objects. For example, imagine a researcher asks you to generate a list of uses for a brick. You could use a brick to build a house but a more creative solution might be to use a brick to prop open a door. The purpose of the Alternate Uses Task is to test divergent thinking, an important component of creativity. In Vartanian’s study the participants had 12 seconds to generate uses of a common object, and three seconds to enter their responses using an MRI-compatible keypad. They repeated this task for 20 trials.

Vartanian and his fellow researchers found that the results mostly confirmed the original hypotheses. First, the experimental group improved their RAPM scores compared to the control group, confirming previous research that cognitive training can boost fluid intelligence. However, they did not discover a difference between the two groups with respect to the number of uses generated in the Alternate Uses Task. In other words, participants who completed the n-back tasks did not score higher on divergent thinking, suggesting that training working memory does not boost divergent thinking.

The most provocative findings were at the neurological level. Namely, activation in the ventrolateral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, areas of the brain associated with divergent thinking, was much lower during the generation phase of the Alternative Uses Task in the experimental group. This means that even though working memory training and subsequent gains in fluid intelligence did not transfer to better performance on the Alternate Uses Task, participants who engaged in the cognitive training were neurally more efficient during divergent thinking. In other words, just like a long-distance runner uses his lungs and muscle’s more efficiently, participants who practiced the n-back task used less neural resources in the divergent thinking task compared to participants in a control condition.

Gains in fluid intelligence moreover predicted lower activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. However, Vartanian reminded me in a recent email that results are correlational. “Drawing a causal link between working memory training and neural efficiency requires more experimentation.”

It’s still unclear if gains from working memory training “transfer” to other tasks. Researchers know that training working memory improves working memory capacity. The question is if working memory training improves cognitive performance across the board just like working out improves your fitness in general. Vartanian says reliable evidence for this transfer effect is the “holy grail everyone is after” even though, he clarified, not every lab has found that the n-back task leads to an increase in fluid intelligence.

All of this brings up the question: What is intelligence anyway? I stated at the outset that intelligence has a genetic component but environment plays a vital role as well. It’s more complicated than that, of course. Consider the Flynn effect. It demonstrates that I.Q. scores have been rising in many parts of the world since 1930. Are people getting smarter or are they just getting better at taking I.Q. tests? The idea that I.Q. is the measurement for intelligence is waning. Yes, I.Q. correlates with success later on in life but it’s unclear what, exactly, it measures. Compounding these queries is the question of multiple intelligences. Researchers like Harvard’s Howard Gardner believe that intelligence isn’t a single thing like a black box in the mind but a series of distinct mental capacities. This makes sense to me – I can write articles on cognitive science but a calculus problem makes me shiver – but the evidence for this line of reasoning is spotty.

Another contentious area of study concerns the relationship between divergent thinking and creativity. Psychologists have historically equated divergent thinking with creativity because divergent thinking is about generating multiple solutions to a single problem, free-flow thinking, and originality. This is true, but like intelligence this paradigm doesn’t address what creativity is in the first place. Today more and more researchers believe that performance on divergent thinking tasks is merely one piece of the creativity pie. This is why a number of creativity researchers are advocating for a broader definition of creativity as well as a shift away from the idea that creative “types” exist, a false suggestion that people are either creative or not.

One of those researchers is Scott Barry Kaufman, NYU Adjunct Professor of Psychology and author of the up and coming Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined. “Pathbreaking creativity requires many years of acquiring a deep knowledge base from which you can draw to make novel connections,” Kaufman explained to me. “Since divergent thinking tests rely so heavily on working memory and fluid reasoning, they don’t allow people to bring their rich database of life experiences to the task. Psychologists are missing out on a large chunk of their creative potential because creativity can be manifested in many ways. By solely judging a person’s intelligence or creativity based on a single decontextualized testing session, you are ignoring that person’s unique mind, and the possibility for that mind to display incredible cognitive feats when allowed to express itself in its own way over an extended period of time.”

Intelligence and creativity are thorny components of our psychologies. Studying them is difficult, defining them even harder. But the overall trend in cognitive science is positive. Researchers like Vartanian and Kaufman are broadening our conception of intelligence and creativity with innovative research and fresh ideas. This is vital. The future of education will depend not just on policy but what we know about how the brain learns, makes insights and solves problems. “Ideally, in educational and other applied settings we would have the ability to train individuals on a few core abilities and then observe performance benefits in many target activities” said Vartanian. “For this to happen, we first need a good understanding of the core abilities that contribute to the desired outcomes, and then we need to differentiate between what can and cannot be trained.”

http://bigthink.com/insights-of-genius/virtues-of-cognitive-workout-new-research-reveals-neurological-underpinnings-of-intelligence

http://bigthink.com/