By Margaret A. MIller
When I was working for the state coordinating board in Virginia, a board member asked
me what it meant to get a baccalaureate degree. The question was simple, direct,
clear, and utterly unanswerable. So after stuttering and mumbling for a while, I
retreated to my office to find three historic pronouncements on what a college education
Thomas Jefferson proclaimed the purpose of an education to be the development
of "a knowing head and an honest heart."
Mitchell Fromstein, president of Manpower, Inc., at a Wingspread conference a
number of years ago, said he was looking for graduates with flexibility, the capacity
to work with others, technological competence, global awareness, competence in a
second language, and civility.
Harold Macmillan informed students at Oxford that they wouldn't have any useful
skills when they graduated, but that they would know "when a man was talking
rot" to them.
But the problem of what it means to be an educated person continued to haunt me.
As I see it, the question is really three-fold:
- What are the characteristics of an educated person?
- What purposes do those characteristics serve?
- Who cares?
What are the characteristics of an educated person?
People have been pondering this question for millennia, but at no time was it more
hashed over than during the 19th century. And, despite the fact that they were talking
about, and to, an extremely homogeneous group of people compared to the students
in an American college or university today, the skills and knowledge the great 19th-century
thinkers talk about are familiar. The general goals of higher education that these
writers describe prefigure many general descriptions of the mental tools with which
we should equip students to prepare them for the 21st century.
Consider the National Education Goal for collegiate education: Graduates should
be able to "communicate, solve problems and think critically" at a high
level of skill. These have been the remarkably constant aims of education over time.
A Capacity to Communicate:
Rhetorical skill has been one of the most important marks of an educated person since
the time of the Greeks. John Stuart Mill is the most eloquent writer on this subject.
In On Liberty, he discussed the ability to engage in "free and equal discussion,"
which for him was the necessary condition of any person's capacity for improvement
and self-correction throughout a lifetime.
What Mill called the "morality of public discussion" included the calm
self-discipline to argue according to the rules of logic; to consider all facts and
arguments, even those that tell against your case; to listen carefully to what is
said and to represent it accurately in your responses; and to be willing to change
in response to what you hear.
Henry Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of presidents, said of his Harvard education
that, if he had it to do over again, he would study only French, German, Spanish
and mathematics. He was looking for communication and problem-solving tools.
Adams discovered, when he began his life as a professional man on the verge of
the 20th century, that his collegiate education had not provided him with the skills
he needed; he said he was better prepared for the year one by his education than
for the year 1900.
Contemporary students learn the problem-solving skills they need when they have
a chance to use them to solve a real problem. Adams had to wait until the start of
his career before that kind of education began for him.
John Henry Newman described "the formation of mind" as a habit of fitting
new knowledge into what we already know, which we then adjust. That implies a set
of principles that organizes our knowledge as it grows.
When we learn, we take information in and fit it into our existing mental structures;
when we learn deeply, we adjust those structures as necessary to accommodate the
A capacity for critical thinking is, if you will, the mental muscle we develop
in the study of a variety of fields.
But critical thinking is not just a matter of mental skills. Cardinal Newman thought
that true "formation of mind" could not occur without broad knowledge,
a sense of the cultural and historical landscape and one's place in it. For an American
living at the end of the 20th century, this includes understanding where one fits
into a large and very complex cultural and historical American picture, and where
that fits, in turn, into a larger and even more complex global picture.
So, in short, a college education should equip students with the ability to communicate
and to solve problems, and it should help them develop the discipline and knowledge
that will form the basis for a lifetime of learning.
But why are these things necessary? Why not just teach students to do jobs? The
men I have quoted all shaped their cultures, as well as being shaped by them, because
they had to a remarkable degree the qualities that they attribute to an educated
person. All college graduates should be capable of shaping, rather than simply being
at the effect of, the changes that will permeate their lives.
At a recent retreat of the American Association for Higher Education staff, we
pushed ourselves to explain why we cared about the improvement of higher education.
The answer, we decided, was because we cared about students and their development.
But why did we care about those things? Because we wanted American colleges and universities
to educate students for their responsibilities as individuals, as citizens and as
productive contributors to society.
For me the chief value of my education has been delight. I love the perspective
that comes from seeing where I fit into a larger picture - astronomical, historical,
biological and social. I love the strength that comes with learning new things and
using my mental muscle. I love the sense of expansion and connection that comes from
seeing and hearing things not accessible to my own eyes and ears, and in having lifelong
conversations with people long dead or far away.
But we also are citizens, and our ability to act rationally in that capacity is
one of the hopeful premises on which democratic citizenship is based. This ability
includes, but is not limited to, the capacity to vote intelligently. It also includes
the disposition and skills to balance individual good with the responsibilities that
we have to our communities.
The original goal of the colonial college was to provide moral education for society's
leaders. As Robert Putnam has most recently observed in his book, Bowling Alone,
we are all much poorer when we lose a sense of civic responsibility. What we lose
especially is the enlarged sense of self that comes from understanding that we are
a part of something beyond the self.
And that sense of civic responsibility does more than simply promote the good
of the community: The capacities to communicate and solve problems are also our best
hope of ensuring harmony among communities. In Three Guineas, written in 1938, Virginia
Woolf addressed the question, "If I want to stop war, where should I donate
three guineas?" Her answer: to a college.
When asked why they go to college, most students put "getting a good job"
high on their list. And indeed, insofar as higher education enables people to use
their mental strengths in useful work, it contributes both to their good and to the
good of society.
But are the tools I have mentioned - the skills of communication, problem solving,
critical thinking - really what's needed in the workforce today? And if they are,
do colleges provide them?
Many colleges, and many majors, today focus on providing their students with an
education that prepares them to do a specific job. But consider this: The Bureau
of Labor tells us that a person should plan on having between five and seven careers
in a lifetime. All people coming out of college need the advanced capacity to do
something in particular, but they also need general intellectual skills and dispositions.
In Virginia, we interviewed a group of manufacturers about the characteristics
of the people they wanted colleges and universities to send them. They were glad
to be able to count on the technical competence of the engineering graduates they
hired. They were a little less certain that they could count on general workplace
skills, such as the capacity to use the near-ubiquitous new technologies. And they
were not at all convinced they could assume that the college graduates they hired
would have the communication and problem-solving skills to move from task to task,
job to job, and from group to group.
Finally, since engineering knowledge these days has a half-life of less than five
years, they wanted graduates who were prepared to continue to learn new things and
who possessed the curiosity that compels them to do so. These were the skills and
dispositions that they considered to be in shortest supply.
A baccalaureate education should provide these skills, but too rarely does. Most
American colleges and universities still run on an agrarian calendar with industrial
production methods, and the product is much as one would expect it to be.
But Mitchell Fromstein tells us that higher education needs to change, ironically,
back to something closer to the ideal articulated by the people I have been quoting.
Even temporary workers (most of us, soon) need to be independent thinkers rather
than compliant order-takers in the new global economy. Practically speaking, in the
post-industrial age - the information age - human beings are no longer "hands"
This brings me to my final question: Who cares what the undergraduate degree actually
certifies about a graduate? Increasingly, everyone has choices to make, for which
that information would be useful. In choosing which college graduates to hire, captains
of industry (to borrow the 19th-century term) could use information about what skills
and abilities are certified by a given diploma and which diplomas ensure that the
bearer has the intellectual nimbleness this age requires. Legislators and state policy
makers, who need to choose which higher education initiatives to support, might find
helpful an understanding of the kind of learning that is likely to result from each.
Students and parents, facing rising costs and a bewildering variety of institutions,
might prefer to choose among them on the basis of what their graduates know and can
do, instead of on other bases such as reputation, price tag, first impressions and
A college or university should define clearly, succinctly and publicly its criteria
and standards for graduate attainment. It should organize the resources it has, and
everything it does, to generate as effectively and efficiently as possible the kind
of learning I have described. And it should gather and communicate evidence about
the curricular and co-curricular strategies and pedagogies it has implemented to
enable that learning, as well as the results of those strategies.
Higher education's "dearest friends and severest critics" are telling
us that we are not holding ourselves to a high enough standard in ensuring that their
sons and daughters are prepared fully for the fullest kind of life. We cannot continue
to disappoint them if we are to have their continuing support.
Margaret A. Miller is president of the American Association for Higher Education.
This article was adapted from her speech at Indiana University - Purdue University
Indianapolis, in October 1997.