As the leader of the nation's only campus dedicated exclusively to early college, the author heads an institution that ensures students graduate sooner than the national average. As an academic who pursued her graduate work at Oxford University--an institution that confers most of its undergraduate degrees in three years--the author has had direct…

On March 12 and 13, 2009, thirty-two educators and leaders from the corporate and nonprofit sectors gathered at Clark University for an extended seminar cosponsored by Clark and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Their focus was a question of fundamental importance for liberal education: how well do the learning experiences…

WICS (Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized) provides a unified model of liberal education for admissions, instruction, and assessment that can be used at any level and for any subject matter. One advantage of WICS is that it goes beyond more traditional models that emphasize memory and analytical learning and, as a result, enables all…

Evidence abounds that, in recent decades, students have typically entered college relying on perspectives they have uncritically accepted from others and are not sufficiently challenged and supported to transition to internal authority during college. Students who have experienced significant challenge, particularly as a result of marginalization,…

Experiential education, which takes students into the community, helps students both to bridge classroom study and life in the world and to transform inert knowledge into knowledge-in-use. It rests on theories of experiential learning, a process whereby the learner interacts with the world and integrates new learning into old constructs.…

Experiential learning opportunities can enrich an undergraduate liberal education and produce graduates who are prepared to grapple, imaginatively and responsibly, with the complex challenges they will face throughout their lives. A growing body of empirical evidence supports that contention. Yet much remains to be learned about how to lead…

In this article, race-conscious student engagement is offered as a method likely to compel more racial minority students to reflect on powerful learning opportunities, institutional enablers of achievement, and outcomes-productive experiences. This version of student engagement is defined, and the benefits it accrues for faculty members and…

Most American students enter college at a time when they are still forging their identities and seeking a place in the world. Yet many or most of today's students are increasingly dependent on their parents and stay more firmly connected to previous support networks via the "electronic tether" than did their predecessors. In this article, the…

In this article, the author suggests that college educators need to do more than tell students how to expand upon their careerist reasons for going to college; they also need to help them "feel" the value of that expansion. The author recognizes that this is part of the motivation for proposed structural changes to undergraduate education, such as…

Something remarkable is happening in programs of liberal education all over the country. The longstanding notion that learning should occur almost exclusively in classrooms is being amended to give a much more prominent place to various forms of experiential education. The belief that liberal education should focus on a narrow range of…

When the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) launched the Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) initiative in 2005, they certainly knew that it would not be easy to achieve the sort of transformation needed to ensure that higher education serves all students--and society--more effectively. The LEAP initiative builds…

In its Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) initiative, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) outlines four clusters of learning outcomes that are essential for all college students in the twenty-first century and that, taken together, represent a high-quality liberal education. These include: (1) knowledge of…

In 1988, civic and business leaders worked collaboratively with university representatives to establish a campus of the University of Southern Maine in the Lewiston-Auburn area, and they decided to build the new college on a solid foundation in the liberal arts. Rather than establishing a curriculum focused myopically on professional preparation,…

Scholarship and teaching in the humanities can sometimes be overly self-referential. Rather than foster citizenship and social engagement, undergraduate literature classes are often limited to exercises in textual interpretation as students learn to compare and contrast formal devices and thematic motifs. The step from analyzing verbal polyphony…

If one hangs around public universities that have less than selective admissions policies, one is bound to hear a litany of complaints about today's students. They lack the attitude required for productive and serious academic work, and too many lack disciplined study habits; they have short attention spans and very little patience with academic…