Debunking six continuing fallacies of higher education
Every single piece of steel in the Eiffel Tower has now been replaced at least once since its construction in Paris in 1889. Colleges and universities have bricks and mortar, but their most durable structures are the assumptions and traditions that have led higher education to a crisis.
The pandemic has been disruptive but has also given us an opportunity to see clearly that colleges and universities must transform what they offer, how they are organised and the ways they operate to remake higher education for the better.
This can only happen if we question the assumptions under which higher education has been operating. We call these assumptions the six fallacies of higher education:
Courtesy of Wellesley College
Roberta Schotka (center left), who oversees peer tutoring services at Wellesley College, trains peer educators at the Pforzheimer Learning and Teaching Center.
As the coronavirus pandemic forced college campuses to shut down last March, Tiana Iruoje scrambled to quickly transition peer tutoring services at Indiana University s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering to online-only appointments.
Iruoje, director of student engagement and success for the school, needed to be able to track student check-ins and tutor hours. She nearly hired a computer science student to develop from scratch a system that could do so.
“The time and resources we would’ve spent to have him do it were outrageous,” she said.
WSU first-year students and seniors can take the National Survey of Student Engagement until mid-May.
The Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research organizes the NSSE and collects survey data from over 1,600 colleges and universities, said Kimberly Green, director of the WSU Office of Assessment for Curricular Effectiveness.
The survey opened March 1. WSU started offering the survey in 2000 and participates in the survey every two years, she said.
Universities with more than 12,000 undergraduate students pay an $8,000 survey enrollment fee to IU, said Zachary Rost, administrative assistant for the Office of Assessment.
WSU invests money into the survey to receive a comprehensive analysis of life as a college student. Green said the survey is high quality and helps the university understand student perspectives and if they are changing over time.
March 8, 2021 MACOMB/MOLINE, IL – Calling all Western Illinois University freshmen and seniors! WIU s first and final year students are encouraged to help their school by taking part in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which was sent to their WIU email accounts Feb. 25. Reminders will be sent throughout the month of March.
Students can complete the survey before May 1, 2021 to be entered into a drawing to win an Apple iPad Mini.
According to WIU Institutional Research and Planning (IRP) Director Angela Bonifas, the survey measures undergraduates academic experience at Western, including learning with peers and their experiences with faculty members and the campus environment.
The Trust Gap Among College Students, by Kevin Fosnacht and Shannon Calderone
Students of color have “substantially less trust” in their colleges compared to their white peers, according to a new report by the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research.
Kevin Fosnacht, associate research scientist at the center and co-author of the report, said the college trust gap between Black and white students, at 0.47 standard deviations, was particularly large. The disparity in perspectives was described in the report as being “of sizes rarely seen in education research.” There was an even larger gap (0.58 standard deviations) between Black and white students’ “out-group trust,” which in this case refers to their trust in individuals who are of different races than themselves, the report said.