Students First: Equity, Access, and Opportunity in Higher Education

Abstract

Paul LeBlanc’s new book has an ambitious goal—a reimagining of the landscape of higher education in America. In a very readable 168 pages, he sketches out some of the key challenges to higher education today and offers strong arguments for reforms that will foster innovation and preserve its specialization and variability. Although the critiques may be familiar to readers within the system, and those same readers may wish for more detail, the book still presents a valuable, accessible overview of those challenges.The biggest challenge, he suggests, is affordability. The first chapter makes clear who the main villain is for LeBlanc: the credit hour or Carnegie unit. LeBlanc here presents a concise yet comprehensive attack on the credit hour that is a useful primer for those unfamiliar with the basic contours of the argument. In brief, time in class is a very poor measurement of actual learning and forces students into a one-size-fits-all pace of learning that is detrimental for most.LeBlanc advocates for a “healthy learning ecosystem,” which shares widely agreed-upon definitions of institutional types, program credentials, and outcomes. Another characteristic of this healthy ecosystem is more transparent reporting, greater student mobility, and portability of credentials. This does not mean, he claims, that all institutions must converge on a common model: Many different modes of education can both perform very different functions yet maintain compatibility and reciprocity.At the heart of this inter-operability is replacing the credit hour with competencies as the “common currency” of higher education of the 21st century (p. 25). This moves away from a typical focus on content in traditional education to the application of knowledge. Furthermore, competency-based education (CBE) is agnostic about how a student gets to the level of proficiency in a particular competency. This broadens our understanding of learning to encompass activities and experiences outside the classroom (which credit-hour measurement struggles to do) and invites innovation around new ways of learning and approaches to bring down the cost of education (p. 55).For the audience of this journal, this takes on a particular importance because the key to CBE is valid and reliable assessment. LeBlanc directly addresses this in the third chapter, which he titles “The Hardest Work.” Sadly, the solutions here are not as compelling. After quite rightly pointing to the challenges of reliability and validity in most learning assessment, LeBlanc argues that we can learn from professions that have very high stakes for lack of sufficient training or skill: air-traffic controllers, surgeons, pilots. There the key metrics are performance-based assessments and on-the-job training. If the “single best form of assessment is rigorous observation by someone who is an actual expert on the learning analogy in question” (p. 73), though, how can this be scaled up to provide the flexibility and cost savings promised in earlier chapters?LeBlanc offers two different examples of competency-based assessment at work. The first, from his own institution, focuses on artificial performance tasks rooted in real world examples. This has the advantage of reliability but arguably is less contextual as they are the same for all students and may not be as transferable to other contexts. The second example emphasizes three-person mentor teams that work with students to develop methods of demonstrating competency that are appropriate to each student’s individual needs and context. The advantage here is that the performance tasks are directly applicable to students’ particular educational goals. The disadvantage is that reliability and, to a lesser extent, validity can be affected by the close personal contact between the evaluators and the students. This is not to say that LeBlanc’s characterization of competency-based assessment is flawed, only that the larger challenges of valid, reliable, contextualized assessment are not solved.Some may be turned off by rhetoric that repeatedly characterizes goals of higher education in terms of employability. The real world scenarios for assessment that he describes are workplace based, the measure of their success is when they are connected to the workforce (31); his proposal for reform is like a “GI Bill for the American worker” (118); and he often characterizes higher education as an “industry.” This may raise the hackles of those who see higher education as having a greater purpose beyond integration into the capitalist workplace. LeBlanc is not dismissive of the liberal arts or hard-to-measure skills like ethical reasoning or problem-solving. He just rejects the contention that such skills cannot be measured at all.In the final chapters LeBlanc considers some of the many obstacles to competency-based education at an institutional level, as well as some examples of different institutions that have (mostly) successfully adopted different competency-based approaches. The last chapter offers a more specific response to the biggest obstacle—the reliance of federal financial aid on credit hours for calculating eligibility. LeBlanc himself admits that “it is hard to overstate the difficulty of overhauling the federal financial aid system, a task so monumental that many will shrug and dismiss the idea out of hand” (145). He tackles it anyways, with reasonable suggestions for both long- and short-term proposals.Whether the reader shrugs about the larger proposals, it’s hard not to be drawn in by LeBlanc’s enthusiasm. He has written a succinct, approachable book. There is something here for seasoned “industry” professionals as well as outsiders and newcomers.