College Learning for the New Global Century - 5

emphasizing preparation for work. Today, the practices are changing but the old Ivory Tower view of liberal education lingers. It is time to retire it. This outmoded view is seriously out of touch with innovations on campus, which increasingly foster real-world experience and applications in all disciplines. But it is especially injurious to firstgeneration students who, the evidence shows, are the most likely to enroll in narrower programs that provide job training but do not emphasize the broader outcomes of a twenty-first-century education. To serve American society well, colleges, universities, and community colleges must take active steps to make liberal education inclusive. The LEAP National Leadership Council calls, therefore, for vigorous new efforts to help students discover the connections between the essential learning outcomes and the lives they hope to lead. The goal—starting in school and continuing through college—should be to provide the most empowering forms of learning for all college students, not just some of them.

A New Framework for Excellence
The LEAP National Leadership Council recommends, in sum, an education that intentionally fosters, across multiple fields of study, wide-ranging knowledge of science, cultures, and society; high-level intellectual and practical skills; an active commitment to personal and social responsibility; and the demonstrated ability to apply learning to complex problems and challenges. The council further calls on educators to help students become “intentional learners” who focus, across ascending levels of study and diverse academic programs, on achieving the essential learning outcomes. But to help students do this, educational communities will also have to become far more intentional themselves—both about the kinds of learning students need, and about effective educational practices that help students learn to integrate and apply their learning. In a society as diverse as the United States, there can be no “onesize-fits-all” design for learning that serves all students and all areas of study. The diversity that characterizes American higher education remains a source of vitality and strength. Yet all educational institutions and all fields of study also share in a common obligation to prepare their graduates as fully as possible for the real-world demands of work, citizenship, and life in a complex and fast-changing society. In this context, higher education needs a broadly defined educational framework that provides both a shared sense of the aims of education and strong emphasis on effective practices that help students achieve these aims. To highlight these shared responsibilities, the council urges a new compact, between educators and American society, to adopt and achieve new Principles of Excellence (see p. 6). Informed by a generation of innovation and by scholarly research on effective practices in teaching, learning, and curriculum, the Principles of Excellence offer both challenging standards and flexible

"It is not possible to squeeze all these important aims into the general education program alone. The majors must address them as well."

Liberal Education & America’s Promise | AAC&U 5

College Learning for the New Global Century

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of College Learning for the New Global Century