[EAS]Future Students
pjk
pjk at design.eng.yale.edu
Fri Jun 1 13:14:59 EDT 2001
Subject: Future Students
Dear Colleagues -
Please ponder this recent issue on the "Tomorrow's Professor" list,
from Rick Reis at the Stanford Learning Lab.
Supplement your ponderings with this mailing of two years ago, at
http://www.yale.edu/engineering/eng-info/msg00548.html based on the
annual publications of UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute
(HERI) <http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/heri.html>. Their latest
survey, that of Fall 2000 freshmen, is at
<http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/00_press_release.htm>.
Much about the future is unpredictable, but some scenarios about
the future (e.g. evolving health care needs) follow more
confidently from existing driving forces, such as population
demographics. It would be negligent not to consider the
implications of the intellectual demographics of today's high
school and freshmen college students in these surveys.
--Peter Kindlmann
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"If this trend, which is already evident today in some sectors,
develops, the higher education community could face the slow
disappearance of four-year institutions."
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Folks:
The posting below looks at the misaligned ambitions of today's
teenagers with respect to higher education. It is a is a review by
SUSAN R. GRIFFITH of: The Ambitious Generation: America's
Teenagers, Motivated but Directionless by Barbara Schneider and
David Stevenson, Yale University Press, 1999, 384 pages, ISBN
0-300-07982-6. The review appeared in in PLANNING FOR HIGHER
EDUCATION [http://www.scup.org/phe.htm] (2), Volume 29, Number 3,
Spring 2001 and is reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis at stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Not Hardware or Software, But the (Hard) Soft Touch
Tomorrow's Academy
----------------- 1,762 words -------------
AMERICA'S TEENAGERS, MOTIVATED BUT DIRECTIONLESS
PLANNING FOR HIGHER EDUCATION (3)
Volume 29, Number 3, Spring 2001
The Ambitious Generation:
America's Teenagers, Motivated but Directionless
by Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson
Yale University Press, 1999
384 pages, ISBN 0-300-07982-6
Reviewed by SUSAN R. GRIFFITH
Despite the gloomy title, there is some good news in The Ambitious
Generation: America's Teenagers. Motivated but Directionless ---
teenagers like their parents more than other literature suggests
(p. 142) and the majority expect to attend college (90 percent)
and to enter the professions (70 percent). The bad news is that
most of these teenagers are unprepared for college and have either
over-or under- estimated the amount of education they need for
college degrees or the professions they expect to enter. Most have
had little or inappropriate guidance from parents and counselors,
and most will receive little financial support for college from
their families.
The authors are well qualified and positioned to undertake this
research Barbara Schneider is professor of sociology at The
University of Chicago and senior scientist at the National Opinion
Research Center. She is currently co-director of the Alfred P.
Sloan Center on Parents, Children and Work. David Stevenson, who
passed away unexpectedly in 1998, was a senior advisor to the
Department of Education's deputy director of the National Council
on Education Standards and Testing, he was responsible for the
report, Rising Standards for American Education. He held research
and teaching positions at The University of Chicago, Stanford
University, and Oberlin College.
The main research base for The Ambitious Generation is the Alfred
P. Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development. This five-year
longitudinal national study, begun in 1989, surveyed cohorts in the
6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th grades, a total of more than 8,000
students (p. 267). The racial and ethnic makeup of the survey
group reflected the U.S. population of 12- to 18-year-olds,
geographically and socio-economically distributed.
The study shows that adolescents in the 1990s were the "most
ambitious teenage generation ever" (p. 3), no matter what their
sex, socioeconomic class or ethnicity. They expected to become
physicians, lawyers, business managers. However, their desire to
be professionals exceeds the projected need for those positions
through 2005 (p. 6).
To dramatize the plight of the 1990s teenagers, and perhaps to put
the findings in perspective for older readers who have a hard time
understanding Generation X, the authors compare the teenage
generation of the 1950s with that of the 1990s: the Silent
Generation versus Generation X. Two major intervening variables
are credited for the differences between the generations: the
availability of funding for higher education, made possible by the
Higher Education Act of 1965, and changing gender expectations
resulted in more poor, minority, and female teenagers aspiring to
college in the last few decades of the 20th century.
Table 1 highlights the major differences between the 1950s and
1990s generations of high school students and their attitudes
toward higher education, careers and life.
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Table 1
ATTITUDES/EXPECTATIONS 1950s TEENAGERS 1990s TEENAGERS
Raised in a home w/both parents 90% 47%
Musical tastes Homogeneous Widely varied
Most valued attributes Being popular,
of high school athletics Academics
Expectations of high school Prepare me for Prepare me for
a job, marriage, college
parenthood
Dropped out of high school 35% 6%
Expected to attend college 55% 90%
Expected to work as a professional 42% 70%
Expected number of jobs in lifetime One Many
World outlook Stable Unstable
Life Focus Family Career
Timeframe for marriage Right out of
high school Later
Timeframe to start a family Right away Later
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The authors found that more than half (56 percent) of the 1990s
students in the study had misaligned ambitions; i.e., they had
ambitious employment goals but the wrong ideas of what it takes, in
terms of education, to achieve these goals. These students either
overestimated (71 percent) or underestimated (29 percent) the
amount of education it would take to prepare for their chosen
professions; many were planning to take the wrong courses.
In general, the 44 percent of students who had aligned college and
career goals had educated parents who were involved in their
children's schooling and activities. The mission of the high school
also contributed to student alignment. Those schools whose purpose
was to help students plan their careers produced the highest rate
of student alignment. Conversely, those that focused on simply
graduating students from high school had the lowest rate of
alignment.
The authors use a series of case studies to illustrate their
statistical findings of misalignment among teenagers in the 1990s.
One example of misalignment is having high ambitions or career
goals but no plan to achieve that goal. Another example is the
"ambition paradox." These students have aspirations of a
bachelor's degree of higher but plan to start their education at a
two-year institution, where the success rate, as measured by
successful transfer to senior institution, is very low.
One teenager with uneducated parents, for example, wanted to go to
college and become a film director. He attended a four-year
institution but was not happy, so he transferred to a junior
college. However, the junior college did not have the courses to
fit his ambition. At last writing, he was thinking about
transferring to a fine arts college. The student had no idea of
the curriculum needed to be a film director nor which schools
would offer the courses he needed in a supportive environment.
Another student worked in her parents' store after school. She
attended a good high school and earned good grades. She wanted to
attend the United States Naval Academy but didn't want to serve on
ship (a problem already). She was originally interested in the
Coast Guard, but the naval academy brochure alone changed her
mind. When she applied, she found out she was not medically
qualified. So she enrolled at a competitive eastern university,
majored in international relations, and aspires to master's degree
in economics or business, since she thinks she needs a doctorate
to be middle class.
The two major factors that contribute to these misaligned
ambitions, according to the authors, are family and school. They
indict the parents (baby boomers) for being insufficiently
involved in their children's lives and for expecting the schools
to do all the necessary counseling and preparation for college. In
addition, most parents are unwilling to sacrifice for their
children's education and expect someone else to pay for it. This
is leading to increased enrollment in low-cost junior colleges and
increased student debt.
In recent decades, schools have developed comprehensive curricula
to prepare students for any life path, providing too many choices
and too little guidance through a complicated curriculum.
Counseling services are also inadequate to prepare students for
higher education. According to the authors, "what is often
lacking...is an effort to help students chart a meaningful path
through the curricular maze of high school" (p. 140)
To remedy the situation, Schneider and Stevenson offer the
following suggestions for parents, high schools, and colleges:
1) Parents should;
· talk to children about school, become more involved in their
lives;
· use personal, social, and professional relationships to help
them gain a knowledge of the world of work; and
· invest in their future.
2) Schools should;
· support activity-based organization;
· simplify the curriculum;
· help students negotiate the curriculum;
· offer work programs that better inform students of career
options that match their ambitions.
3) Colleges should;
· introduce the college admissions process and career planning
to freshman high school students;
· take outreach programs into the middle schools so students
can learn about financial aid opportunities, receive tutoring
for math and science, and understand how selecting courses in
high school will affect college attendance; and
· promote articulation agreements that ease the transfer of
credit from two-year to four-year institutions.
These suggestions are useful but require an underlying change in
the philosophy of education. The purpose of higher education is
more comprehensive than just offering vocational training. I am
reminded of a phrase from K. Patricia Cross's article in the Fall
2000 issue of Planning for Higher Education, which captures the
conflict between traditional academic values and the philosophy of
"student as consumer." Cross wrote that the faculty "see students
obsessed with preparing to make a living, while they would prefer
to see students preparing to make a life" (p. 11).
In addition, it is troublesome that The Ambitious Generation views
changing one's major in college as an indicator of misalignment.
The college experience itself can expose students to areas of
study they would not otherwise consider and may cause them to
change their majors. Expecting teenagers to be able to map out
their minds is asking a great deal, indeed.
I am drawn back to Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential
of American Higher Education (Study Group on the Conditions of
Excellence in American Higher Education 1984). This report made
many recommendations to improve undergraduate education and
spawned many of the renewed emphases or reforms we have
experienced in higher education in the last two decades: liberal
or general studies, student involvement, learning communities,
high expectations, assessment and feedback, active teaching modes,
remedial courses, and emphasis on undergraduate education and on
learning rather than teaching. Most of the members of the group
who wrote this report are familiar names in academe: Kenneth P.
Mortimer, Alexander W. Astin, J. Herman Blake, Zelda F. Gamson,
Harold L. Hodgkinson, and Barbara Lee.
With parents unwillingness to sacrifice for their children's
college expenses, more students are planning to attend two-year
colleges (p. 8) and then transfer to four-year universities. If
this trend, which is already evident today in some sectors,
develops, the higher education community could face the slow
disappearance of four-year institutions. These institutions would
become de facto upper-level institutions with the majority of
their students coming in as junior college transfers. This would
put great strain on facilities management and budgets, since an
increased number of smaller classes would be needed for upper
level courses, which are more expensive to deliver. Faculty would
have to shed their typically poor expectations of transfer
students, which would require intensive faculty development or
replacement.
Another implication of decreased family financial support is an
increased debt burden for students. This would lead to an increased
incentive to work while in school, thus further increasing the
trend toward part-time college attendance and increased time to
degree.
One import implication extending from this research concerns the
need for increased and improved articulation between high schools
and colleges. The high schools should better attune their
curriculum to the expectations of the colleges and universities
their students are likely to attend. There is resistance on both
sides of the equation, due to fears of losing autonomy. This
issue, at a minimum, needs to be on every SWOT's list for every
strategic planning session in higher education.
References
Cross, K. Patricia. 2000. Portraits of Students: A Retrospective.
Planning for Higher Education 29(1): 5-13
Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher
Education. 1984. Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential
of American Higher Education.
Susan R. Griffith is chief planning officer for the Council for
South Texas Economic Progress, a student loan service person.
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