Mental Models of Purpose of College

 Been busy with not just classes, but meeting with students and also coaching (mostly) students.  All is going well and I look forward to collecting my thoughts into some coherent whole.

Currently reading The Real World of College: What College Is and What It Can Be by Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner and, first of all, how can I be at a place that talks about and cares about this sort of stuff?  Where I can discuss the ideas in this book with colleagues?  Oh well, instead I'll assign sections to my students so I can talk about it with someone.

The specific piece of this book that is currently occupying my mind is their categories for how people think about college.  They identify 4 general categories: inertial (viewing college as just the next step after high school -- in the same way high school is the next step after middle school), transactional (college as a mean to a job afterward), exploratory (college as a means to discover and better understand the world) and transformational (college as a way to 'level up' as a person).  They note that the level of selectivity at a school correlates with the mental model students have and that most faculty view college as transformational (regardless of the selectivity).  All this makes sense and it interesting.  They also discuss the change in students models from first year to graduation.

With these models in hand, I've been having two thoughts.

First, my dissatisfaction with my institution is at least in part due to the real doubling down on being transactional.  I think in the time I've been here, there's been a shift in how we are marketing ourselves to that it's nearly entirely transactional anymore and I disagree that this is what college should be.  Yes, we should definitely be making sure that our students are employable but to focus on this seems like focusing on the lowest possible bar and abandoning what college education could be doing and how we could be making people's lives much much better by helping them to do more than just be employable.  We shouldn't be communicating to anyone that the most important thing is whether or not someone can get a job -- that we are all, fundamentally, laborers.  There's so much more we can be and should be able to be.  To settle for mere employability is irresponsible.  

At the same time, I understand that this might be so-called 'low hanging fruit' -- that this is an easy way to convince students (and their parents) to give us their tuition dollars instead of somewhere else.

All this helps me to better understand the disconnect btwn the decisions being made and what I think makes sense.  The goals of the current administration are completely different from the goals I think we ought to have.  Of course, it's still true that given the goals the administration has, they are making (from my perspective) decisions that are not likely to achieve even their stated goals.  And, thus, my frustration isn't completely abetted.  I'd be much happier if they were to at least be collaborative with strategies for achieving the goals they've set -- instead of only talking with those they believe are likely to agree.  

But I digress.

My second thought is that I suspect the mental model students have for college greatly shapes how they understand what it means to be a learner.  Yes, this is super obvious once I thought of it -- and, conceivably, everyone else is extremely aware of this and it's been so obvious that no one ever discusses it, BUT it feels like an epiphany to me.  My hypothesis is that students who have a transactional view of college are far less likely to do the reading, think about the reading at a deeper level, participate, etc.  That is, they are simply less inclined to engage ideas because they view the point as simply to "fulfill the requirements' and get the degree.

The next question then is how to help students shift from transactional to either exploratory or transformational.  What inspires the shift that at least some students make and how can I be more intentional in making it happen?  This is now the question I'm going to sit with.