What if higher education focused on restoration rather than transformation?

There is no mystery about why "transformation" is a regular part of higher education-speak right now. Everyone recognizes that we are in a period of substantial, accelerated change. Transformation is a way of describing that change.

Our embrace of transformation masks uncertainty about what it means, what its purpose is, and what it stands-in for.  Take, for instance, the definition of transformation.  Its usage includes two potentially divergent meanings: change in scale; and change in state. So, a transformed campus could be much larger, or richer, than it was before, but be essentially the same.  Or, a student who has a transformative experience could be fundamentally different from who she was before.

The purposes of transformation are similarly contradictory. Transformation can be purpose-neutral, as many of the large-scale changes influencing an institution are beyond its control.  Or, its purpose can be functional, in that transformation pursues more or better things--students, buildings, funding, etc. Or, it can be  liberationist, in that transformation frees an institution or person from the limits of previous budgets, curricula, or points-of-view.

While questions of definition and purpose are important, they are less important than the question of what transformation stands-in for.  Here, let me propose that attention to transformation stands-in for paying attention to restoration.

Let me argue further that many institutions, especially those that are small, have a faith commitment, reside in struggling communities, or serve the “new demographic” of college-goers, would be better off focusing on restoration than transformation. I say this because these sorts of institutions reside in worlds where limits, not limitlessness, are the norm.  And they work in communities and with lives that are broken, and hence in need of restoration prior to, or instead of, transformation.

How would a college centered on restoration be different from one attentive to transformation? A couple of ideas:

1. The college would have to assert up front a particular view of human nature, since restoration requires work towards a particular end.
2. It would assume that students bring with them skills/talents/interests and of weaknesses, absences, and challenges.  Its struggle would be to respect both parts of their natures, and help them assemble those things into something that has integrity.  It would design systems, curricula, and activities that acknowledge the dual nature of students. It wouldn’t be sanguine, though, about the prospects for these efforts, because it would realize that restoration is more difficult than transformation.
3. The organizational structure of the institution would model the whole to which it is working--unity among the disciplines, or in the experience of students, or healthy ecosystems of learning, or relationships between campus and community, or between students and their peers and families.
4. Learning would be explicitly about deepening context--providing greater historical, local, disciplinary, and human connections--so that people could understand what was being restored, rather than about escaping context in order to transform.
5. It would make decisions about the allocation of resources based on their impact on wholeness, integrity, and relationships (and the challenges of each of those things)  rather than questions predominantly  about the scale or pace of change.
6. It would measure the impact of its work largely by whether its efforts helped create the conditions (the ecosystem) in which people and relationships can be restored, and whether it found greater integrity in its own actions, in the use of its resources, in the lives of its students, and in the communities in which its people  live and work.

In calling for attention to restoration over transformation, I am not necessarily calling for the restoration of any particular approach to higher education.  (After all, there are secular institutions and huge ones whose work is restorative, and small, faith-based institutions whose assumptions are transformative.).  Instead, I am calling for focus over sprawl, limits over limitlessness, consistency between vision and action, and some humility about our ability to fundamentally change things.

It may be, though, that many of the issues afflicting us--racism, economic inequality, climate change, and the fracturing of communities--are better worked on through a prism of restoration than transformation.

Two big reasons to oppose free community college

Both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have plans to provide two years of free college tuition. President Obama has proposed a similar plan. The rationale behind these plans is two-fold: college costs too much, and a college education ought to be more broadly available to the public.  By making two years of college free, the thinking goes, the cost of education to students will be reduced and access to higher education increased.

Those plans have received criticism from Republicans because of their tax implications and because they represent an expansion of the federal government. There has been no opposition to them, though, from either  AACU  or CIC , the entities that represent independent higher education.  This is surprising, of course, since the proposals represent a significant threat to the schools they represent.

If independent colleges were to oppose these plans, though, they needn't do it simply out of self-interest.  Instead, there are educational and civic reasons to do so.  Here they are:

Educational:  While there are many outstanding community colleges, few of them are successful at graduating students with associates degrees in two years. There are many explanations--community college students have complex lives, they don't always come from strong high schools, they aren't always seeking a two-year degree, they are poorly funded, etc.

Of equal importance, though, is that community colleges aren't set up to provide maximum support to their students.  The majority of faculty are part-time, classes are large, student support is stretched to its limit, and high-impact learning practices aren't widely available. Many community colleges are stretched beyond their resources with their current enrollments. In short, the institutional factors that lead to student success aren't as available as they need to be in community colleges.

The plan to encourage enrollment in community colleges, then, amounts to an effort to stress those institutions to a greater extent without responding to their challenges. ( The K-12 equivalent of it would be to encourage more students to enroll in struggling public schools, something that policymakers have widely moved away from in the past decade.) There is little reason to believe that shifting enrollment to two-year schools will improve education there.

Civic: There are two points to consider here.  First, the concern about student loan debt represents a profound failure of civic imagination.  In the United States, there are four major types of debt: mortgage debt, student loan debt, auto loan debt, and credit card debt.  The total amount of student loan debt (1.1 trillion)  is now slightly higher than auto debt (900 billion) and credit card debt (900 billion), and about 1/8th of mortgage debt.  Yet there is no national policy debate about reducing the cost of cars;  no major party urges the eradication of credit card debt; no one worries that mortgages are tying the hands of the public.  Yet all three of these types of borrowing have lower returns on investment than the college education that student loans buy.  And neither cars, nor credit cards, nor even homeownership are as important to the flourishing of communities as the presence of civically engaged college graduates.  Put another way--the best thing for people and communities to borrow for is education.

Second, if free community college were to shift student enrollment significantly from four-year schools to two-year and from independent to public, the impact on communities would be strongly negative.  Small, independent colleges are are the heart of thousands of communities around the United States.  And they form a hugely significant part of the independent, non-profit sector.  In that role they inspire service, provide civic leadership, build social networks, respond to suffering, raise critiques, and create innovation.

Independent colleges outpace their public peers in educating low-income and first generation students, and in providing engaging education. To undermine them, then, is to undermine institutions that serve the students Sanders and Clinton most worry about. And it  is to undermine communities across the United States that rely on an effective civic sector to flourish.