In early January, the Lumina Foundation for Education will be releasing its Degree Qualifications Profile—an effort months in the making and preceded by a draft profile earlier this year. As a complement to the foundation’s goal of increasing “the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60 percent by the year 2025,” their forthcoming profile is squarely focused on the process by which institutions of higher education assess student learning outcomes.
The conversation of just how colleges and universities assess the quantity, quality and pace at which undergraduates learn across a wide range of disciplines is certainly not new. What is new, however, is the context within which the current debate over student learning assessment resides. At a time when the nation’s education, workforce, civil rights, and youth advocacy communities are taking new and aggressive efforts to drastically improve postsecondary completion rates, there comes concern over not just the number of students graduating but the educational quality and market value that degrees and credentials confer.
If there is any one academic community that should be paying strict attention to this renewed assessment agenda, it is the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) community. Given the president’s focus on strengthening the American scientific and technological enterprise—and a corresponding need to increase the number of students pursuing and graduating with advanced STEM degrees—there will perhaps be an even stronger level of scrutiny for teaching and learning in these fields.
The good news for STEM is that, as a collective, a number of scientific fields are ahead of the game. Perhaps more than any set of disciplines, engineering departments are known for their ability to take changes in the field and quickly translate them to undergraduate curriculum, teaching and assessment of learning.
The next step for engineering and other STEM disciplines—indeed all disciplines—is to bring this knowledge and transparency to bear on a national discussion being held by policymakers, institutions of higher learning and the associations that represent them, and the foundations that have been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into bettering college-going and degree completion rates. At the heart of this discussion is a not so simple question: Are students learning what they need to know in order to successfully participate in society at large—intellectually, civically and economically?
The education community has been trying to answer this question since the inception of higher education, yet never before has the question been such a powerful and political driver.
Comprehensive assessment initiatives prepared to serve the whole of higher education, and the many disciplines it houses, are many. A prominent international example is what has been known as the Bologna Process; a multi-nation European system that has sought to define educational quality by creating a framework for higher education that meets students’ needs, not institutions’ choices or policies.
