Slide 1

CIHE Panel Session:Degree Qualifications Profile: What Is Its Utility?

Presenters: Dr. William M. Throop, Provost and Vice President, Green Mountain College, Poultney, VT

Dr. Richard Borden, Rachel Carson Chair in Human Ecology, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME

Dr. Michael Konig, Founding Dean of College of Arts and Sciences, Bay Path College, Longmeadow, MA

Moderators: David S. Graves, CEO Hospitality, Art and Design Education, Laureate Education, Inc.Robert C. Froh, Associate Director, CIHE, NEASC

What is this about? The demands for higher education accountability increases as the federal government, employers, students and their parents continue to ask, what does a college degree signify, and what would be the core competencies for recipients of various degrees?

The Lumina Foundation brought together a group of higher education leaders, and policy makers to develop a qualifying framework that has resulted in the Degree Qualifications Profile.

This profile has generated great interest and broad discussions from the higher education community. The panel members will share insights and challenges from the perspective of their individual campuses and invite audience participation to the general discussion.

Elements of the Degree Qualifications ProfileApplied LearningCivic LearningBroad Integrative KnowledgeSpecialized KnowledgeIntellectual Skills

Excerpts from Civic Learning

Our Panelists todayDr. William M. Throop, Provost and Vice President, Green Mountain College, Poultney, VT

Dr. Richard Borden, Rachel Carson Chair in Human Ecology, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME

Dr. Michael Konig, Founding Dean of College of Arts and Sciences, Bay Path College, Longmeadow, MA

Dr. William M. Throop, Provost and Vice President, Green Mountain College, Poultney, VT

Elements of the Degree Qualifications ProfileApplied LearningCivic LearningBroad Integrative KnowledgeSpecialized KnowledgeIntellectual SkillsDr. Richard Borden, Rachel Carson Chair in Human Ecology, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME

Elements of the Degree Qualifications ProfileApplied LearningCivic LearningBroad Integrative KnowledgeSpecialized KnowledgeIntellectual SkillsCreation of an Office of International and Domestic Study: Bay Path College, Lumina, and Degree Qualifications Profile

Presenter: Dr. Michael Konig, Bay Path College

Bay Path College:

Four-Year Private Institution2,200 undergraduate and graduateSocio-economically diverseFirst generation, 28% students of color

Vision 2013:

develop global and multi-cultural perspectives that promote an understanding of ones place in the world and enable one to be ready for whatever challenges the future will bring.

CIC Lumina Proposal:

Creation of Office of International and Domestic Study.Support opportunities for global learning and life experiences for Bay Path College students. Work to more fully integrate academic travel opportunities with specific degree programs across campus.

Application of Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP) :

ensure that student learning outcomes established for participation in academic travel are consistent.These outcomes are aligned to outcomes for each academic discipline.Clearly communicated to faculty, advisors and current and incoming students.DQP frameworks serve as foundation upon which graduate-level global study based. DQP frameworks spider web creates more seamless transition.

Applied Learning masters

bachelors

Civic Learning associate Intellectual Skills

Broad, Integrative Knowledge Specialized KnowledgeDr. Throop notes Notes for Panel on the Degree Qualifications Profile - William Throop Dec. 6, 20111. The Lumina Foundations Degree Qualifications Profile (DP) advances the movement to characterize the quality of education in terms of outputs rather than inputs - what is learned rather than what is taught. Thus it provides an important counter-balance to other measures of quality, such as terminal degree percentages. It is much more nuanced than retention/graduation rates, which are rarely comparable across kinds of institutions. 2. Higher education needs to have high social capital to perform effectively its function in modern society, and this has been eroding. The DP promises to provide a structure that helps to communicate to the public at large what a degree means and why it has value. The goal is important, though the means for achieving it works only if the DP is widely enough shared and substantive enough to warrant value claims. The challenge is to find a reasonable balance between these two desiderata.3. I have some doubts about whether the DP can achieve this balance given the plurality of higher education missions in the US. I see the following three primary issues, a plurality problem, a cognitive bias and a disciplinary presumption. I briefly explain each of these issues below, recognizing that if the five learning areas are sufficiently vaguely characterized, then they incorporate reasonable responses to the issues. But the cost of this is that they are insufficiently concrete to meaningfully differentiate quality degrees from their imposters.4. A Plurality Problem: The claim, as I understand it, that each degree level must address each of the five areas of learning seems too strong. It is not clear to me that all degrees must address all areas and if they do so, it is not clear that the learning at higher degree levels is best seen as cumulative. The spider web/pentagram image is misleading. It seems more in line with the plurality of higher education missions to recognize that significant learning in some subset of the five areas (supplemented with other equally worthy areas) is sufficient for the quality of a degree at a level. This is not captured by the variations in the spider webs for different kinds of institutions. Some masters degrees, such as video game design (UCF) may have little breadth and others need not involve specialized knowledge understood in terms of disciplinary depth Sustainable Food Systems (GMC)Two year degrees may provide highly detailed knowledge in a specific area, e.g. HVAC technicians, which does not serve as a foundation for further learning in four year institutions.The civic learning component seems to fit best within four year degrees; the examples of specific learning outcomes for two year and graduate degrees seem forced, at least for some degrees at these levels.5. A Cognitive Bias: The DP focuses on students skills and knowledge what they know and can do -rather than their dispositions - who they are. Historically a liberal arts education aimed to cultivate character, which involves developing sensitivities, emotional resources, and tendencies to think and behave in certain ways. These are not well integrated into the five cognitively defined categories, nor do they seem best understood as an optional sixth area, as they may be at the core of an institutions identity. Nussbaums book on the role of the humanities in a democracy provides reason to think that cultivation of virtues remain an important function of higher education.Colleges like Green Mountain, with strong value-oriented missions, may be best understood as cultivating dispositions to think, feel and behave in certain ways the example of our ELA program and the cultivation of sustainability virtues.6. A Disciplinary Presumption: The DP seems to interpret breadth and specialization in terms of disciplines, which fits the last century of higher education in the US, but which is not easily translated into thematic approaches to higher education (a focus on water or health or the environment) as suggested, for example, by Mark C. Taylor. Thematic approaches may better meet the needs of employers who typically do not care about the kind of abstruse knowledge that characterizes contemporary disciplinary specialization. At the bachelors level, the student defines and explains the boundaries and major sub-fields, styles, and/or practices of the field and defines and properly uses the principal specialized terms used in the field, both historical and contemporaneous.At the bachelors level, the student frames a complex scientific, social, technological, economic or aesthetic challenge or problem from the perspectives and literature of at least two academic fields, and proposes a best approach to the question or challenge using evidence from those fields and produces, independently or collaboratively, an investigative, creative or practical work that draws on specific theories, tools and methods from at least two academic fields.7. Summary and reflections on the alternatives to having a DP (if there is time).