Improving Teaching:
Strengthening the College
Learning Experience
Sandy Baum & Michael McPherson
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A n odd feature of the public policy discussion of higher education is
the near absence of attention to the quality of teaching. In marked
Kontrast, in the discourse around K–12 education, issues of teacher
training and recruitment, evidence about the impact of teaching quality on
student test scores, and debates about the role of classroom observation in
assessing teacher quality are prominent. Economist Raj Chetty made head-
lines several years ago by estimating that a high-quality kindergarten teacher
could wind up adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to a child’s lifetime in-
come.1 In K–12, all agree: teachers and teaching matter.
But in higher education, questions about what and how much students are
learning and how their learning is related to the quality of instruction they re-
ceive tend to take a back seat.2 Instead, questions about college admissions,
pricing and cost, debt, and financial returns dominate the news and policy
Diskussion. These are worthy topics of study, but they sidestep examination
of what goes on inside the “black box” of teaching and learning that college
students actually experience.
College teaching and learning are about more than the mastery of academ-
ic subject matter, important as that is. Classrooms provide occasions for the
development of interpersonal and cross-cultural competences, and skilled
teaching involves taking advantage of those learning opportunities as well as
more-narrowly academic learning. At the same time, the larger life of the
campus, including extracurriculars and, for some students, residential life,
can also be a deliberately designed instructional space for students.
The lack of attention to college teaching is consistent with how we pre-
pare faculty for their profession. An observer from another planet visiting
© 2019 von der American Academy of Arts & Wissenschaften
Veröffentlicht unter Creative Commons
Namensnennung 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Lizenz
https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_e_01757
5
American Ph.D. programs might well conclude that the graduate students
there are being prepared for full-time careers in academic research. Rarely
will doctoral students have more than one course on teaching, wenn überhaupt, und ihre
work as teaching assistants is likely to be less an apprenticeship than a part-
time job. Yet after graduating, typical faculty members in the United States ac-
tually spend the majority of their professional time on undergraduate teach-
ing and related activities, spending less than one-quarter of their time on
graduate instruction and research combined. The “theory” that would justi-
fy this mismatch between what faculty are prepared for and what they actu-
ally do is that the hard part of being a good teacher is knowing the subject
matter, and the rest can be picked up “on the job.” This is not an assumption
we would readily accept in other professions like aviation or surgery, as Harry
Brighouse argues in his essay in this volume. There is a good deal of evidence
that high-quality preparation matters for grade school and high school teach-
ers, and there is no reason for this to be any less true of college teachers.
The American Academy’s Commission on the Future of Undergraduate
Education, recognizing how important a strong postsecondary education sec-
tor is to the future of our nation and its citizens, reached the conclusion that
serious examination of the quality of the college education students are re-
ceiving needs to take a central place in deliberations about higher education’s
future.3 Attending to quality is at least as important for the future of higher
education as ensuring the affordability of college and strengthening the like-
lihood of students successfully completing the educational programs they
start. Paying for college and even getting a credential ultimately will not mean
much unless college students have high-quality educational experiences that
add real value for them in their careers and in their civic and personal lives.
By “quality” we do not mean the prestige and resources measured by U.S.
News & World Report and other college ranking systems, or the attributes
sought in the overheated struggle by some, usually privileged, Americans for a
place in the “best” university or college: a scramble that in reality affects few-
er than 5 percent of the students in U.S. higher education. The U.S. News rank-
ings aim principally to capture, auf der einen Seite, how “good” students are when
they arrive (notably not when they leave) according to conventional measures
Und, andererseits, how resource rich the environment is where they land
(essentially, how much money will be spent on them). Eher, our interest is
in the quality of students’ college experience: how the college classroom and
the broader educational environment shape what students know and are able
machen, what they value, and how they approach life. No doubt the “quality” of
one’s peers and the ability of a wealthy institution to provide small classes and
modern facilities bear some relationship to what students learn and how they
6
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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesImproving Teaching: Strengthening the College Learning Experience
develop as human beings. But high-quality educational experiences and deep
learning can occur in a variety of institutional settings. The best environment
depends on the student’s characteristics and circumstances.
Existing rankings–as well as most discussions on the strengths and weak-
nesses of our higher education system–lack any indication of what work is
being done inside the university to educate undergraduates or how well that
work is being done. What kinds of knowledge and skills are students gain-
ing? How are students developing as human beings and as members of soci-
ety? How do faculty prepare for their work, get feedback on it, and improve
their teaching? How does the larger educational environment within which
students are embedded meet their needs? These outcomes may be difficult to
quantify and rank, but in this volume, leading researchers and practitioners
give attention to these questions.
I n their magnificent history of the coevolution of technology, wages, Und
Ausbildung, economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz show that qual-
ity has long taken a back seat to quantity in American higher education.4
In the nineteenth century, while European countries introduced national ex-
aminations and other centralized requirements to control access to second-
ary education, the United States developed a highly decentralized, offen, Und
forgiving system of elementary and, in the twentieth century, secondary edu-
cation. From the beginning, America’s founders saw that the success of their
democratic republic depended on citizens prepared not only to vote, but also
to run for and staff public offices; as a result, throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury, America far outpaced Europe in the percent of citizens getting a basic ed-
ucation. In the early twentieth century, the United States led the high school
movement that would equip people to work with the high technology of the
day: Elektrizität, chemicals, locomotion, and medicine. High schools were lo-
cally founded and supported, and states imposed few regulations or require-
ments on performance. This “open and forgiving” American system support-
ed rapid expansion in numbers of educated Americans prepared for the ballot
box and the factory but, as Goldin and Katz acknowledge, did “little to in-
crease the quality of education.”5
The momentum of this quantitative expansion led to widespread high
school completion after World War II and the beginnings of mass higher edu-
cation in the 1950s and 1960s. But growth in education levels of the U.S. pop-
ulation slowed sharply at the end of the 1970s: while Americans were begin-
ning college in large numbers, disappointingly few were completing college
credentials. Even today, about one-third of the students who begin a bache-
lor’s degree program fail to complete it, and only about 40 percent of students
7
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148 (4) Fall 2019Sandy Baum & Michael McPherson
who enter a community college (where the majority of all higher education
students start) have any kind of degree or certificate six years later.
As high school graduation became more common and more working adults
and students from low-income families sought college degrees, the cost of col-
lege became a major obstacle to student success. Beginning in the 1960s, Die
federal government began to address this problem through federal student aid
grants and loans, but managing the costs of providing postsecondary educa-
tion to a large fraction of the population continues to be a national challenge.
A second obstacle to student success, in Goldin and Katz’s view and in
ours, has been educational quality. As more students aspired to postsecond-
ary education, it became apparent that too many high school graduates were
arriving at college ill-prepared by their earlier education, with as many as half
being assigned to some form of remedial instruction. Colleges and universi-
ties have proved to be highly varied in their capacity to meet effectively the
needs of underprepared students. Real educational success for the much larg-
er numbers and greater diversity of students now pursuing higher education
requires careful attention to educational quality and the student experience.
There are compelling reasons for our nation to face up to the challenge of
improved educational quality, at the precollege and college level. In simple eco-
nomic terms, the earnings advantage gained by college graduates over those
with less education remains high compared with past eras. Increasing the num-
ber of low-income and minority students with a college education will both
expand the economy and reduce economic inequality. Beyond the economic
gains for individuals, economists have found that communities with higher ed-
ucation levels benefit from the greater ability of people with more education to
work together and communicate well.6 A study sponsored by the Commission
on the Future of Undergraduate Education showed that well-designed invest-
ments in students’ college success more than paid for themselves over a thirty-
year time horizon.7 Numerous studies have demonstrated the societal value of
increasing the share of adults who earn meaningful college credentials.8
A college education is about far more than getting a job; but even focus-
ing on employment outcomes, building a career in the Internet age is less
about landing and holding a job than it is about acquiring the flexibility, prob-
lem-solving ability, and capacity for nonroutine work demanded by a rapid-
ly evolving economy. In this volume, Earl Lewis’s essay “Toward a 2.0 Com-
pact for the Liberal Arts” and Thomas Bailey and Clive Belfield’s contribution
“The False Dichotomy between Academic Learning & Occupational Skills”
address the familiar but false dichotomy of academic or liberal arts learning
and vocational training. The clear message is that efforts to narrow education
to specific occupational preparation are counterproductive.
8
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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesImproving Teaching: Strengthening the College Learning Experience
The country’s founders showed admirable forethought in recognizing
that U.S. citizens needed education both to be able to vote intelligently and
to serve as office-holders such as legislators, cabinet officials, and judges. Ear-
ly in the nation’s history, the ability to read and write might have sufficed, Aber
in today’s technologically advanced, environmentally challenged, culturally
diverse, and globally connected society, the educational requirements to be a
discerning voter and effective participant in public discourse, let alone to serve
as a responsible government official, are substantially greater than in the past.
Preparing for active citizenship needs to be an element in all high-quality ed-
ucation, as Sylvia Hurtado discusses in her essay “‘Now Is the Time’: Civic
Learning for a Strong Democracy.”
Sustaining focus on improving the quality of undergraduate education is
a challenging goal, but there are some encouraging signs. As K–12 education
research has shown, improvements in technology make it easier and cheap-
er to observe classroom practice and to measure and assess student outcomes
(including but not limited to test scores). An increasing number of well-doc-
umented examples of schools and school systems that have adopted obser-
vation practices have shown that such practices yield consistent success in
improving teaching.9 A growing number of college case studies and research
projects have begun to demonstrate the possibilities for higher education as
well.10
Several essays in this volume focus specifically on the question of how to
improve academic classroom teaching. In addition to Brighouse’s “Becoming
a Better College Teacher (If You’re Lucky),” Carl Wieman discusses the neces-
sity of establishing expertise in university teaching, and introduces readers to
the growing field of discipline-based education research in “Expertise in Uni-
versity Teaching & the Implications for Teaching Effectiveness, Evaluation &
Training.” Sally Hoskins writes about a distinctive approach to teaching biol-
ogy in “CREATE a Revolution in Undergraduates’ Understanding of Science:
Teach through Close Analysis of Scientific Literature,” and Mary Sue Cole-
man, Tobin Smith, and Emily Miller discuss the Association of American Uni-
versities’ efforts to help science departments improve their faculty’s teach-
ing. It is not entirely an accident that these essays are focused in the natural
Wissenschaften. Systematic efforts at undergraduate teaching improvement seem to
have moved further in the sciences than in other parts of the curriculum, pro-
haps in part because scientists may find it more congenial to rely on the kinds
of quantitative evidence that can help guide improvement, but probably also
because the National Science Foundation has been willing to spend money on
funding improvement efforts in the sciences and studying their results.11 Who
will fund comparable research in the humanities and social sciences?
9
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148 (4) Fall 2019Sandy Baum & Michael McPherson
As we noted earlier, the classroom and the campus environment matter
to student development in ways that go beyond mastery of specific academ-
ic subjects. In her essay “Mitigating Ethical Costs in the Classroom,” Jenni-
fer Morton talks about the tensions that often exist, especially for first-gener-
ation students, between the expectations of the academic communities they
are joining and those that prevail in their families and neighborhoods. To the
degree that these tensions concern differing cultural values, they have a mor-
al as well as emotional valence. She highlights the personal costs of social ad-
vancement overwhelmingly borne by less privileged students. Morton argues
Das, especially at a commuter college, the classroom is likely to be a critical
venue for addressing these cultural tensions and ethical costs in a support-
ive way. We also consider the value of the classroom experience, but through
analysis of online technology and education delivery. In “The Human Factor:
The Promise & Limits of Online Education,” we report evidence that less-
prepared students do particularly badly in purely online settings, vorschlagen
that the absence of personal instructor contact and a supportive communi-
ty is especially costly to these students’ learning. Attempts to overcome this
problem of isolation through online strategies have so far not succeeded on a
large scale.
College often places heavy psychological demands on students. Young stu-
dents may confront new adult demands and responsibilities in a setting of new
social norms and a community of people with more diverse backgrounds than
they have previously come into contact with. For older adults, who constitute
um 40 percent of all students, managing academic responsibilities in the
midst of a full life often involving children and employment is taxing. In their
contribution to the issue, “Financial Constraints & Collegiate Student Learn-
ing: A Behavioral Economics Perspective,” Benjamin Castleman and Katha-
rine Meyer review insights from psychology and behavioral economics show-
ing how faculty and staff and thoughtful university policies can address some of
these challenges. Vital psychological, cultural, and moral challenges arise from
the fact that colleges and universities are among the few places where people
from different races and ethnic and cultural groups commonly work and live to-
gether. It is a mistake, obwohl, as Beverly Tatum points out in her essay “Togeth-
er and Alone? The Challenge of Talking about Racism on Campus,” to assume
that this proximity will automatically contribute to a constructive learning en-
vironment. Tatum describes a program of intercultural communication and di-
alogue that has demonstrated effectiveness in moving participants out of their
comfort zones toward relationships of genuine sharing and mutual learning.
Dan Greenstein–in his essay “The Future of Undergraduate Education:
Will Differences across Sectors Exacerbate Inequality?”–draws on his per-
10
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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesImproving Teaching: Strengthening the College Learning Experience
spective as longtime head of the Gates Foundation’s work on higher educa-
tion to describe the substantial pressures and challenges that the higher ed-
ucation industry has been subject to in recent decades, and will continue to
Gesicht. Yet through all these changes, colleges and universities remain among
the most conservative of institutions, in ways good and bad.
The essential work of an undergraduate college is to open students’ minds
to important ideas, to help them acquire knowledge and skills in areas of last-
ing value, and to develop capacities that will help them succeed in their ca-
reers but also improve their society. However much the settings for and tech-
nologies of delivery of instruction change, this basic work does and should re-
main the same. We applaud the conservatism that resists reducing college to
vocational training or the acquisition of specific skills.
But universities and colleges remain highly conservative in another, weniger
creditable way. Educators tend to teach in the way they were taught. There is
some irony in the fact that most college teachers were formerly the students
most adept at benefiting from (or at least surviving) the educational practic-
es their teachers inflicted on them; it is easy to see how those practices repro-
duce across generations in an environment where there is little training for
or monitoring of teaching, even if the practices have limited effectiveness for
most students. This is just one of the factors that makes it hard to motivate in-
stitutional change, despite the evidence that improving educational practices
actually makes faculty enjoy their work more. A more unsettling form of con-
servatism in higher education is a tendency to reproduce unthinkingly cul-
tural biases and prejudices inherited from the past, such as allowing men to
barge in while women wait to be called on, or discouraging a student of color
from majoring in math. There is room for a good deal of improvement in how
higher education faculty and institutions do their work, even as the work they
need to do remains in many ways the same.
Taken together, the essays in this volume make a persuasive case for the
importance of broadening the scope of discussions on the future of higher ed-
ucation. Ensuring widespread access to affordable college education is vital.
But as the inconsistent outcomes of today’s students suggest, getting people
into college is not enough. Nor is just getting them through their programs.
We have to understand more about how students learn, about how to devel-
op and support effective teaching at the college level, and about how to ensure
that we are truly educating students, not just providing them with credentials.
11
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148 (4) Fall 2019Sandy Baum & Michael McPherson
Über die Autoren
Sandy Baum is a Nonresident Fellow in the Center on Education Data and
Policy at the Urban Institute and Professor Emerita of Economics at Skidmore
College. She is the author of Making College Work: Pathways to Success for Disadvan-
taged Students (with Harry J. Holzer, 2017) and Student Debt: Rhetoric and Realities
of Higher Education Financing (2016).
Michael McPherson, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2014, is Pres-
ident Emeritus of the Spencer Foundation and a Nonresident Fellow in the
Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute. He is the author
of Lesson Plan: An Agenda for Change in American Higher Education (with William
G. Bowen, 2016) and Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public
Universities (with William G. Bowen and Matthew M. Chingos, 2009). He is the
Cochair of the American Academy’s Commission on the Future of Undergrad-
uate Education.
Endnoten
1 David Leonhardt, “The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers,” The New York
Times, Juli 27, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/business/economy/
28leonhardt.html.
2 An important exception is Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift:
Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010),
which examines student performance across colleges on a well-known test of critical
thinking, with discouraging results.
3 Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, The Future of Undergraduate
Education, The Future of America (Cambridge, Masse.: American Academy of Arts and
Wissenschaften, 2017).
4 Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology
(Cambridge, Masse.: Belknap Press, 2010).
5 Ebenda., 345.
6 Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs (Boston: Mariner Books, 2013); and Paul
Romer, “Endogenous Technological Change,” Journal of Political Economy 98 (5)
(1990).
7 Sophia Koropeckyj, Chris Lafakis, and Adam Ozimek, The Economic Impact of Increas-
ing College Completion (Cambridge, Masse.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
2017).
8 See Jennifer Ma, Matea Pender, and Meredith Welch, Education Pays 2016: The Bene-
fits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society (New York: The College Board, 2016)
and the references therein.
9 Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane, “Rising Inequality in Family Incomes and
Children’s Educational Outcomes,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social
Wissenschaften 2 (2) (2016); Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Lisa
Rosen, The Ambitious Elementary School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017);
12
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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesImproving Teaching: Strengthening the College Learning Experience
and Robert E. Slavin, Nancy A. Madden, Bette Chambers, and Barbara Haxby, Two
Million Children, Success for All (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press, 2008).
10 Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, The Future of Undergradu-
ate Education, The Future of America, Kerl. 1, endnote 23; and Aaron M. Pallas, Anna
Neumann, and Corbin M. Campbell, Policies and Practices to Support Undergraduate
Teaching Improvement (Cambridge, Masse.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
2017).
11 There are certainly improvement efforts in other fields, some at individual institu-
tions and some that are broader. One notable effort is the History Tuning Project
sponsored by the American Historical Association; see https://www.historians
.org/teaching-and-learning/tuning-the-history-discipline.
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13
148 (4) Fall 2019Sandy Baum & Michael McPherson
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