So this weekend when my parents were here I was watching the Today show with my mom, and there was a whole segment about how some college (I can’t remember which, and I tried to search on the Today site for a link but I can’t be bothered to devote hours to this) that is selling itself based on the fact that it allows students to bring pets to school with them – like, to live in their dorms. When the students go to class they have doggy daycare where the students can drop their pets off…. You get the picture.
Anyway, the first thing that I thought was “well, this totally hits the bull’s eye on what I’m going to post for the Higher Ed thing on the blog!”
So, I don’t have anything terribly illuminating to say about all of this. Just that I do think that there is an ever-increasing divide between the work that universities do as educators and the resources that they devote to actually educating students. Instead, it seems like the money is flowing toward the “experience” as opposed to the education. When we think about the buzz words in higher ed today, we hear a lot about things like retention, student satisfaction, student life, branding, etc. All of those things demand administrators, and they demand money. They also, under the guise of “serving students” take the focus away from what happens in the classroom and instead move that focus to what happens in dorms, on quads, on the internet.
Now, lest people think that I’m too reactionary here, I think some of these “university experience” type things are a good thing. I think it’s good, for example, that we attend more to students’ mental health needs, and that we recognize that students go through a period of adjustment when they enter college and they need support. On the other hand, though, I don’t see where any of the experience stuff makes a damned bit of difference if we’re not focusing nearly all of our energy on what happens in the classroom. Not on new course management software, new reporting software for students who are in trouble, new administrators for new programs that are just inserting more administrative layers without actually enhancing student learning, workshops for “student-centered learning” that take professors away from things like actually meeting with students or giving them feedback on their work, the increasing casualization of classroom instruction, because we really need to spend less money on that if we’re going to have more “services.”
So I guess my question is this: how can attention to the university experience work with attention to education, as opposed to working against it? How can we socialize students in P-12 to worry less about the “experience” and more about the education that we receive – or if not students, then their parents? Is there really a conflict between these two things, or do I just see a conflict because we’re all so busy fighting over scarce resources? What do undergraduates really need to get out of their college educations, and how do we put that first, even if what they need isn’t terribly exciting?
(Sorry again about being a day late on this one. Talk amongst yourselves.)
Reassigned Time 2.0 
Guess how long it took me to find this:
http://www.petside.com/the-sidewalk/top-pet-friendly-colleges.php
You made me wonder if they use adjuncts to staff those “experience” programs, or if they are all Assistants to the Associate Assistant VP for Rock Walls with benefits and everything.
Might be entertaining to pick some public university and look through their salary information. Or ask for the admin-student ratio as well as the faculty-student ratio …
As I read this I’m thinking that “experience” is being confused with “amenity”. If you look at it from the perspective of the “user experience”, that is, from the profession of designing user experiences (UX), having access to doggy daycare or a rock climbing wall or a dining hall with a sushi chef is more about an institution offering a version of higher ed country clubization. That’s just stuff that might impress a student during the campus visit and encourage them to pick college A over college B, but that might only be because that’s all they have to go on. It’s far more difficult to make a choice based on the quality of the education at A or B – or the long-term impact of a diploma from A or B – excepting perhaps a top-tier elite institution where a diploma from that institution is what makes the difference – not what was learned there.
Real user experiences focus on delivering meaning that results in something that is truly memorable. They also instill loyalty. Yes, it’s possible a student would remember taking their dog to college – but they’d probably more likely remember the experience of doing things with their dog moreso than the college experience. Real experiences usually don’t require more money. They require commitment from the people delivering the experience. How can you and your colleagues do a better job of developing relationships with students, of giving them something that’s meaningful and memorable? How could you concretely show that it’s different and unique from the education they could get at a local community college or an online for-profit?
In the long run students will forget the amenities, but what they’ll remember is the experience. To have students be more focused on the education, you and your colleagues need to work together to figure out how to make the education – and not the amenities – the real experience that your institution delivers. Start by focusing on how you deliver something truly meaningful for your students. As the last line of your post suggests, it’s not easy to do. I think about this often at http://dbl.lishost.org – try coming up with a better experience for a college library.
Re: the university “experience”
Coming from a UK University my view of university experience may be sightly different…But even during undergraduate study my academically-minded friends and I had many conversations about WHY people were at university in the first place. Depressingly, we found, most people ARE at university for the experience, not for the learning. In my first year as an undergrad, I was shocked to find that most people randomly picked courses out of the Uni course guide, not necessarily because they were passionate about a subject, but simply because they wanted to come to Uni. So I suppose it makes sense for Uni’s to get ‘bums on seats’ by appealing to the “experience”, rather than the real reason why people SHOULD be taking degrees. It’s for the learning, damnit!
I personally think it’s come from the whole focus here of getting peple into Higher Ed. But 40% of young people in Uni doesn’t necessarily result in more people wanting and believing in what they’re studying. More often, in my experience, it results in seminars where only a minority actually want/or do contribute anything. I’ve had so many seminars where out of a group of 15 or so, only 4 or 5 actually talk.
Saying that, I’ve have loved a pet in undergrad…I’m not sure how I’d have paid for it though, I could barely afford to feed myself in first year!
CPP – shut it. I was looking for the actual today show link (though admittedly I wasn’t terribly committed to that project).
CC Physicist – at least at my place, there is a layer of lower administration and then a layer of “staff” positions, which are full time and carry benefits. In that regard, people stuck in adjunct hell should really consider transitioning into student services positions, except, of course, they are “overqualified” or wrongly qualified for those.
Steven B – I think you make a really good point about the conflation of “experience” with “amenity” and that there really is (or should be) a distinction made. That said, I don’t think that we can put this all back on instructors and what they do in their classrooms. I’m confident in saying that the vast majority of my colleagues – both at my institution and elsewhere, tenure-line and not – try to make the learning experience in the classroom the best that it can be. But the reality is that improving that *learning* experience requires some level of institutional support. If institutional support for teaching comes in the form of buying the latest non-user-friendly and ineffective technology (and a cadre of administrators/workers to implement it) and yet faculty can’t get support for developing a new course or attending a conference that would allow them to keep up with their field, then that’s a problem. And I don’t think the buck stops with instructors for that problem.
Mistress Medieval – thanks for stopping by. I agree that a lot of this has to do with getting people in to higher ed, and I’d add that at least in the states the problem has been exacerbated by the drive toward retention efforts (i.e., how do we get students to stay in school after we’ve lured them with all of these amenities? Well, clearly with more amenities!).
This is a great post. I’m at a University where the student ‘satisfaction’ is ridiculously high, and yet we struggle with getting our students to understand that part of the ‘experience’ is actually coming to the classes that they’re paying for.. although increasingly, what they’re paying for isn’t the classes at all – it’s the student activities/athletics/tech/elevator-fixing fees that come along with it.
Sadly, amenities are just the way everything is progressing right now. I was even thinking about hotels in this way: I never pick hotels that don’t have free WiFi…. even if I’m not planning on using it (odd, I know). But I suppose it’s similar. Some schools offer SO many amenities that the schools that don’t simply can’t keep up.
The model that makes sense to me is one that keeps the “experience” and the “academics” of higher ed separate. You can do this most easily in my opinion by associating these “experience” things (pet services, rock-climbing gyms, sushi chefs, whatever) with student residences (“colleges” if you are UK or Australia-based, “dorms”, I guess for USA peeps). Then students can choose to live off-campus and skip the experience stuff and all the extra expenses associated with it. And the academics shouldn’t be affected one way or the other. And if the dorms/colleges/residences are funded directly by student fees paid by the residents, then the ridiculous high-end experience-stuff doesn’t push up the cost of going to that university as an (non-resident) student.
Essential services (mental health, physical health, financial aid, international student assistance, etc) should continue to be associated with the university itself, in my opinion, even though it isn’t directly academic-based, because it can make or break a student’s ability to participate in the academic life of the institution (which is not the case for pets or rock-climbing gyms).