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Enhancing Our Undergraduate Program
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
May 20, 1998
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is Nebraska's land-grant institution and the state's largest undergraduate school; it follows that we have special responsibilities to have an undergraduate program of exceptional quality, one that is perceived by undergraduates as providing them with a singular undergraduate experience.
Chancellor Moeser, reflecting upon these aspirations and responsibilities, identified our goals as follows:
We intend to keep Nebraska's best in Nebraska and to attract the nation's and world's best. Recognizing that too many of our outstanding high school graduates leave Nebraska to attend institutions of higher education in other states, UNL dedicates itself to an intensified program of recruitment for academically talented and gifted students and to programs that support the retention of all students. The current Honors Program will be enhanced, creating a community of young scholars and outstanding faculty working together.(1)
Fortunately, we already have many strengths to call upon in enhancing our academic program, because this campus has a long tradition of commitment to its undergraduates. Most importantly, we have many professors who pour their creativity (and long hours) into their teaching and other work with undergraduates. Our degree-granting departments and programs place high emphasis on maintaining up-to-date curricula and pedagogy. The campus continues to invest in studios, labs, classrooms, computer labs, libraries, and other facilities to ensure good facilities and support. As a result, across the campus there is broad appreciation for our undergraduate teaching responsibilities.
Even with these many strengths, however, our own high aspirations and some new circumstances call us to achieve more - to build an undergraduate program of consistent and manifest excellence. First, our aspirations: We - members of the UNL community - are committed to assisting all our students become active, rigorous, and well-informed thinkers capable of effective problem-solving and critical thinking. We believe that all students should develop intellectual curiosity and habits of the mind that will sustain them as lifelong learners. They should leave our campus fully ready to enter society and take up productive and fulfilling lives. And we want to help our students develop a set of values, an ethical core, that will guide them in their personal lives and help them be effective community leaders.
Changing circumstances also compel us to action: It is evident that Nebraska's economic and social prosperity will increasingly rely upon the state's ability to attract, educate, and retain in the state a high-quality labor force; UNL's leadership role here is as self-evident as it is central. We can (and should) view this as an opportunity, but equally we cannot ignore the fact that the society around us is demanding more of us. A second changing circumstance is the imposition of new admissions standards and the rapidly growing opportunities for UNL to attract larger and larger numbers of truly outstanding students open the doors to raising our expectations for student academic achievement; as we are seeing, prospective students committed to learning will seek out a university which shares their commitment. Finally, the support of alumni and friends of the University, including in particular financial support expressed through the Capital Campaign, offers the prospect of material help for this effort.
With these considerations in mind, we propose a general framework for building UNL's undergraduate academic program. We recognize that these ideas can succeed only if they engage the imaginations and energies of individual faculty members in the departments and programs of the University. Therefore, we do not intend these proposals to operate separately from existing programs, but rather we see this plan as a way to support, strengthen, and elevate the undergraduate academic programs of the individual departments and programs of the campus.
We propose a five-part agenda: • We should work to build a more academically-supportive campus culture - among our faculty, our administrators, and most importantly among our students - to engage students more fully in the academic enterprise of the campus and to establish shared expectations of high academic achievement by all of our students.
• We should ensure that we have a rigorous and challenging curriculum that meets students' needs and fully reflects the faculty's best expectations.
• We should continue to build the University Honors Program and other special programs offering particularly challenging opportunities to our most academically-committed students.
• We should vigorously pursue the new opportunities we face to recruit exceptional students of high academic achievement, commitment, and potential.
• We should explore diverse innovations in conventional campus practices to find new ways (within relatively fixed resources) to enhance our undergraduate programs.
Let us consider each of these items in turn.
Building a Campus Culture that More Fully Supports Academic Achievement
We should build a campus culture that is more fully committed to the academic success of all of our students - and one that encourages all undergraduates to see their intellectual development as the core of their undergraduate experiences. As we are increasingly successful in recruiting hard-working and highly-committed students, we need to make sure that our campus appropriately challenges and encourages them to achieve.
Much of the educational life of our undergraduates - for good or for ill - occurs outside the classroom. Students carrying a full course-load will still spend only fifteen or so hours per week in class; the quality of their educations depends crucially on what they do with the other hours in their week - and in particular how much or how little they study, debate ideas with other students, engage their professors, make use of cultural opportunities on campus, and so on. Even in the classroom, the expectations and motivation (or lack of them) that students bring with them depend importantly on how much or how little the campus culture supports the academic enterprise. For these reasons, we cannot exclusively focus our efforts to elevate student academic achievement on the classroom experience itself; indeed, it is arguably by focusing on the broader campus culture that we can most effectively enhance in-class achievement.
Part of the commitment needed to enhance the campus's academic culture involves faculty and administrators. We as a campus community must be committed in everyday practice to the success of all undergraduates. The University's new admissions standards imply that we have certified that every student who now matriculates is sufficiently qualified to be successful at UNL; is it not a corollary, then, that the campus should be committed to the success of every student? What would it mean for the campus to be committed to the success of every student?
We know that at present many students are not successful on our campus. We suffer an attrition rate from freshman to sophomore years of approximately 25 percent; that is, after one year, one-quarter of our students find that somehow, the match between their needs and UNL's programs, which the year before was judged to be sufficiently close for them to choose us over other institutions, no longer exists. We suffer the loss of tuition that we would collect if they continued at UNL, and some argue that the taxpayers have "wasted" the funds that subsidize these students' freshman classes. More importantly, a quarter of those we have recruited for the University have started (and perhaps concluded) their post-secondary educations with this failure. While the optimum retention rate is not necessarily 100 percent, few would argue that it should not be significantly higher than it is; what would be the optimum rate, and how do we begin to move upwards toward it?
Graduation rates provide a second measure of how many students are succeeding. With the six-year graduation rate currently hovering at approximately 50 percent of the cohort which entered, it is not unreasonable to conclude that nearly half of our entering students are not succeeding at UNL by the six-year mark. What do we need to do to move our graduation rate
significantly higher, say to 65 percent or 75 percent?(2)
These data suggest that there is much room for improvement in both retention and timely graduation. One could have argued that under the old admissions rules, many students who did not belong in college and had little chance of succeeding were nonetheless here; high attrition from our student ranks, some argued, corrected for overly-easy admissions. With the new admissions standards, however, we cannot easily make this argument; and we have inevitably set ourselves on a path that ought to commit us to the success of all our students.
One implication of committing ourselves to all students is that we must reject the traditional definition of academic rigor. Rigor has most often been understood as "gate-keeping" - the narrower the gate, the greater the rigor. But there is an alternate and more useful way of conceptualizing rigor: Rigor can be better understood as setting high standards for achievement and expecting that all our students will meet these standards. So too, academic rigor should mean more sophisticated student work, not simply more student work. The faculty member's role changes, from that of being a gate-keeper to being the one who facilitates and encourages all students to succeed in meeting the high standards of increasingly sophisticated work. (Such concepts as "mastery learning," where students continue to work on material until they master it, attempt to operationalize this commitment.) Of course this change does not relieve the student from responsibility - indeed, just the opposite, under a regime of high expectations, all students are strongly challenged to achieve more.
In large part this commitment to the success of each student will be communicated (or
not) through how we mentor and advise each individual student. Committing ourselves to the
success of each student also commits us to providing those extra-class supports, particularly
mentoring and advising, that assist students to make proper choices about their academic
programs, take full advantage of the opportunities they encounter, and overcome those times of
difficulty and self-doubt.
Much of the responsibility for enhancing the campus's overall academic culture will rest on the shoulders of our students, because ultimately this project will succeed or not depending upon whether UNL's student culture is changed. Here it appears that we lack the very tools needed to intervene effectively in changing student culture. We can work harder with student groups such as the honors societies, ASUN, APU, MASA, Greek organizations, and others to promote an academic culture among students. We can more effectively recognize and celebrate student academic achievement. And undoubtedly there are other steps of a similar nature we can nd should take. Still, these efforts seem intrinsically limited and ineffectual as ways of affecting student culture.
This view is, however, misleading, because all of the steps outlined in the remainder of this paper are, directly or indirectly, aimed at enhancing the academic culture of the campus. Indeed, the most holistic assessment of the success or failure of the proposals below will be precisely the impact they have on student academic culture.
Developing the Curriculum
Primary responsibility for the University's curriculum rests with the faculty, and faculty members are continuously engaged in developing the campus's curriculum - as individuals revising their own course curricula, as members of departments updating degree requirements, as participants in various wider committees charged with approving changes touching upon the curriculum. Ideas on curriculum, then, including those identified in this paper, can be realized only to the extent that they come to influence faculty decisions. Moreover, it would be inappropriate for a campus-level plan to attempt to make detailed recommendations concerning the many specific curricula on campus.
We can say, however, that our efforts throughout the undergra duate curricula should be characterized by six general themes.
First, we should make every effort to ensure that our courses are appropriately challenging and that they inspire and motivate our students to high academic achievement. This task is especially important in the context of a changing student body, one that is increasingly prepared to be successful academically. Committing ourselves to the success of all our students means in part encouraging them to set high aspirations for themselves and in part our having high expectations for them. Determining the appropriate level of challenge should not be left just to individual instructors but should also become a "public" matter -- something to be discussed within departmental and program faculties, in peer-review groups, and so on.
Second, we should work to build into the curriculum, where appropriate, relevant content elements that prepare our students for a world of significant racial, ethnic, gender, and other diversity. Appreciation of diversity involves knowledge as well as tolerance, learning as well as experiencing, and our courses should develop in our students the knowledge base necessary for them to live in, compete in, and succeed within an increasingly global society.
Third, we must ensure that our students become computer literate and that our courses fully incorporate, where appropriate, new information technologies. Students will face an increasingly pervasive presence of computers in daily personal life, in vocational requirements, even in their lives as citizens. To be successful, they must be able to handle information technologies comfortably. To prepare these students, our curriculum must integrate computers as
fully as do the situations our students will face after graduation.(3)
Fourth, as many of our students as possible should have some international experience integrated into their undergraduate careers. We need to develop more opportunities (including financial support) for students to have such experiences. Where relevant, we should develop ways to make language study a meaningful part of international study.
Fifth, we need to continue to develop linkages between and among courses, especially at the freshman level, in order to create learning communities that support our first-year students in making a successful transition to the University. There appear to be three critical aspects of first-year experiences. First, students need opportunities to be inspired by, interact with, and form relationships with at least one member of the faculty and a cohort or community of student colleagues. Second, students must be socialized into a shared culture of high expectations. Third, students should be offered opportunities to learn and practice the skills that will enable them to perform to these high expectations.
There are many potential forms for such programs. One example is learning communities,
in which we package clusters of courses for cohorts of students (for example, offering calculus,
English comp, and chemistry to a cohort of engineering students, with some coordination of
instruction in the courses). We could expand the Supplemental Instruction program, through
which a course is in effect extended to the residence halls via discussions led by student mentors. "Theme floors" in the residence halls -- especially if connected to a course or academic program
-- offer another model. Some colleges identify and effectively integrate potential majors into
their programs starting in the first year. Undoubtedly there are many other models for sustaining
first-year students that should be explored as well.
Sixth, towards the end of the undergraduate's career (if not earlier), we need to ensure
that the student has had a meaningful encounter with the research enterprise of the campus. The
key institutional feature that distinguishes us from private colleges and "mainly-teaching" public
universities (including UNO and UNK) is that our students are taught by a faculty active in
research or creative-active. Seen negatively, this feature means that we will likely never be able
to offer our students the small classes and other close-attention advantages of, say, the small
liberal arts colleges; but used positively, this distinguishing feature opens the way for us to offer
a quite different kind of undergraduate experience. How can we turn our situation to our
advantage?
Many faculty members already take extra steps, for example through NSF's program of
Research Experiences for Undergraduates, to incorporate undergraduates in their research or
creative activity; would it nonetheless be possible to increase dramatically the opportunities for
more undergraduates to participate in some form of research or creative activity? Could we (e.g.)
require of all our students a "capstone" achievement participation in a faculty research project,
senior thesis, research project, or other research experience? Could we require each student,
during the junior or senior year, to serve as a research assistant for a faculty member? If we
cannot require this of all students, could we offer a capstone experience as part of the
requirements for gaining a special honors diploma? Are there better ways to bring our
undergraduates into meaningful contact with the research and creative enterprise of the campus?
Building the Honors Program and Other Special Offerings
The University Honors Program, as Chancellor's Moeser's words quoted above suggest,
plays a key role in the developing plans for the campus. It simultaneously serves as a rigorous
program for our most academically talented students, a mechanism for diffusing expectations of
high academic performance throughout the campus, and a crucial piece in the recruitment of
highly talented students to the campus. At the same time that we continue to build the quality of
the Honors Program, we should be developing other highly challenging, special offerings for
students. Our goal should be that all students who are capable and committed to succeeding in
such select programs should be able to enroll in one.
Concerning the University Honors Program, several important questions of strategy and
implementation require campus discussion. Should the Program remain capped at 400 entering
students? An alternate vision would seek to enroll, with the Program's high standards being held
constant, a steadily growing proportion of our entering class; however, growing enrollments
would require growing allocations of resources to staff and operate the Program. Do we have
adequate faculty resources to provide the junior- and senior-year experiences now required by the
Program? Undoubtedly we will need to develop creative ways to provide the faculty mentoring
expected without imposing undue burdens on the faculty. And finally, what role should the
colleges play in administering, operating, and paying for the Program?
Despite these questions, and others that will emerge as the Program develops, it remains
clear that Honors will play a leading role in modeling and encouraging high achievement
aspirations for undergraduates on the campus. We need to ensure that all UNL undergraduate
colleges and departments, including those that have not yet fully participated in the Program,
provide appropriate support and assistance in building Honors.
The Honors Program by itself, however, will not be sufficient to meet student demand for
highly challenging programs -- indeed, there are nearly as many students denied admission as
admitted to the Program. Since Honors enrolls only 400 students out of each freshman class, we
should also focus on developing other highly challenging or selective programs for academically-committed and hard-working students. As we recruit larger numbers of very good students,
having such programs will become even more important.
We should work to ensure that every course of study, every major, every undergraduate
program has within it meaningful opportunities and significant encouragement for students to
excel, including for example in departmentally-based honors programs. Other possibilities
include expanding discipline-specific dorm floors, designating special sections within existing
sections for target audiences, or combining existing courses into intensive blocks of courses.
Some programs should be truly interdisciplinary, allowing students to discover how knowledge
fits together, perhaps necessitating team teaching or collaborative efforts at curriculum design.
Programs should lead to a tangible recognition of some kind (e.g., accelerated graduation,
certificate, minor, special designation).
In addition, we should encourage colleges and departments to develop other options
offering exceptionally challenging courses of study. The J.D. Edwards Honors Program in
Computer Science and Management will be an exemplar. But there are other possibilities as well;
for example, we should explore options for 3/2 and 3/3 programs, in which highly-committed
students earn both baccalaureate and masters degrees in five or six years. We should explore
whether we should encourage larger numbers of advanced undergraduates to use the 400/800
options or even enroll in graduate-level courses (either to complete baccalaureate requirements or
to begin accruing credits to be applied towards a graduate degree).
Programs should be designed to create exciting intellectual environments in which faculty
model passionate curiosity and allow students to pursue their own curiosity. This will probably
require new kinds of student-faculty interactions that include "hands-on" applications of
knowledge.
Recruiting Exceptionally-Talented Students
The Lincoln campus appears to be entering a period when we will have growing
opportunities to attract increasing numbers of high-ability and high-academic-commitment students. How can we take full advantage of these opportunities and still remain true to our
historic land-grant commitment to access?
High-ability and academically-committed students can transform our campus, helping us
create that student culture in which all students value academics as the core of their
undergraduate experience. High-ability students raise the level of discourse in their classes and
stimulate their instructors to set higher expectations. They will tend to model high achievement
for other students, challenging all students to higher levels of learning and accomplishment.
Recruiting such students tends to draw in their wake other talented students as well as those
academically committed students who, while perhaps not as talented, nonetheless want to be part
of an intellectually alive campus and are prepared to benefit from it.
Who are these high-ability students, and how can we identify them? Who are, in Chancellor Moeser's words, "the best"? We propose that we search for high-ability and high-commitment students along multiple dimensions, including both traditional academic qualifications and other talents that better measure other forms of high ability and high motivation. Moreover, we propose that even within the traditional academic qualifications, we use several different measures.
Among those measures that reflect relatively traditional aspects of academic quality, we would identify the following (often overlapping) target groups for special recruiting attention: National Merit Scholars (about 80 each year in-state); Top 2% ACT + top 2% class rank (about 450 students); Nebraska graduates with ACTs over 30 (or comparable SATs); Nebraskans graduating in the top 10 percent of their classes; World-Herald "all-state" scholars, including those nominated by their schools as well as finalists (36 all-state, about 300 nominees); and Community College Phi Theta Kappa Special Honorees (26 students each year).
We also propose that we identify other groups of exceptional high school students and heavily recruit them as well. We should identify the top students in artistic and creative talents; the College of Fine and Performing Arts' newly inaugurated Nebraska Young Artists Awards provides an excellent vehicle for identifying these students. We should develop similar programs to identify (e.g.) the Top 50 students in Leadership Potential in the state (identified perhaps by school and community leadership, 4-H Action Teams, etc.); the Top 50 Minority Community Achievers (identified perhaps as Davis Scholarship recipients or through community groups); and other groups of exceptional students.
Beyond students with the most sterling academic credentials there exists a large target audience of students whom we should also recruit. These are also students of exceptional merit, bright, hard-working, and highly committed to achievement. They are likely to be academically ambitious and success-oriented. They have demonstrated that they can achieve: most (though perhaps not all) will have good grades and good test scores, and those with less than strong grades or scores will have demonstrated their abilities in other ways. Some may very well be nontraditional students (older, returning students, first in family to go to college, immigrants). We should strongly recruit these students as well.
Finally, we should continue to implement the new admissions standards and indeed, in a few years we may be in position to consider whether to raise them further. Recruiting
high-ability and high-talent students goes hand-in-hand with the new standards, and we can expect further increases in the quality of in-coming freshman classes as a result. Already, however, President Smith and others have raised the question as to whether our new admissions standards, which many view as constituting very minimal qualifications, should be raised further. There is little support for imposing additional course requirements. If, for example, we were to raise the required ACT composite score or high-school grade-point average, we would need to weigh the impact on access. Perhaps a better possibility would be to link our admissions standards directly with the high school exit standards currently under consideration by the Nebraska Board of Education. From a narrow UNL perspective, we could use the standards to help us identify outstanding students. But there is also a larger rationale: our using these standards as admission criteria would give them much greater impact.
To attract top prospective students, recruitment activities need to effectively connect them with those on our campus who are able to convey their own excitement for learning. Currently we look primarily to our admissions office to develop and implement a recruitment plan. We need to determine if others, in addition to the admission office, should be involved in developing and/or implementing a recruitment plan, when they should be involved and how their efforts should be coordinated? Recognizing that new groups are joining the recruitment efforts (e.g., extension educators and alumni) and that K-12 activities are offered through colleges, Student Affairs and Academic Affairs, addressing these issues may allow us to better utilize the efforts which are made.
How do these targeted recruitment strategies fit with our landgrant commitment to access? After implementation of these strategies, UNL will continue to admit approximately 3600 new freshmen every year, approximately 90 percent of whom will likely be Nebraska residents. Thus the recruitment strategies reflect no change in the number of opportunities available to Nebraska high-school graduates. If successful, however, these strategies will represent a profound change in the quality of their opportunities -- undergraduates coming to the University will be more consistently challenged to do their best, to achieve as much as they can, to use the University's resources in the most effective way possible. The value (in both personal and occupational terms) of the education they earn while here will be greatly enhanced.
Innovating Campus Practices
The agenda proposed above is ambitious. To achieve it will require not only the commitment and hard work of the faculty but also -- because every faculty member's workweek is finite -- new and more effective ways of organizing the teaching, research, and outreach activities of the campus. Rather than attempt to inventory, much less prescribe, all the innovations that might come forth in support of such an agenda, let us consider just a few examples that appear to have promise.
First, we should be prepared to develop and support multiple profiles for what constitutes a successful faculty career.(4) In particular, some faculty members, or faculty members at some phases of their careers, should be able to choose greater concentration on teaching than is common in the "one-size-fits-all" model, and we should commit ourselves to providing significant rewards for outstanding achievement in teaching. We know that faculty members contribute in different ways to the multiple missions of the University and that the University needs to be able to elicit a full contribution from every faculty member. Having in mind only one model of a "successful" faculty career has not served us well. For some senior associate professors and full professors, we should recognize the option of their focusing primarily on instructional activities and being appropriately recognized and rewarded for it. For those instructional faculty who are on non-tenure-track appointments, we should provide for appropriate assignment, evaluation, and the possibility of advancement; more extensiveresponsibilities and demonstrated superior performance should result in increased compensation.
A second promising innovation is further development of the peer review of teaching project. The University is a national leader in this area, and we should work to generalize the
opportunities and benefits from the project to as many faculty members as possible. We now recognize that graduate schools have all too frequently failed to prepare us for our teaching roles, and thus many professors seek assistance from the Teaching and Learning Center or Academy of
Distinguished Teachers or participate in the Teaching Council, Teaching Learning Technology Roundtable, or other groups on campus. Peer review of teaching, if developed on a broader scale, offers an attractive model of helping each other, of engaging our most effective teachers in
a collaborative effort to effuse their successes across the campus.
A third innovation is engaging students to teach other students. Of course we already have some models on campus of upper-class students serving as tutors, proctors, workshop leaders, and so on. The Supplemental Instruction program is a more structured effort in this regard, and while relatively new on our campus, has apparently been highly successful elsewhere. A different model, also highly structured and highly successful elsewhere, has been developed for introductory calculus instruction by the Berkeley mathematician Urie Treisman. Still a third model is being developed in Information Services; it uses students who enter the University with significant computer skills to teach computer skills to others, including staff and faculty. While traditionally we have seen students as only the taught, never the teachers, this view in fact undervalues students. Treisman's model has demonstrated that juniors and seniors, who are outstanding math students, if given requisite training and under appropriate supervision, can greatly enhance the calculus learning of introductory calculus students, including in particular those students often presumed to be "at-risk" in math classes. And certainly with regard to computer skills, the assumption that computer-literate students have nothing to teach others (including faculty and administrators) is patently wrong.
A fourth innovation is instructional technology and extended education. No detailed treatment of these topics is needed here, since a separate discussion paper will focus on
instructional technology, and plans for extended education are being developed by the Vice Chancellor for Extended Education. However, it appears certain that developments in instructional technology will rapidly open opportunities for -- indeed, perhaps compel
adaptation to -- quite new and different ways to teach. Our challenge is to provide faculty members with sufficient support, training, and incentives to ensure that the new instructional technology turns out to be a useful tool for, rather than an intimidating diversion from, the
fundamental learning goals that faculty members establish for students.
We intend to create a campus culture in the broad sense of the everyday life and choices of the institution that is more fully committed to high student achievement and the academic success of all of our students. This will require a sustained collaboration of faculty, administrators, and most importantly the students themselves. If we succeed, we will have fulfilled our land-grant obligation to have an undergraduate program of exceptional quality, one that our students value as a singular undergraduate experience.
Footnotes:
1. University of Nebraska Strategic Plan, 1996.
2. We need to keep in mind many cautions when interpreting these data. The current generation of students evidently uses institutions of higher education in more complicated and less linear ways than prior generations. Increasingly those who study retention and graduation rates speak of students who "step out" as well as those who "drop out" of college, implying an intentional phasing of schooling more congenial to the perceived interests of the student.
3. Within the next couple of years we will need to decide, as a number of other public universities have already decided, whether we should require entering students to own (or have access to) a computer. And we need to begin planning for how we will re-wire the campus to accommodate such extensive computer use and how we will provide the necessary technical and pedagogical support to the faculty.
4. These ideas will be presented more fully in the discussion paper on faculty roles and responsibilities.
If you have comments or suggestions, please send your feedback to Nancy Stara.
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