About Campus: Enriching the Student Learning Experience

One of the most important steps colleges and universities can take in becoming learning organizations is to reorganize their educational activities to encourage shared, connected learning experiences.

It is a paradox not lost on many in higher education that while the corporate world has embraced organizational learning, higher education lags significantly behind. What would it take for colleges and universities to step up to the challenge of becoming true learning organizations?

While over a third of American college students are enrolled in community colleges, there is surprisingly little research on these institutions to inform our views of the role they play—or can play—in the world of higher education. Turning our attention to these long-ignored but widely attended institutions may mean challenging some common assumptions about what students can and should get out of postsecondary education.

For over fifty years, Outward Bound has been using challenging wilderness expeditions to help people discover how to forge successful learning communities. Now the instructors at one Outward Bound Center are taking the wilderness expedition principles to schools and campuses, designing what they call learning expeditions— ones where you don't necessarily have to sleep on the ground.

In 1990, one graduate admissions office, overwhelmed by paper, decided to take the plunge and convert their paper-based functions to an electronic environment. Now they can provide almost instant delivery of information and service. Sound too good to be true? The director of graduate admissions explains how they managed to make such a smooth transition.

A professor, who chooses to preserve his anonymity, has a friendly lunch with the vice president of student affairs and learns a thing or two about where modernism has taken us.

According to professor of psychology Claude Steele, practices such as support services for so-called at-risk students and the sidelining of minority interests in university life can actually undermine minority achievement. So what helps promote it? The answer for Steele and other educators at the University of Michigan is to raise expectations for all students. This is the philosophy behind the 21st Century Program.

Here are some of the tough issues facing public universities as they struggle to redefine their roles while holding onto the promise of providing widespread access to high-quality and affordable education.