Accepting Responsibility for Student Learning

The world is very different from the one in which colleges and universities evolved. Technology has transformed the way people do business and the way they live. It has extended the research capacity of higher education. Yet it does not seem to have changed educational practices on campuses to any great extent. The college students of the early 1900s do not have a lot in common with today's students, yet classroom practices are probably not much different.

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Some of America's most respected educational leaders, seeing the need for change, have urged colleges to give more attention to undergraduate teaching, to improve institutional effectiveness, to institute Total Quality Management techniques, to become more customer-responsive, and to make better use of technology in teaching. However well-intentioned these recommendations are, they are not likely to have any significant or lasting effect on higher education unless we shift to a paradigm in which colleges and universities accept responsibility for student learning.

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Under the new paradigm--the "Learning Paradigm"--colleges will be responsible for student learning. Students, of course, will remain responsible for their own learning, but that does not relieve the institution of its own responsibility. Everyone on campus should be evaluated based on contributions to student learning, and the focus should be on continuous improvement of the environment for learning. Institutional leaders should be concerned about success for a diverse group of students, and institutions should meet goals for improving learning outcomes.

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As institutions shift from the Instruction Paradigm to the Learning Paradigm, the criteria for success will change.

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In the Learning Paradigm, however, institutions that have identified goals for learning and student success outcomes and that can document achievement will be the most successful. Rather than focusing on the quality of entering students, these institutions will be concerned about the quality of exiting students and how much those students have learned.

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