What Would an Ideal College Look Like? A Lot Like This [View all]

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If you’ve been attentive to the growing series of posts here under the banner of the American Futures project, you know that Deb and Jim Fallows have been examining small, resilient American cities that are home to intriguing innovations and entrepreneurship. A few days ago, as part of the project’s recent focus on Burlington, Vermont, I took a look at two of the three great colleges there. Now let’s look in on the third, Champlain College. You’ll see why this one fits the project’s ongoing “American ingenuity” theme.

If you could design your ideal college from scratch, what would it look like? Mine would look something like the following. Students would acquire training that makes them immediately employable. They’d take courses in the liberal arts that would sharpen their skills in writing, analysis, and reasoning. And they’d graduate with some real-life knowledge, such as how to interview for a job. There’d be no tenure for faculty, but instructors would be made to feel they’re valued members of the enterprise. And administrators would constantly ask themselves “how can we prepare students for what the world needs of them?”

While you’re busy designing your version of the ideal, I can take a nap or go fishing, because somebody has already built mine: Champlain College. It is doing everything I’ve described and, in the process, is gaining the attention of the higher-ed world. The words I’ve heard used to describe Champlain include innovative, nimble, adaptable. A professor from nearby St. Michael’s College told me, with unabashed admiration, “Champlain is always asking itself What works?”

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A second component of Champlain’s undergraduate education comes through its required “Life Experience and Action Dimension” program, which has two parts: (1) some real-world education, emphasizing financial literacy and sophistication (developing a budget, making sense of credit cards, understanding how employee benefits work and why they’re important, etc.) and job skills (marketing oneself, negotiating business contracts, and developing skills in interviewing, networking, etc.); and (2) a community-service element that puts students to work helping Burlington’s needy and simultaneously broadening cultural awareness and a sense of engaged citizenship.

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Internally, the college seems healthy, too. There’s palpable energy and enthusiasm on this campus. You might expect the faculty to be angry or resentful about the no-tenure policy. They’re not. Several people, including Finney, told me the absence of tenure “has never been an issue,” a claim the Faculty Senate’s President, Laurel Bongiorno, affirms. Faculty members work under individual, multi-year contracts – a good arrangement most American workers would love to have.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/what-would-an-ideal-college-look-like-a-lot-like-this/280717/