Higher Ed Learnings

“’We all technically, legally own the place,’ Will Xu told me last year. We were sitting at a picnic table on the campus of Deep Springs College, a tiny, experimental school in the California desert where he is a student. The White and Inyo Mountains were ringed around us.”

Deep Springs College offers a different picture of what learning might look like across our higher education institutions. The quote above comes from a New York Times opinion piece written by editor Michal Leibowitz.

At a time when traditional colleges and universities are under attack from almost every direction (in April a committee of Yale professors published an unusually self-critical report, arguing that colleges need to take the public’s low trust in them seriously), schools like Deep Springs seem to meet the needs of their learners in a better way compared to their traditional competition.

“[Deep Springs College] was founded in 1917 by a hydroelectric tycoon L.L. Nunn. Today, Deep Springs educates about 26 students each year, offering them a free, two-year liberal arts education on a working cattle ranch. Many go on to elite colleges like the University of Chicago. After Mr. Xu graduates in June, he plans to work in tech policy.”

“The students of Deep Springs are the sole beneficiaries of the Deep Springs trust. This college is theirs to look after and to safeguard.”

“This isn’t a symbolic position. Of course, millions of American students work part or full time while trying to get an education. But the students at Deep Springs have an unusual kind of responsibility for their collective lives: They work as cowboys and butchers, they mow the lawns, and they serve on the board of trustees, the curriculum committee and the communications committee. They staff a team of volunteer firefighters, responding to accidents on the twisting roads beyond the school. They help make the food that feeds everyone here – students, faculty, staff members and their families.”

“The students must choose not only which classes to take but also which ones will be offered to the college at large. They help to pick the professors and to run the admissions process, and are involved in ever bigger decisions about the future direction of the college, like whether to hire someone for fund-raising.”

“Perhaps this is why A.I.-enabled cheating does not seem to be a problem at Deep Springs. At other schools, students can tell themselves that they are, at worst, only cheating themselves. Students at Deep Springs learn to see themselves not as consumers of a degree (an individual good), but as creators of an education (a collective good)….”

“Deep Springs…, as well as other work colleges sit on the edges of America’s education system, experiments that have managed to sustain themselves, and even flourish, without becoming mainstream. But there are aspects of…these idealistic schools that could be incorporated into Yale or Harvard or Pomona. (It’s telling that the Yale committee’s 30-plus-page report on trust in higher education included only a few sentences about giving students a greater role in the university.)”

Leibowitz points to several steps traditional colleges and universities could take to make learner agency/student voice more prominent on their campuses:

Reviving cooperative living to give students at least a taste of what it means to live in a context where their actions matter.

Empowering students to take on greater roles in the stewardship of their schools, like running the honor board, managing the campus recreation centers, serving as trustees or full members of hiring committees.

Creating campus work programs where mandatory labor roles give students a bigger stake in their institutions.

Other ideas to make a learning institution more inviting to the individual learner would be to focus on academic growth instead of academic achievement. In other words, celebrate the growth a learner has shown over time instead of just achieving a passing score.

Build relationships that foster learning, both between peer learners and between the young learner and their adult learning coaches.

Empower young learners to make learning decisions for themselves, which, in turn, could involve financial decisions connected with the young person’s learning agenda.

Embrace anytime/anywhere learning.

And balance all the human learning interaction with technology tools that assist learning, instead of replacing instruction.

Leibowitz ends his Times piece by writing this:

“If you ever visit the valley where Deep Springs is nestled, you may be struck, as I have been, by the confidence with which these students, particularly the second years, move through their little world. They move – and this is the best way I know how to put it – like natives. Over their time at the school, the students come to know one another and be known by one another. They are, for the most part, accepted. They have challenged themselves, and they have all failed – the curriculum, almost by design, demands too much. And they have survived it all.”

“Along the way, they have been given an opportunity to learn what many people don’t learn until well into adulthood, if they even learn it then: A good life can consist of things that are not for sale, that cannot be resumatized, that are not best understood as investments in your future so much as brushes with life itself.”

Til tomorrow. SVB