Trends towards Global Excellence in Undergraduate Education: Taking the Liberal Arts Experience into the 21st Century

Abstract

Dissatisfaction over undergraduate education seems to be persistent and has been jeopardized by the boost in research performance as fuelled by global rankings. Yet it will continue to be the cornerstone and a key mission of higher education. Hence the tide is shifting and the global debate on "the world-class university" is increasingly inclusive towards excellence in teaching and learning. A renewed focus on liberal arts education is part of this global debate on redefining excellence. This article aims to explain why liberal arts education, as it is (re)emerging in different regions, seems to be an adequate response to the search for excellence in the 21st century. It explores the drivers for liberal arts education from an epistemological, economic and a social-moral point of view. The role of interdisciplinarity, generic skills, and citizenship in different regional context are discussed, and also an admission that a liberal arts education is no panacea --that various limitations should be overcome and a truly global perspective is needed. UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION AND ITS DISCONTENTSAmid the massification of higher education, undergraduate education and its discontents is a subject of intensive discussion and analysis. The central elements of dissatisfaction are poor learning outcomes, student disengagement, low retention rates, stagnant or decreasing graduation rates, and lengthening time to degree. Conditions deteriorate, with overcrowded lecture halls, impoverished staff-student ratios, weakening of the research-teaching nexus, and faculty indifference to undergraduate teaching. Moreover, despite relentless efforts, persistent and or growing inequalities exist, while the undergraduate experience is becoming less affordable as a public service. As summarized by Muscatine: "the product of the present curriculum -despite a residue of good learning by good students in good courses -could hardly be called either excellent or economic" (2009, 51). Even in the most elite universities, disappointment with undergraduate achievement has been acknowledged (Bok, 2006; Lewis, 2006).

International Academic Mobility: Towards a Concentration of the Minds in Europe

“…Snow’s 54 plea in the late 1950s to overcome the gap between the humanities and the sciences and even long before that to the liberal arts model, including both the literary and the mathematical arts. This model was at the origin of the European university and has a renewed value and strong potential for the 21st century, as is already demonstrated in some particular initiatives in Europe 55 …”

The Global Citizen Conceptualized

“…However, educating for global citizenship needs to be considered systemically and systematically in terms of translating it from a university aim into a curricular outcome (Lilley, Barker, & Harris, 2015b). There have been calls for a greater synthesis of the principles of liberal education into professional learning (Schneider, 2004; Van der Wende, 2012). This research makes a contribution by linking the global citizen cognitive capacities (Table 2) to the formative themes of liberal education, namely, intellectual judgment, social responsibility, and integrative learning.…”

Global liberal education: Theorizing emergence and variability

“…As noted previously, explanations for the global emergence of liberal education are numerous. Van der Wende, reflecting on the European experience, conceptualizes three overlapping ‘drivers’: epistemological, economic and social/moral (2014). Epistemological drivers come from new categories of knowledge and ways of knowing, thought to result from technology and the need for creative solutions to complex social problems.…”