Expand the Menu of Majors

For better or worse, one way that prospective students search for colleges is by looking for particular majors, and one way that prospective students' enthusiasms about higher education are excited is by imagining themselves majoring in various things.  In short, the list of majors (again, FBOW) functions a bit like the menu in the restaurant window.

It may well be that Mills does not optimally present the possibilities that prospective students would find here (in other words, students CAN do more than it looks like they can).  Our offerings in terms of majors are, for the most part, program- and department-bound.  We have been (wisely, we probably feel) rather conservative in this regard.  We have developed a few (e.g. intermedia arts, public policy), but we tend right away to think of these as programs/proto-departments that need to stand on their own.  Our experiments in expanding student options within the existing envelope of course offerings are fewer.

This proposal is for more consideration of moderately creative multi-disciplinary majors that put together courses from different areas.  They can be "housed" in a given department but draw on courses in multiple departments.  We have some models for this (there is an anthropology/sociology degree, for example, that uses parts of the sociology major but substitutes several anthropology courses).  This is arguably the very spirit of the liberal arts.

We rightly worry about falsely advertising things we can't really offer, but there might be attractive majors that we do have the courses for (or that we almost do and that a strategic supplementary hire would leverage).  This might be an opportunity to define new positions that can create multiple such leverages.  Strategically, this should be co-driven by what would really enhance the attractiveness of our repertoire of majors and what existing curricular resources are most exploitable via strategic investment.

SEE ALSO comment on other post

Faculty Driven Trans-Disciplinary Major Pilots

Idea

What if small groups of faculty design, and get approval for "college" majors to be offered for a few years on a pilot basis.  The menu on offer would vary from year to year as lessons were learned and interests evolved.  For something similar, see the programs at Evergreen College.

Introduction 

Like many liberal arts colleges, Mills allows students to “design their own majors.” These institutions also, from time to time, consider curriculum changes including the creation of new majors and (much less frequently) the elimination of existing majors. When the two processes are contrasted, interesting differences emerge. The former leaves the inventiveness in the hands of sophomores, the latter in the hands of distracted committees, status quo bias, and turf battles. The products of the former, even if an excellent idea, are rarely repeated. The latter, even if a bad idea, are rarely repealed. The list of contrasts could go on, but the bottom line does not require it: our processes for curricular innovation leave a lot to be desired.

The future of women’s education depends on changing this. The pace of change in world of higher education is such that offering an education that is just as good as and just the same as except for women only is not likely a sustainable. If we continue to be guided by our 19th and 20th century educational legacy, we stand to produce graduates less and less well prepared for 21st century lives. This will reduce the attractiveness to new students and reduce the success of graduates and, in turn, reduce the level at which they can support the college.

Women’s colleges like Mills, if they are to serve women who will lead change in the coming decades must themselves be able to lead change in what it means to be an institution of higher education. One piece of this is to re-think what it means to “major” in something.

Majoring in the 21st Century 

What should students at women's colleges major in? For a long time we have tried to change women’s position in the social division of labor by getting more women to major in subjects that had tended to be dominated by men. In some fields, like medicine, this project has been quite successful (The Lancet 2009); in others, like computer science, quite disappointing (Stross 2008).

These efforts, while laudable, are, ironically, not very future oriented. The academic paths we encourage our students to follow in pursuit of breaking barriers and ceilings are on maps designed to solve the problems of a previous century. The time has come to think about training leaders not in terms of the legacy of disciplinary boundaries and social problems of the 20th century, but rather for the problems and opportunities that lie ahead.

In other words, what they should major in in the 21st century is the 21st century.

What would this mean? Even without crystal balls, we can guess that the leaders of tomorrow, in technology, arts, and politics, are going to be boundary spanners, most likely not the "interdisciplinarians" that we have talked ineffectively about for the last few decades, but rather "transdisciplinarians" whose tool kits ignore boundaries and who possess the ability to collaborate with colleagues with alien skill sets.

It won't do to reprise previous efforts at top down, monolithic, a priori curriculum reform. We need to eschew the old approach of appointing committees and voting up or down wishy-washy consensus plans based on what we wish we had studied in college. In its place we need an infrastructure that will facilitate faculty experimentation and curricular reconfiguration in ways that do not depend on university committees, decanal decrees or foundation grants. In effect, we need to import some of the virtues of “startup culture” into the academy.

We should explore how women's colleges can reinvent themselves not to prepare women for traditionally male occupations but for a world that is not yet here and to do this in ways that other institutions will want to emulate. It will focus on ways to build an innovation infrastructure that encourages, facilitates and rewards faculty for engaging actively in this process.

A Preliminary Vision 

What if small groups of faculty design, and get approval for "college" majors in consideration of

1. existing intellectual and pedagogical resources, 
2. an analysis of future problems and challenges in American and world society, 
3. an assessment of the opportunity structure in the graduate school and employment markets (to optimally match “novel” majors with career paths likely to be open to them). 

Faculty would commit to a given sequence of courses and advising students for a set number of years. Faculty would then be in the position of “selling” the program to entering students; if there were no student interest, there’d be no program. Similarly, faculty and students would evaluate such programs on an ongoing basis, making changes or even eliminating the programs as indicated. Programs that are particularly successful could be institutionalized in majors “on the books” if desired.

We expect that novel programs like this will prove attractive to excellent students and to outside funders currently desperate to find student oriented new ideas. The institutionalization, not of particular "majors," but of this process, can lead to a general institutional nimbleness that is rarely seen in organizations like liberal arts colleges.

Opportunity

Amid the litany of problems facing women’s liberal arts colleges like Mills lies opportunity. Contrary to the position some have taken, the project of educating women can be called a success without saying that it is over. According to the National Center for Education Statistics women will continue to earn about 60% of the bachelor's degrees awarded in the U.S. each year – over one million per year – during the next decade (National Center for Education Statistics 2010). This is not a small market. But to enroll these students women's colleges need to take the lead transitioning from "just as good as but different" to “different and better.”

Colleges like Mills tend to be small, under-resourced, and have relatively low rates of staff turnover, all factors that make innovation challenging. These same factors can make it possible to create an environment in which small experiments can flourish. We should attempt to take advantage of these characteristics and this demographic trend to expand our impact on society.

Works Cited 

1. National Center for Education Statistics. 2010. “Degrees Conferred by Degree-granting Institutions, by Level of Degree and Sex of Student: Selected Years, 1869-70 Through 2019-20.” http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_279.asp. 
2. ———. “Digest of Education Statistics, 2007.” 
3. Institute of Education Sciences. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_258.asp. 
4. Ryan, Dan. 2012. “Majoring in the 21st Century.” http://majoring21.blogspot.com/. 
5. Stross, Randall. 2008. “What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?” The New York Times, November 16, sec. Business. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16digi.html. 
6. The Lancet. 2009. “Women in Medicine—a Future Assured.” The Lancet 373 (9680) (June): 1997. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61088-6..