Assessing the Undergraduate Experience

To what extent does Michigan succeed in creating such an educational community for its undergraduates? In our own discussions and the feedback we received from students and other experts, the Commission did not reach a single answer to this question. Rather our assessments can be broadly divided into three categories.

In some areas, we found great success. Commission members were humbled by the range and complexity of the undergraduate programming at U-M—about which all of us were variously ignorant—and impressed by the energy and creativity it revealed. The much-lauded Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, for instance, enables more than a thousand undergraduates each year to collaborate on cutting-edge research with top scholars. UROP's emphasis on peer mentoring and the participation of historically underrepresented students make it a national model for the integration of inquiry-based learning, student leadership, and commitment to diversity. Similarly, the University is justly proud of living-learning programs like the arts-oriented Lloyd Hall Scholars Program, Women in Science and Engineering, and the Residential College (now venerable by the standards of most learning communities). Surveys by the U-M Housing Office confirm that such programs tend to enhance academic engagement, faculty-student interaction, and mixing across sociocultural lines–not only for their own students but for their neighbors in the residence halls (see Appendix IV). Initiatives like UROP and Michigan Learning Communities encourage the integration of living and learning and the crossing of social, generational, and disciplinary boundaries; they exemplify the virtues implicit in the “urban vision” described above. The University needs to reward and build on such achievements.

In other areas, we found significant but still incomplete success. The University has made a sustained commitment to diversity, for instance, not only in its legal defense of affirmative action in admissions, but also in academic programs that seek to foster an ethos of inclusion for all students and to provide all students with the educational benefits of multicultural engagement. Thus, the program on Intergroup Relations, Conflict, and Community (IGRCC) offers First-Year Seminars, intergroup dialogues, and residence-hall workshops that integrate social analysis, structured conversation, and residential community-building to explore identity and difference on a diverse campus. IGRCC and related programs like the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives have an impressive record of achievement, one that has garnered significant external recognition. Yet faculty, administrators, and undergraduates stress that many students from backgrounds that are historically underrepresented at Michigan often remain marginalized at the University. They stress the need for an enlarged commitment to creating a culture of diversity and inclusion.

Community-based learning represents a second arena of significant but still incomplete success. The University supports an impressive range of community-engagement, service-learning, and public-cultural programs: among them, the Ginsberg Center for Community Service and Learning, the Arts of Citizenship Program, the Prison Creative Arts Project, the Detroit Initiative, and the museums, libraries, and cultural institutions of the Public Goods Council and the various schools and colleges. Such units involve undergraduates in literally hundreds of service, partnership, and educational outreach projects in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Detroit, and other communities. The Ginsberg Center’s Project Community, for instance—one of the oldest service-learning courses in the country—places more than five hundred students each year in community organizations; the Prison Creative Arts Project trains several dozen students annually to lead drama, writing, and art workshops in prisons and detention centers across the state. Yet often the University’s community work remains uncoordinated and unpublicized. Neither undergraduates interested in such opportunities, nor the participating units and faculty, nor the public itself knows the full range of what is being supported. Doing a better job of linking and making visible these programs would enhance both student participation and the cultural ethos of the campus community.

Support for interdisciplinary teaching and learning offers a final example of real but incomplete success. The University has made a significant commitment to interdisciplinary programs, faculty positions, and research. Indeed, the Provost framed U-M’s self-study for re-accreditation by the North Central Association of Schools and Colleges around the theme of interdisciplinarity and collaborative learning. Recent experiments like the Global Change Curriculum and the new integrative courses sponsored by the Life Sciences Initiative represent a significant effort to carry that commitment into undergraduate teaching. Nonetheless, interdisciplinarity is much more strongly rooted in faculty scholarship and graduate pedagogy than in the undergraduate experience. According to the re-accreditation self-study, the barriers to team-teaching and course selection across college lines remain high, and student attitudes reflect confusion about the value of crossing disciplinary boundaries to intellectual growth. The University needs to develop policies and programs that make its genuine commitment to interdisciplinarity more sustained, widespread, and compelling for undergraduates.

Finally, the Commission found important areas in which the undergraduate experience at the University of Michigan fell short. The geography of campus life, for instance, tends to separate different academic communities of inquiry, student subcultures, and generational cohorts—a tendency with undeniable administrative and research benefits but important costs for undergraduate education. Such spatial divisions reinforce the age-segregation of the campus as well. Entering undergraduates, advanced undergraduates, and graduate and professional students enjoy few opportunities to live, talk, and work together.

Two effects of this segregative geography seem especially corrosive to the undergraduate experience. The first is the social and intellectual distance that it interposes between faculty and students. The Commission seeks to be clear about this crucial issue. We did not find significant evidence of faculty indifference to or neglect of undergraduate teaching. To the contrary, conversations with faculty and administrators, as well as student focus groups and survey data, confirm a strong and widespread commitment to excellence in classroom teaching. At the same time, the time and space that most faculty give to that commitment is understandably circumscribed by an emphasis on professional visibility in research, by the priority given to graduate and professional pedagogy, and perhaps by the many responsibilities that the University’s culture of interdisciplinarity, decentralization, and faculty governance generates. The Commission does not have the same survey data for faculty attitudes and practices that we have for student behavior. However, anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that it is not the norm for faculty to have regular social, co-curricular, or informal intellectual contacts with undergraduates outside of class and office hours. Such attention is prized by Michigan undergraduates; participants in the focus groups spoke of choosing a less skillful instructor if s/he had an “open door policy” about personal contacts. Three-dimensional relationships are a normal part of graduate mentoring at U-M; coffee dates, reading groups, and Rackham Summer Institutes surround and enrich the seminar, lab, and dissertation committee. By contrast, relationships between faculty and undergraduates typically remain narrow and monocultural. The result is a thinner understanding of who our students are and a more limited capacity to help them learn and grow.

The divide between academics and student social life is the second problem reinforced by the geography of the campus. With the important exception of Michigan’s living-learning communities, residence halls do not offer a rich array of programs and spaces that encourage the integration of intellectual, co-curricular, and social activities; fraternity and sorority houses do even less. The undergraduate community has created (and the University funds) an extraordinarily diverse “civil society” of student organizations and activities—ethnic associations, performance groups, political organizations, athletic teams, not to mention the informal sphere of parties, movies, and socializing. That is as it should be. The Commission is not proposing that faculty and administrators impose themselves in loco parentis over this sprawling, more or less self-regulated sphere of student life. But we are disquieted by how little University educators have articulated a vision of where that sphere can connect and contribute to the student’s educational development. Nurturing such connections through public spaces and co-curricular programs—for instance, in a Student Arts Building or a Media Union cyber-cafe—will enable undergraduates to infuse their intellectual and ethical growth with the concerns and passions of their everyday lives. Conversely, as a student member of the Commission commented, it can spur students to explore beyond their accustomed social rounds and “make everyday life extraordinary.”

Survey data and focus groups helped to sharpen the Commission’s understanding of student attitudes toward undergraduate education at the University. Instruments such as the annual National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) paint an overall portrait of accomplishment, satisfaction, and loyalty on the part of Michigan undergraduates. U-M ranks significantly above its “doctoral-extensive” peer institutions in the level of academic challenge that students report, in their exposure to active and collaborative learning, and in seniors’ overall assessment of their experience. Notwithstanding this evidence of their happiness and hard work, however, students consistently voice dissatisfaction with the undergraduate experience at U-M in at least three key areas. First, even as they praise the general level of course instruction and intellectual excitement at the University, students describe a pervasive lack of contact with and guidance from faculty outside of classes. NSSE 2000 found that only one-quarter of first-year students and one-third of seniors had significant experiences of faculty contact outside of formal educational settings—our peer institutions had equally lamentable results—and focus-group participants told stories of “ZERO faculty interaction” over the course of a semester (see Appendix IX). Secondly, students decry the state of the University's residence halls, both their inadequate space and lack of amenities. Most vote with their feet by abandoning campus housing for the rental market or the Greek system as soon as the University permits them. Indeed, given the current shortfall of campus housing, the University is more or less explicit in pushing second-year students out, reinforcing the intellectual thinness and age-group segregation of the residence-hall experience. Finally, undergraduates criticize the inadequacy of the advising and informational resources that they receive about the University’s academic, co-curricular, and social resources. In short, what the Commission learned from survey data and focus groups was that U-M undergraduates love the institution, feel excited by its intellectual riches and social energy, but at the same time often experience it as impersonal, opaque, and unhelpful.

Data and advice from University administrators further sharpened the Commission’s understanding of the problems of the undergraduate experience. Administrators foregrounded four issues in particular. First, although Michigan is blessed with high levels of satisfaction on the part of enrolled students, the University faces a growing challenge in admissions and recruitment, a challenge that can only be met with more generous policies and resources for financial aid. This is particularly true for out-of-state admittees, who contemplate stiff tuition levels at Michigan, and for talented and interesting students being courted by peer institutions, many of which have boosted financial aid and merit scholarship commitments in recent years. (In “head-to-head competition” for cross-applicants, for instance, only one in three admittees chooses U-M over Northwestern, one in four over Cornell, and one in six over Duke.) Secondly, administrators shared students’ criticisms of the amount and quality of campus housing. President Bollinger noted concern that high rent levels close to campus were accelerating the geographic dispersal and social attenuation of the student community. A third issue cited by administration is the need to improve arts and cultural programming for undergraduates. Although the formation of Arts At Michigan in recent years has done much to coordinate and expand such offerings for students—along with public goods units like the University Musical Society and the Museum of Art—the Commission received much feedback that the University could do more to build upon its extraordinary cultural resources (see Appendix VII). Finally, administrators and faculty stressed that the problems faced by all undergraduates—social fragmentation, inadequate advising, non-contact with faculty—have an especially destructive effect on historically underrepresented students, including students of color, making it more difficult to retain and support them and blocking their intellectual and personal development.

In sum, the Commission reached several linked assessments about the current state of the undergraduate experience at the University of Michigan:

• First, the overall quality of undergraduate education is strong, fostered by the University’s breadth of programming, by the faculty’s intellectual stature and pedagogical seriousness, and by recent initiatives such as undergraduate research, interdisciplinary course clusters, and first-year seminars.

• Second, the academic achievements, satisfaction, and institutional loyalty of our students are quite high, fostered not only by the University’s academic strength, but also by the social vibrancy of Ann Arbor and the students’ “civil society.”

• Third, there are important beachheads of programming where the University fully focuses its capacities and energy on the integration of undergraduate life and learning and the creation of a diverse, dynamic, welcoming educational community.

• Fourth, the overall ecology of campus life and of the individual student’s experience often remains disjointed and compartmentalized, so that undergraduates are not able fully to engage the breadth and diversity of the University in support of their intellectual, ethical, and social development.

• Fifth, the Commission’s concern for the interconnectedness, dynamism, diversity, and reflectiveness of the undergraduate experience—our "urban vision"—translated into more concrete problems, including the need to

• enrich faculty-student interaction
• bridge curricular and student-life programming
• upgrade campus housing and its residential culture
• improve the quality of advising and information coordination for students
• improve the University’s success in recruiting top students
• increase financial-aid resources
• enhance arts and cultural programming
• create a living and learning environment in which students of all backgrounds and experiences succeed and take advantage of the opportunities for transformation and connection that the University offers.

The University has been proactive in recognizing and responding to many of these issues. The Regents recently approved, for instance, a commitment to a new residence hall, and plans are proceeding for retrofitting existing halls. Led by alumnus and Commission member Richard Rogel, the University is dedicating financial aid for out-of-state students. Similarly, programs like Intergroup Relations and the Office of Multicultural Initiatives, described earlier, are building bridges across different student subcultures and providing support for undergraduates from historically underrepresented groups. The University has much work to do to make the actuality of undergraduate education align with our hopes and goals, but it has already begun that work on many fronts (see Appendix VIII).

Finally, before moving to the Commission’s proposals, it is worth reiterating what is not a central theme of the report or its recommendations: a systematic reworking of the University curriculum. Curricular change is often the primary solution of institution-wide efforts to review and renew undergraduate education. As discussed at the start of this report, for instance, commissions at Stanford and Berkeley have emphasized such proposals as freshman and sophomore seminars, the spread of inquiry-based learning and writing pedagogy across the curriculum, and the development of capstone seminars within concentrations. In the recommendations below, we will indeed offer some ideas for curricular development: for instance, the proposal that academic units in all schools develop courses and programs linking their fields to the study of transnational phenomena. Yet the Commission chose not to “take on the curriculum.” We found no strong sentiment from faculty, students, or administrators that the curriculum needed taking on. To the contrary, we noted many recent examples of creative curricular and course development, including initiatives that enhance first-year, research-based, interdisciplinary, and community-based pedagogy. These include LSA’s successful First-Year Seminar Program, the Curriculum 2000 initiative in Engineering, intercollege theme semesters such as the Detroit 300 Theme Semester in Fall 2001, and the Global Change Curriculum. Such examples reinforce the conclusion that the ongoing work of curricular revision should remain the prerogative of the schools and departments. The problems of undergraduate education at the University of Michigan do not most centrally concern such issues as distribution requirements or capstone experiences. They have to do with how the parts of an undergraduate's life connect together and with the University’s effectiveness in enabling the exploration, reflection, and engagement to foster that connection. Changing faculty practices will play an important role in confronting such problems, we believe, but not wholesale change of the curriculum.