It is possible that over the next several years Indiana, Minnesota and Utah will sync their collegiate degree systems to reflect an agreed-upon standard of higher education.
By defining courses by what students will learn as opposed to a credit hours and course requirements these schools will join similar cooperatives across the globe in ensuring a basic level of skills required to obtain certain degrees.
The idea of an educational alliance began a decade ago in Bologna, Italy with the Bologna Process, wherein thousands of European institutes of higher education agreed to enact comparable educational standards. This process, called tuning, is being eyed closely by nations around the world, and 18 Latin American countries have already enacted similar plans.
Clifford Adelman of the Institute for Higher Education Policy says that tuning allows for greater clarity of expectations for students, because credit hours and course requirements "mean absolutely nothing."
The question is whether American schools should be forced to tailor their educations to foreign standards. It has long been the belief in this country that a school's reputation means something when a graduate enters the job market, to the point where educational tuning could diminish an individual school's reputation rather than bolster it.
In addition educational tuning removes a certain level of professorial academic freedom; teachers that teach courses that are ancillary to core disciplines could find themselves stymied and controlled in an educationally tuned school.
It is better to allow this area of our national infrastructure to remain deregulated. The standards of excellence that universities set for themselves are more than adequate to guarantee the continuation of the American educational ideal that has served us well for more than a century.
Certain institutions could stand to be regulated to the point where they can't grant bathroom breaks without forms filed in triplicate, but higher education is not one of them. Regulation, in this case, stymies minds and handcuffs teachers to a single educational standard.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
