“University Town”: let students do all the college’s work

The Problem: It’s hard to find good internships during college.  Similarly, it’s hard to hold down a job and still get schoolwork done. Different aspects of college are disconnected from each other.  Students have very little idea where their tuition money goes.

The Solution: Run a full university town from scratch.  Involve students in all the jobs and careers that exist in an university town. Save money (with all of your internship labor) and prep students for careers.

University Town: Where Every Building is a Classroom

Your little town has been built on an abandoned stretch of land, so there are no townies to displace. Your engineering students go to work expanding the town and building more buildings, getting concrete experience (aha) in the work they’ll be doing after school.

The English majors spend part of their coursework designing the college’s marketing materials, while communications majors run the admissions office and front desk. Finance majors work on the university board, learning to allocate spending, while pre-law students handle all necessary disciplinary actions and violations of community codes.  Culinary arts students run the school cafeterias, partially relying on food which agricultural students grow on the university farms. Meanwhile, pre-med students handle the bulk of work at the student health center.

All students work under supervision of experts and professors and their work is still graded, but motivation to do well also comes from the practical, immediate implications of failure. Mandatory seminars each semester, led by seniors, help students theorize what it means to run a community together.

The college, fully utilizing its mountain of free labor, is able to keep tuition costs low. Due to the uniquely interactive nature of the education, the university quickly becomes highly selective, and the (undergraduate) admissions counselors are able to admit the balance and quality of students which the community needs to become ever more self-sustaining.

You graduate from university town in a ceremony you helped plan with your PR major, and go on to a bright future doing a job you already know how to do.

Bare Bones University: Just the Basics!

The Problem: University tuition is high, leading students to endure years of oppressive debt.

The Solution: Just keep the essential parts of the university, turning all of the budget to good teaching.

Change this into that:

Dining Halls –> Variety of restaurants and food trucks (which will flock around your campus anyway).

Gym –> Local area gyms, offering student discounts.

Dorms –> Apartment buildings offering a variety of competitively-priced housing options.

Fancy Science Labs, Music Performance Facilities, etc. –> Minimal amenities, plus increased internships and cooperation to give students experience at local science labs, hospitals, orchestras, art studios, etc.

Summers Off –> Alternating seasons off, reducing number of students overall at any given point and allowing for smaller classes.

Tenured Faculty with Research Requirements and Sabbaticals –> Full-time teaching faculty, paid a decent wage, with generous and consistent contracts.

TAs –> Upper-level undergrads, working closely with professors, take on some additional grading and tutoring duties in exchange for free course credit.

Marketing brochures, etc. –> Low-cost internet advertising, with an emphasis on Craigslist.

What about it? Did I just invent the community college?

Death Class and Love Class

Problem: Academic categories are sometimes hard for students (and teachers!) to relate to their lives. Courses can feel pointless and esoteric.

Solution: Curriculum based on the main universal topics–death, love, life, and so on.

The Real “Death Class”: A professor teaches a popular class about death at a New Jersey college. The class brings together anatomy, field trips (to cemeteries, morgues and crematoriums), creative writing, in-class grieving, and understanding how death works in our society.  The class is very popular.

What impressed me most about the piece was the clear value the course had for students taking it. Without being therapy, the class helped grieving students overcome their grief. Without it being too much to handle, the course seems to help correct a social imbalance, our mass unwillingness to think about or talk about death.

Correcting a social imbalance, helping students cope with the world–if this isn’t the purpose of a liberal arts-based education, then what is?  What if all of our courses directly, concretely helped with the bigger questions in life?  Wouldn’t that be value-added for our students?

Your Curriculum: You’re a freshman college student. Your course load:

• Death
• Love
• Freedom

Each of your courses have a couple of TAs, who take attendance, grade assignments, facilitate discussions, teach writing and analytical skills, and know you very well.  The courses, truly interdisciplinary, are taught by a rotating spectrum of professors from the more traditional academic disciplines.

Your class on Love begins with solid dating advice from the counseling center to help you navigate the tricky first year of college. Health practitioners and sex educators come through to give you an understanding of the biology of love, while an anthropology professor discusses love as a cultural construct for a few weeks.  Of course, there’s plenty of writing, both creative and analytical. A English professor leads you through an analysis of the sonnet form, and a historian links courtly love practices to modern gender roles.  A psychology professor helps you understand the science behind first dates and pick-up artists. Death and Freedom similarly mix the curriculum.

At the end of your semester, you don’t like everything you’ve covered in your classes, but you like some of it, and you leave the semester with an increased ability to cope with the demands of the real world. After taking Death, your fear of death is decreased, you’ve discovered a love of anatomy which might lead you to med school, and you’ve worked through a lot of feelings about the death of your grandma. You have a better understanding of how your society works from your Freedom class, and you’re eager to make an informed voting decision in the next election. Your Love class has helped you get over a bad breakup with your high school sweetheart and launch a safe and enjoyable college dating life, complete with sonnets written to your new crush. All in all, you’re pretty well-adjusted for an 18-year-old.

You can check out the story I heard about the Death Class on NPR: http://www.npr.org/2014/01/19/263128996/death-class-taught-students-a-lot-about-life

And the book about it here: http://thedeathclass.com