By Ellen Crowell
Every four-year college and university today seeks to offer a distinctive undergraduate education—one that provides a holistic framework that both educates students beyond their specific degree programs and serves broad career goals.
The ideals of “liberal education” or “general education” have long provided a valuable scaffolding for the distinctive approach at Jesuit institutions, but it is now harder than ever before to develop a coherent core curriculum that effectively serves undergraduates across multiple specialized degree programs while also preparing them to navigate life in an uncharted future. At the same time, it has never been more important for Jesuit institutions to tell a compelling story about why their distinctive curriculum is the right one for prospective students and future graduates.
A variety of trends have conspired to heighten the stakes for both the very survival of the core curriculum and for each institution’s need to convince students and their families of the distinctive value of their program.
A major challenge to the core’s survival is that many of our students and their families face tightened budgets and uncertain financial prospects. Amid the ever-rising costs of higher education, undergraduates understandably want to arrive on our campuses with as many course credits as possible—often from courses that may resemble institutional general education requirements. Consequently, institutions find themselves pressured to be more flexible in accepting advanced placement and transfer credit, while also minimizing the number of unique, non-transferrable, required core courses so all students, including transfers, can complete their undergraduate studies in four years.
Further, whether due to financial stress or other reasons, students understandably come with clear career goals and declared majors in the fields they identify as directly geared toward post-graduation employment. In particular, as more students major in credit-heavy STEM and pre-professional fields (some of which require as many as 90 credits), it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the balancing act between time-to-degree programs and the goal of a distinctive Jesuit education provided through a core curriculum.
Why do developments related to finances, time-to-degree, and career preparation represent such a challenge? A core curriculum is at its heart a communal enterprise—one that brings students together, beyond their specific majors and ultimate career goals, for the sake of a common intellectual experience. As a communal enterprise, a core curriculum can only be effective when a majority of students complete it from beginning to end. The core as a communal enterprise thus becomes collateral damage when students feel pressured to hasten their progress toward an undergraduate degree and organize their studies around specific career-focused goals.
Another major challenge our institutions must contend with is the prospect of what our enrollment and retention offices commonly refer to as the coming “demographic cliff.” Amid the financial crisis of 2008-09, U.S. birth rates dramatically plummeted and have never recovered to previous levels. Consequently, in the years after 2025, institutions in some regions of the United States expect enrollment declines of up to 15%. While this will mean existential challenges for some institutions of higher education, all of them must be prepared for heightened competition as they seek to convince students both to enroll and to stay through graduation. To make their best case, it will be essential for institutions to convince students that their distinctive brand of education will be valuable in an uncertain future.
For the students and those who work to recruit and retain them, for faculty who watch their classes shrink and those who face untenably large enrollment, and for college and university administrations tasked with balancing the whole enterprise, Jesuit institutions must be able to tell a coherent and compelling story about how they uniquely prepare all students, regardless of major or program, to embark on their post-baccalaureate lives and careers.
So, what particular resources do Jesuit colleges and universities bring to the table as they respond to these challenges?
First, Jesuit education’s historical commitment to ethical, moral, and spiritual development has the potential of producing some of the most distinctive and generative elements within a core curriculum today. The trick is ensuring that core offerings touching upon these themes respond to students’ demand for courses that reach out beyond an established canon and into their lives. Courses that link ethical, moral, and spiritual questions to issues arising in technology, the sciences, and healthcare can effectively highlight connections among the core, students’ majors, and the world beyond the classroom, even as they ensure that religious and philosophical traditions become living traditions capable of engaging with today’s most pressing questions. The same is true for courses that explore dialog among diverse faith traditions and philosophical commitments, or those that link humanistic inquiry and direct social action, or courses that explore the concept of human dignity by explicitly engaging marginalized voices.
Those who regard Jesuit institutions’ commitment to ethical, moral, and spiritual development as a relic of the past are mistaken. On the contrary, this commitment is key to a distinctive education and a vital future for Jesuit institutions. When it comes to engaging in ethical, moral, and spiritual reflection, now is the time to lean in, not pull back.
Aaron Van Dyke, associate professor of Chemistry at Fairfield University (above middle), offers guidance to students as they conduct scientific research. Van Dyke is among many Jesuit higher education faculty who lean into the process of engaging students in ethical, moral, and spiritual reflection. Photo courtesy of Aaron Van Dyke.
Second, even amid the decades-long drive toward greater specialization in higher education, Jesuit institutions have maintained a relatively strong reputation for cultivating a sense of shared mission among students and faculty alike. This sense of participating in a communal enterprise is a valuable resource that institutions would be mistaken to overlook, because it can provide a glue that enables an educational program to cohere into something both distinctive in the short run and impactful over a lifetime.
Slogans like “preparing men and women for and with others” can, of course, be mere slogans, but frequently they offer faculty and students a shared sense of what they are doing together in their respective roles within an institution. Animating principles like “the service of faith and the promotion of justice” provide a shared understanding that our work at Jesuit colleges and universities is more than just preparation for a job.
I write from out of my own experience at Saint Louis University (SLU), where I serve as director of the new University Core, our first-ever common undergraduate curriculum, which will be fully launched in August 2022. Our core is small. It asks students to complete between 32 and 35 credit hours of general education requirements. But it also invites all faculty members and all academic programs serving undergraduates to carry our mission—thereby making the difference and value of Jesuit education inherent and visible across colleges, schools, and programs.
The lengthy process we undertook to develop and approve this common curriculum was successful only because faculty members from all baccalaureate-degree-granting SLU colleges and schools came together across disciplinary divisions and agreed on nine student learning outcomes that we collectively determined all SLU graduates should achieve. For the most part, these outcomes are not associated with specific departments or tied to distinct courses. Instead, students can meet learning outcomes through multiple courses, at differing levels, throughout their time at SLU.
This outcomes-based model of undergraduate education, as opposed to a course-based model, invites instructors and programs to become collaborators in a synthetic approach to undergraduate education undertaken within the Jesuit tradition. Weaving our nine learning outcomes throughout the curriculum, instead of imagining them inherent only in particular disciplinary areas or buckets, further allows more faculty and students to participate in living our mission—regardless of their educational background, chosen major, disciplinary affiliation, faith tradition, or other philosophical commitments.
Our common curriculum also works against the very real problem that not all graduates deeply understand, or are able to articulate—what makes studying at a Jesuit institution different and how that difference distinguishes them as applicants to graduate schools or the workforce. Our new curriculum is intentionally designed to show students the seams between core requirements, making the connections between and among them explicit.
For example, the SLU core begins with the Ignite Seminar, in which first-semester freshmen are introduced to what makes teaching and learning at Saint Louis University distinctive and transformative. The Ignite Seminar invites faculty members to teach on any discipline or topic to which they feel passionately committed. But because they are asked to do so through the Ignatian pedagogical paradigm—and to make that paradigm visible to their students—faculty who teach our Ignite Seminars therefore model how individual scholarly commitments are necessarily forged in dialogue with the complex personal and social worlds we inhabit.
Additionally, our core guides all students through a scaffolded, three part cura personalis sequence, in which they reflect on the core and their relationship to it at three distinct moments over the course of their time at SLU.
Cura Personalis 1: Self in Community launches students on a path of self-discovery and deeper meaning-making by exploring fundamental questions of identity, history, and place. Completed in a student’s first year at SLU, this course is designed to offer grounding and support as students join the SLU academic community and begin to navigate its distinctive intellectual and interpersonal challenges.
Students at Georgetown University (above) engage in dialogical sense-making during a class from the core curriculum. Photo courtesy of Georgetown University.
Cura Personalis 2: Self in Contemplation, taken at the end of one’s sophomore year, guides students in a structured process of reflection and discernment in dialogue with the Ignatian tradition. In Cura Personalis 2, students are invited to envision a clearer sense of who they are and how they might contribute to their communities by considering how their values and calling shape their vocational aspirations.
And finally, in Cura Personalis 3: Self in the World, completed in a student’s senior year, students look outward by articulating how their skills, competencies, and knowledge transfer to professional, personal, and civic vocation. Students are guided in reflecting on intersections between their core and major, and are assisted in crafting written and oral messages about how that intersection informs who they are as they leave SLU and embark on their work in the world in solidarity with others.
SLU’s new core strives to balance traditional approaches to our Jesuit educational mission—which, of course, is one reason students choose SLU, and one reason our alumni network continues to support our work—with our ever-increasing need to expand our enrollment, to offer support for the students we recruit, and to guide all students in an explicit process of integrative reflection and vocational discernment.
With the help of our University core, we at SLU can now be more confident in our expectation that students graduate with a clear sense of how their distinctive Jesuit education has prepared them, regardless of their major or their career goals, to lead purpose-filled lives in solidarity with others.
Ellen Crowell is director of the University Core and an associate professor of English at Saint Louis University.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of BBC Science Focus Magazine.