Degree plans appear to be innocent administrative devices; let’s talk about subtexts.
I served as department chair for many years, and in that time, I advised and mentored my share of students, many of whom were philosophy majors. Listening to students talk about their aspirations and experiences, I picked up on what they picked up on in their degree plans, namely, the way plans impose a certain reading of time. Students wouldn’t express this in terms like “phenomenology of time consciousness”; rather, a great many of them said things like, “I have to take X next semester — I’m already behind.”
There’s a lot to unpack in this sense of behindness, and I won’t aim for comprehensiveness in one little post. But I will draw attention to several issues I consider determinative of students success. Let’s start with a hidden injury of degree plans: By making a specific temporal framework normative, we imply that deviation is abnormal.
In some spheres, normal and abnormal are normal binaries; the trick is to determine when to “normalize” a framework and when to erode its power against our aspirations. Our previous provost, interested as he often was in normalizing, used to insist that “the data” shows that full-time students complete their studies more quickly. I hope what he meant to be saying wasn’t something banal, like “People who work full-time jobs make more money than when they work less.” Perhaps he meant that full-time enrollment correlates with other markers of success, like persistence and time-to-completion.
And that’s great — for those 25 or 30% of the students we serve who can attend college full-time and who therefore get the nod from normalizing criteria like time-to-completion. But what are we telling the rest?
I’ve worked with a great many students who would have loved to be able to attend college full-time, but whose assessment of their own lives was that they couldn’t manage it. We could continue asking these students to help us serve their interests more effectively by conforming to our service framework. But won’t our message about empowering them ring hollow when we reject their own assessment of their lives?
My point is not that student’s assessments are always right; that interpretation is an evasion of responsibility. Rather, I argue that degree plans laid out in semesters across two years is just such a framework. It says this time frame is normative: If you haven’t taken these courses by this point, then you are behind. If our mission really is to empower students to take ownership of their education and to be a vehicle for access to the education they want for themselves, why would we put this additional burden on them? What purpose does it serve? More accurately, whose purposes does it serve?
What would a student-friendly “degree plan” look like? Instead of semesters, think of competencies: What is a plausible order of courses to build momentum around mastery? What courses reinforce each other in ways that make them good “packets”?
This isn’t new: A progression of competencies is built into every responsible degree plan. But it’s subsumed in a time frame, four semesters and two years, and that message is more arresting.
We’ve often told ourselves that we should strive not to obsess about college-ready students, but to become a student-ready college. Being serious about that aspiration requires rethinking the normative frameworks that assign meaning to student experiences. Our degree pathways are a good place to start.
