Academic Libraries and Lifelong Earning | From the Bell Tower
Is the claim to fostering lifelong learning just another myth? Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA Jul 15, 2010You'll have to forgive me for getting off topic in the first sentence, but there is no way I can resist starting this week's column by sharing some news: Bell towers are back! According to a recent article in the Miami Herald, colleges and universities are restoring and improving their bell towers:
What does all that bell-ringing have to do with higher education? Increasingly, a lot, as schools across Florida and the country are turning to bell towers—or cheaper electronic imitations—as a way of fostering tradition, reflection, and perhaps even little bit of promptness among the perpetually late student body.
Turns out that while many of the bell towers use less expensive electronic chimes, multiple institutions still offer the traditional carillon, an organ-like instrument that originated over 500 years ago in Europe. The carillon in the bell tower, in those old villages, was used to signal good news and bad, and to alert the townspeople to important events. Over half of the carillons found in the United States are on college campuses. The bell tower, I think, is a fitting symbol for a column designed to alert academic librarians to news and developments from the field of higher education. So, it's good to know that colleges and universities are keeping bell towers at the heart of campus tradition.
The importance of campus tradition
Bell towers, fight songs, sports mascots, campus ghost stories, and a whole host of other imagery and rituals are all part of college education. Our institutions originate and perpetuate these icons and symbols to create a unique story for each generation to pass along to the next.
My own institution, Temple University, has its own tale of mythical proportions about the "acres of diamonds." It relates to a famous speech given by the university's founder Russell H. Conwell. Handed down to each new generation of students and faculty, the story inculcates these community members to our shared institutional values. Such traditions are the threads that form the fabric of institutional culture, and they are just as valuable to colleges and universities as any buildings, library books, or other tangible assets.
Questioning another college tradition
Perhaps most salient to all students is the higher education tradition that suggests the investment in college yields long-term, lifelong financial rewards. The story, it goes, is that if you attend college and do well, your prospects for a good career are much better—and the careers likely to be more financially rewarding—than those who go no further than high school. To embellish this colorful tradition, we are all told that the lifetime value of higher education is estimated to be somewhere between $900,000 and $1.6 million—a better than decent return on tuition at most institutions.
According to a new study, one that adds yet another list to an already crowded field of institutional rankings, the promise of a great return on a higher education investment is but one more myth perpetrated by colleges and universities. The reality, as reported in a Bloomberg Businessweek article, is that the average return on the college investment, over 30 years, is more like $400,000, and much less at many institutions.
Sure, there are a few outliers that do offer a great return, like MIT or Harvard, but most of us will never attend those schools. Take Temple University, where the return on an initial $117,000 to graduate returns only $368,000. Meh. Obviously this has a strong connection to the earning power of a school's graduates. MIT and Harvard turn out lots of folks who end up on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms. Temple turns out lots of teachers. If you look at a college education as strictly an investment these rankings makes sense. But why not just invest your $100,000 in tuition in the stock market if what you want is a high yield?
Is our claim to lifelong learning a myth?
Anecdotally speaking, I'd say that about 50 percent of the academic library mission statements I've seen speak to the topic of lifelong learning. Our academic libraries do far more than provide access to all the advice, books, articles, and other information needed for research, education, and persistence to graduation; we like to claim that they actually enable students to achieve lifelong learning.
That claim sounds a bit like those other myths that a research study is likely to show is more fiction than fact. While the transference of lifelong learning skills is a highly desirable outcome, we really have no way of demonstrating that our academic libraries are actually capable of achieving it—just as we previously had no way of knowing if a college education actually did offer everyone an awesome return.
Let's forget for a moment that there's no distinct sense of what lifelong learning really means or that we lack a set of clear outcomes that define or quantify how lifelong learning is achieved. We would still be challenged to quantify the degree to which the work of academic librarians facilitated what people learn their whole lives. At best, we might be able to establish some guidelines by which we would expect to enable students to achieve lifelong skills for wisely consuming information, using information resources that appropriately match their information needs (i.e., knowing when to go beyond a Google search or when to consult a librarian), and demonstrating the use of research and information retrieval skills to achieve workplace success—and maximize that earnings return on their initial investment.
Our research needs to turn to life after graduation, so that we can begin to learn what our students do with the information skills we impart after they leave our hallowed halls. We could attempt to better understand the impact of library education, or even just the exposure to academic library resources, on, for example, their workplace performance or ability to master new skills.
That level of research is intense and expensive, and even if we could accomplish it do we truly want to know the outcomes? Perhaps just continuing to say that our academic libraries enable students to achieve lifelong learning is the way to go, as long as no one can prove otherwise. After all, that kind of thinking makes the best myths, and it sure has served our parent institutions well for many generations.
Steven Bell is Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. For more from Steven visit his blogs, Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog and Designing Better Libraries or visit his website.
