High-Impact Educational Practices: What We Can Learn from the Traditional Undergraduate Setting

The higher education ecosystem is shifting. Lines are blurring. Continuing professional education—with its focus on nontraditional students, applied learning, support of workforce development, and use of innovative and technology-based pedagogy—was commonly perceived to function outside the core of the academy, which focused on a liberal-arts education for residential traditional-aged undergraduates. But now we observe traditional higher education becoming increasingly “vocationalized” in order to attract and serve students, in many cases, first-generation or international students. At the same time US employers demand just the opposite of highly specialized professionallyoriented majors. They want broad knowledge and skills associated with a liberal-arts education: critical thinking, communication, problem solving, and an understanding of the historical, economic, scientific, cultural, and global contexts in which we live and work. Over the past few years, various articles in the Continuing Higher Education Review have made similar observations and arguments. See, for example, Shannon, “Liberal Education and Lifelong Learning,” CHER 2011; Reimers, “Enlightening Globalization,” CHER 2009; and Schejbal and Irvine, “Global Competencies, Liberal Studies, and the Needs of Employers,”