Johns Hopkins University
Commission on Undergraduate Education
Final Report | May 15, 2003

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CHAPTER 5
Findings and Common Needs

Notwithstanding the complexity of its charge to address undergraduate education in five different school environments and the limited institutional research data available about some of the divisions, the Commission was struck by the amount of consensus about the strengths of a Hopkins education and about areas in which the undergraduate experience needs improving. This is true with respect to all four areas of inquiry: the academic experience, advising and career support, diversity, and student life.

Findings

The Academic Experience

Many aspects of the academic experience get deservedly high marks. Students value the opportunity to take courses with faculty at the forefront of their fields and appreciate the intellectual excitement of being engaged with expert practitioners, researchers and scholars who are influencing the course of their disciplines, and in the case of Peabody students, renowned artists. The main advantage of education in a research-intensive environment is the opportunity to participate directly in the process of discovery. At Hopkins, this is clearly an institutional strength. Significant numbers of students (in fact, larger percentages than at our peer institutions) work with faculty on their research endeavors, with many students producing poster sessions and some contributing to published findings. We heard and read plenty of testimony from students who had found wonderful faculty mentors and had been gratified by the degree of interest shown by an individual faculty member or an advisor. We also learned of opportunities in some departments for the kind of engagement with the faculty that more often characterizes small, liberal arts colleges. Clinical supervision presents nursing students with active mentoring through a capstone experience, and all SPSBE students complete Senior Research Projects under the guidance of a faculty sponsor and accompanied by a supporting research seminar. We know too that those students who intend to pursue advanced education in graduate or professional school leave the University extremely well prepared. The depth of specialized knowledge that Hopkins students attain stands them in good stead.

On the other hand, we found evidence that, despite these positive aspects to the experience of many undergraduates, there are still too many students who are dissatisfied generally with access to faculty, class sizes, and the perceived degree of faculty commitment to the undergraduate experience. Some of the frustrations are no doubt discipline-specific and byproducts of uneven demand for certain majors or related to additional challenges of pre- medical education that we offer to an unusually high number of students. Many "gateway" courses are very large, and students contend that not all are well taught. Nor are laboratory experiences that accompany some of these courses uniformly excellent. These problems contribute also to an environment characterized by excessive competition and by less true intellectual exchange than is desirable.

In addition to the positive aspect noted previously, the academic depth that many departments at Hopkins encourage has a negative side. Extensive requirements for the major and related coursework deny some Homewood students the opportunity for the degree of educational breadth that would serve best their long-term goals or stretch fully their intellectual horizons. Further, too many students are graduating without the gains that we would like to see in analytical, writing, or speaking skills.

Advising and Career Support

Our five undergraduate divisions offer a variety of resources to assist students with the academic choices that they must make as well as with their plans for advanced education or job placement. In a number of areas, these services have been enhanced in recent years. However, at the risk of over-generalization, despite these enhancements, such services at Hopkins have not been as fully developed as at some of our peer universities. More should be done to provide the best level of advising assistance. Students are not satisfied with academic advising in some departments where they perceive some faculty as inaccessible, uninterested, or over-burdened by advising loads. They experience too few opportunities to participate in mentored relationships that might guide their academic and career choices. Career counseling is not perceived in some divisions to serve well the interests of those students not headed for graduate study. Coordination and good communication among the elements of the advising system have not been fully achieved. While we are now actively cultivating alumni involvement, we have not reached the level of engagement that represents the best practices in these areas.

Diversity

In many respects, Johns Hopkins University is a culturally diverse institution. We draw students from all corners of this country. Need-based financial aid allows us to enroll students from various socio-economic groups, although Hopkins, like our peer private universities, struggles to achieve higher levels of such diversity. Some Hopkins divisions also have large cohorts of international students, and we attract significant numbers of students from some racial and ethnic groups. Hopkins majority students value their exposure to this diverse student body and interaction with students from different backgrounds and cite higher levels of satisfaction with this aspect of their undergraduate experience than their colleagues at peer institutions. There have been few overt racial incidents or situations of intolerance to students because of sexual orientation.

However, not all is well in terms of diversity. The experience reported by ethnic minority students as well as students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-gendered is quite different from that perceived by their majority classmates. These students do not have a comfortable place in the Hopkins community. The University does not have a significantly diverse student body in terms of race and ethnicity. We particularly lack the number of African- American and Hispanic students that would allow these students to feel fully comfortable. In addition, we have not sufficiently developed support systems and structures to assure that all admitted students can enjoy equal success. The absence of adequate numbers of African- Americans and Hispanics on the faculty and in senior staff leadership roles deprives the under-represented minority students of the role models so important of intellectual and social development. Further, we recognize that there are gender related concerns, such as percentage of males in nursing and women in engineering.

Student Life

For many Hopkins students, there is no shortage of outlets for an active life outside the classroom. There are myriad clubs and organizations covering a full spectrum of interests. Occasions abound for community service. The tradition of entrepreneurism at Hopkins shows itself in the number of activities that Hopkins students initiate or for which they take virtually full responsibility. The opportunities for leadership thus presented are manifold. New facilities and staff at Homewood have resulted in expanded support for the arts, for recreational past-times, and for religious expression and exploration. Beyond the borders of the campuses, Baltimore exists as a city rich in culture and social resources. There are excellent museums, symphony, opera, and theatre; fine restaurants; professional sports events; and sufficiently interesting and "funky" areas to allow ample venues for the adventuresome.

Yet, Homewood undergraduate students report a feeling of fragmentation about their residential lives, and more generally a serious absence of community. They lack sufficient contact with faculty outside of purely academic settings; upperclassmen live off campus and therefore are too detached from campus social and intellectual life. They also lack spaces to socialize and to engage in group study. There are few shared rituals and traditions that would bind the community together. Many Peabody students feel a similar sense of isolation and feel disconnected from the rest of the University. Nursing students experience the effects of social space limitations and are concerned about safety and parking issues. SPSBE undergraduates have special concerns about fragmentation, both with respect to the particular geographic dispersal of academic programs and also the demands on adults who balance full-time work with family and school. And, there is almost universal criticism of the food services on campus.

Common Needs

As we assessed each of these four broad areas, identified specific concerns with the undergraduate experience, and contemplated our findings, several themes recurred and certain common needs emerged. These are the common needs around which our recommendations cohere.

The single most important undergraduate need at Johns Hopkins is to strengthen the sense of community.

Survey data and anecdotal testimony give ample and compelling evidence of the central importance of this objective. Many factors at Hopkins conspire to create a lack of a sense of community. Surely, realities of campus geography play an important role, but so, too, do certain conventions and practices that weaken the bonds of community that develop naturally when talented people who share interests come together.

We face the further challenge of creating an undergraduate community across five schools and multiple campuses, each with a different focus, scope and student expectations. Each of these communities shares a strong interest in more and better programming, more space for informal relaxation, and more interaction with students in other divisions of the university. The old-fashioned yellow school bus is the official mechanism for bridging the distances. Like other urban universities, our campuses are also severely constrained in terms of land available for facility expansion. This problem manifests itself in the absence of informal gathering places and lack of adequate student union facilities and outdoor recreational space that would support undergraduate student needs for stress-relieving pastimes. More importantly, the dearth of campus land on which to build traditional residence halls increases the challenge of developing a sense of community within the student bodies of each Hopkins school.

On top of these physical obstacles, there are, in fact, other problems, some of our own making. We need to consider how Homewood course scheduling practices affect the academic and social environment for students. Administrative decentralization as well as incongruent class schedules work against interdivisional programs. While the programmatic infrastructure has tended to provide good support to groups and individuals with specific, focused interests, it has served less well the cause of bringing the student body together in school-wide social events or celebrations. Further, Hopkins lacks the kinds of shared traditions that form bonds among students and, over generations, sustain a sense of place.

The essential paradox is that the campus community encompasses, and is in a sense defined by, the academic mission of the university. So while we know from our summary of 'best practices' that fostering a sense of community is vital, and that the quality of campus life directly affects the effectiveness of the undergraduate experience, we cannot so easily separate 'student life' from 'academic life.' Indeed, students tell us that the character of academic life at Hopkins, the infamous 'throat culture' and excessive specialization, creates a dysfunctional community outside the classroom.

Strengthening our sense of community, then, may depend as much on what happens in the calculus class as whatever changes we may make in residential and student life, and however much we may spend. At the same time, plenty of evidence suggests that improving residential and student life can go a long way toward breaking an endemic culture of competitiveness and complaint that has become a self- perpetuating expectation if not a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The needs for better integration of the elements of the undergraduate experience and for a healthier sense of balance find expression in a number of Commission recommendations.

One of the consequences of Hopkins decentralization is that responsibility for various aspects of the undergraduate experience is fragmented. Departmental autonomy on major requirements and advising arrangements, the segregation of the structures that address student life issues from those responsible for academic matters, and the resulting lack of integration of the academic and extra- curricular dimension of the undergraduate experience reflect some of the dysfunctional aspects of a tradition of decentralization that has otherwise served Hopkins well. Several recommendations thus propose ways "to see the student whole." Moreover, Hopkins is a place where faculty and students come to work hard, but coming with a sense of purpose is not mutually exclusive with coming with a sense of play. Survey data show that some self-selection is at work as a large percentage of students come to Hopkins prepared to study especially hard and anticipate a less fulfilling social life. As one of our members observed, this is one area in which it is unfortunate that Hopkins lives up to expectations! Departmentally mandated extensive course requirements and liberal policies permitting significant course overloads intensify the stress on students, many of whom already operate under the pressure of the reality of competition for admission to graduate and professional school or competition for limited job opportunities in a tight labor market. Several recommendations thus propose remedies to create a more balanced and supportive environment.

A third need around which many of the recommendations cohere is the need for undergraduate education at Hopkins to be more personal.

As one of the smallest of the American research universities, Johns Hopkins should offer an undergraduate program characterized, if not any longer by the "hand-tooling" that faculty tout as the standard for a Hopkins graduate education, at least by the opportunity for substantial, close interaction with faculty. Growth in the size of the student body over the past dozen years may well have made it more difficult to achieve this objective. Nonetheless, the absence of core requirements and courses specially designed for first-year students and the anonymity of large science and other introductory classes all contribute to an environment that is individualized, yet not personalized.

One of the most disturbing findings by the Commission is the extent to which many students perceive that no one cares.

Given that the faculty and administrative members of CUE each agreed to serve out of a strong commitment to undergraduate education and that the President and Provost who launched the Commission, and the Deans who blessed the initiative, did so out of equally strong beliefs in the importance of undergraduate education and a determination to make it better, this is particularly troubling. Almost uniformly, other administrators not centrally involved in this exercise volunteered help. Some were even disappointed not to be included as Commission members. So, where is the disconnect? How is it that this level of interest and concern has not resulted in wider recognition that some, and indeed many, do in fact care? Certainly, there is a need to reconcile this gap between the perception of not caring and the reality that many do indeed feel passionately about the satisfaction and success of undergraduates.

Finally, the need to be more intentional about undergraduate education is a fifth need and focus of many of the recommendations.

The decisions to appoint a Commission on Undergraduate Education and to focus the re- accreditation self-study on undergraduate education are two first steps. There is merit in continuing university-wide discussions about undergraduate education, but, in keeping with our administrative tradition of decentralization, explicit focus must also take place in each school and in each department. Part of being more deliberate is also to identify individuals with the unequivocal charge to attend to undergraduate education. If the undergraduate experience is to be enhanced, there will need to be clearly assigned responsibility and accountability.

We turn now to the Commission's recommendations, recommendations that speak to these important needs.

© 2003 The Johns Hopkins University. Baltimore, Maryland. All rights reserved.
Last updated 17May03 by dgips@jhu.edu