Final thoughts and reflection

                  In the Student Personnel Point of View, 1937, we learned that even back then, we understood that higher education requires the student to not only be educated academically but to educate the student as a whole beyond the walls of a classroom. Over the course of the last decade, higher education has lost its real purpose from educating students to be critical thinkers and leaders of the workforce to a piece of people that gets you a job.  Many of the students I currently work with are ready to get out of school and find a job the fastest way possible and many just want the degree for their resume.  Keeling and Hersh (2012), state how the education system is gradating students that are not fully prepared in the workforce. They believe in the idea of higher learning the same way as the Student Personal Point of View, in that education needs to be educating the student as a whole.

                  Although I do not think that higher education has completely lost its purpose in the classroom, where it is failing is helping students think critically and be able to make that connections that allows them to develop and learn.  In Learning Reconsidered (2004), they state that higher learning needs to be a campus-wide focus, which means that all stakeholders, students, faculty, administration and staff developed co-curricular activities that helps students creates meaning (p.1). As I read the Student Personnel Point of View (1937), I realized that we had started with the right idea of higher learning but with the changes in the culture, demographic and economy, higher education became more of a requirement rather than self-improvement and development.

For the last 5 weeks, I’ve been pondering whether I wasted my time as a undergraduate student by not taking advantage of every student activity group, campus activity, or going above and beyond in my class assignments in order to think critically and be able to connect with my fellow classmates.  In part, I think I did because of my timid personality, work life, and my eagerness to finish college, but I also felt that the campus as a whole did not challenge me to go above and beyond to develop as an individual. As future student affairs professionals, we need to start filling in the gaps where academics is missing, conduct activities to engage students, develop effective learning outcomes and build relationships with other departments to change the campus as a whole. But how do we change a system that has gone so far off the cliff?  Education like many other areas of our society that requires improvement will require many years of debate and politicians denying that there is nothing wrong with our higher education system. Sadly for our society and a culture to change, we often either need to go to an extreme tragic situation, and even then, change is not immediate, or we take it a step at a time.  Like Keeling and Hersh, we, as student affairs professionals, need to create a culture of higher learning wherever our careers may take us, one campus at a time. It may take time, but it does need to begin.