Indianapolis Star - October 21, 2007

Along with football, it's also parent season this month on America's college campuses.  Whether for a homecoming or family weekend or both, millions of moms and dads are following the routes taken by their children just five or six weeks ago.  They'll get a peek at residence hall life, make sure their sons and daughters have adjusted to the academic and extracurricular routine, and visit with the institutions' leaders during rare times they know are dedicated largely to them.

Not surprisingly - having in many cases just mailed fall tuition installments - they frequently make the most of the opportunity.

One parent recently shared with me an Associated Press article describing how many college parents have resorted to paying consultants up to $9,000 in order to secure summer internships for their undergraduate children.  As Phil Gardner, head of Michigan State's Collegiate Employment Research Institute has observed, "It's just one of those things you have to have before employers will even consider looking at your résumé."

The inquiring father asked, "Don't college families already pay enough in tuition, fees and other costs to prepare students for the 'real world' with a quality higher education?"  Indeed, isn't this kind of preparation for postgraduate life what a college or university degree is supposed to provide?  Why are so many parents now feeling forced to supplement their already sizable investments in getting the kids diplomas in order to get them jobs?

Would that the phenomenon might be explained as an aberration - simply a group of well-meaning (and well-heeled), but suggestible, parents doing what they've always done in terms of propelling their progeny to the highest level of success.  That is to say, whatever it takes.

Sadly, there are other "sightings:" parents paying consultants to edit their children's college application essays, for example, hoping that it will improve the students' chances of winning admission to a better or even - dare they imagine it - "top-tier" institution.

It's the increasingly commonplace marriage of marketing and the pursuit of prestige that so disturbs former college administrator Lloyd Thacker and devotees of his Education Conservancy, committed to battling what they regard as dangerous commercial creep into the once more clearly defined public-interest mission of higher education.

As an educator and a university president, it disturbs me, too - this idea that "whatever it takes" somehow now lies outside the scope of the modern college or university experience.

I believe that's true only with those institutions, students and parents who value name recognition over results, pedigree over performance, and are less interested in the realities of a rapidly changing marketplace.

Many aspiring college students (and many parents) would benefit far more if they realized that - in the interconnected, interdisciplinary world of the 21st century described by best-selling The World is Flat author Tom Friedman - real competition has remarkably little to do with gaining a place at Hallowed U. or Mighty Impressive Tech.

The Hong Kong-trained executive working for a South African firm and looking for managers to serve in one of more than 30 countries where the company operates can just as readily choose graduates from programs in Scotland or Chile, Egypt or Australia as from the United States, no matter how renowned the imprint on one's degree.

More and more, the determining factor is not where you're from or even what you know.  It is, "What have you done?"

Unfortunately, as internships have become routine (three-quarters of today's college students complete at least one prior to graduation; two decades ago only 30 to 40 percent did so) their relative importance is diluted.  Be they paid, unpaid and/or paid for, if everyone has one, the critical evaluation must then be, "What is the next measure of differentiation, the next highest level of distinctiveness?"

Some of my colleagues and I believe the answer rests in the concept of immersive learning.

First, let's delineate between immersive learning and the more traditional experiential learning promoted and supported at many colleges and universities.

Right now, a group of students at my institution is participating in a poverty simulation, engaging with affected members of the community-at-large and role-playing what it's like to live for a month in poverty.  That is experiential learning - learning through doing but within parameters set by someone else (not unlike the typical internship).

Also this fall, other groups of students are joining with faculty mentors and off-campus partners in semester-long (or longer) projects addressing actual business, civic and public health issues in cities, towns and counties across the Hoosier State.  Last year, one team proposed an innovative information technology solution for a computing problem at Indianapolis International Airport, saving the airport authority big money.  Another designed and supervised the construction of a desperately needed municipal park and pavilion for our home city of Muncie.  Still another is producing a PBS television documentary on the 200-year history of the nearby Old National Road.

Participant-learners driving the learning process and establishing its parameters, confronting real-world problems and coming up with real-world solutions.  That's immersive learning - of the kind employed for decades to great effect by the Peace Corps and more recently by both the medical and graduate business schools at Stanford University, where "experience management techniques" are used to promote intercultural competence, as well as individual self-assessment, self-monitoring, predictive, planning and reflection skills.

Peace Corps veterans are highly marketable, while nearly half the graduates of Stanford's immersive global management program accept competitive positions internationally.

Higher education, in general, has delayed too long introducing these lessons of success at the undergraduate level.  More should be done to advance their acceptance, or the cost to many college parents of "whatever it takes" will continue to climb.

Currently in her fourth year as president of Ball State University in Muncie, Dr. Jo Ann M. Gora recently participated in the American Council on Education's Advancing to the Presidency forum in Washington, DC.