A Tennessee educator will travel halfway around the world at the end of this month to help the island nation of the Maldives set up a higher education framework.
In Tennessee, Claude Pressnell is the president of TICUA, the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association. But on other continents, he’s a specialist in higher education for the U.S. State Department.
He’ll spend July in the 200 inhabited islands of the Maldives (“Mal-deeves”), south of India, helping draft a plan for student aid in the tiny country of 400,000 people..
“They were one of the very early Muslim nations that revolted against a totalitarian rule in their country, and as a result, have developed a democracy.”
Pressnell says the county is trying to create an economy, and jobs, that will keep its young people from leaving. Part of that will require public higher education. And paying for that will call for government money, but also loans and grants.
Pressnell is doing the work for the Fulbright Scholars Program, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
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Pressnell has worked to re-build higher education systems in the war-ravaged countries of Iraq and Kosovo, part of the former Yugoslavia. We have his thoughts on what he has learned that could affect the United States below.
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The island nation of the Maldives has a negative growth rate, losing about 12 of every 1,000 residents each year to out-migration. The archipelago is about 1,190 islands, of which 200 are inhabited and roughly half are home to resorts, catering to tourists.
Space is tight, Pressnell notes.
“The island of Male, which is one of their larger islands, where the capital is actually located, is one two and a half square miles. But there are a hundred thousand people who live there.”
Pressnell says his previous work in Iraq and in the Balkans was aimed at re-creating a higher education system after wars had devastated the countries, and that’s a blank slate, but the Maldives project involves working with existing public schools and some emerging private colleges.
So they’re trying to work through what is the role of higher education – both public and private – and not only that, but how do they determine quality, how do they determine an accreditation system to ensure that the citizens are getting a good education.
In both cases, the rebuilding/emerging nations are looking at how to measure outcomes, he says.
“So they take a look at the U.S. model of higher education, but they’re also very interested in what’s happening in Europe, with the Bologna process and all the higher education reforms there.”
The Bologna process – begun in the 1990s in that city in Italy, is tied economically to the development of the European Union. Member states of the Bologna program agree to a type of testing that guarantees a graduate of any of the countries is capable of working throughout Europe – that a person with a chemical engineering degree from Germany has been exposed to the same education as a person with the same degree from France, or any other country.
And that, Pressnell says, is a lesson that Americans are starting to pay attention to.
“I think one thing that one thing the United States has learned from that, is that we really need to focus on student competencies after they complete a degree of study.
And what should they be able to do, what competencies should they have? So not so much counting the courses of what they’re taking, but making sure we understand what the outcome of each of those courses are. And then how they culminate in a degree.”
“In the United States our institutions are really very good at understanding course outcomes, what a student should be able to do at the end of a course. Where we haven’t done the heavy lifting is, what should they look like at the end of the degree?”
While that’s going on, he says, many Americans are looking at college education as simply job training. Something he considers an oversimplification.
“There is a difference between training and educating. Training is typically very specific, for a very narrowly defined skill set to do a particular task. Whereas educating would have outcomes that would be more in the realm of critical thinking, broad-based communication skills, and group dynamics. And so it’s going to look a little bit different. I would say that what we’re seeing take place, in terms of higher education as a whole, is that there’s pressure to blend the two of those things together.”
While they may be blended – many courses go into a degree program, after all – Pressnell says the country can’t lose sight of one of the basic reasons for education – not job training but citizenship.
“Because we don’t want to swing so far towards training that we lose the fabric of a civil society that is a part of the general education concepts.”
The on-line CIA World Factbook describes the Maldives here.
Pressnell’s biography is on the web site of the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association.
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