Published by the Baltimore Business Journal on June 24, 2016.
Goucher College President Jose Antonio Bowen
says he wants to reinvent higher education at
the Towson liberal arts school.
In the past two years, under Bowen’s leadership, Goucher began accepting two minute videos for application, as opposed to the standardized test and transcript combination. Students began taking psychological surveys each year, to see how the college experience was affecting them. Classes are focusing less on textbooks and more on active learning skills. And faculty went from being “professors” to “cognitive coaches.”
“The business model for what we do has been completely annihilated in the past
10 years…The service we offer has changed,” Bowen told members of the CEO Club of Baltimore on Thursday. “The world is an open book and my job is to create
students who are ready for the jobs of the future.”
Bowen, who took over as Goucher’s president in 2014, said more changes are on
the way.
“Every student walks onto campus with more information, more knowledge in their
pocket than they could ever learn in a classroom,” Bowen said. “The future belongs
to people who can learn more, not people who know more.”
Access to smartphones, internet advancement and the proliferation of social
media have all fundamentally changed the way people learn and interact, Bowen
said. Higher education institutions must react and respond to these changes, he
said.
In Bowen’s view, the faculty’s job is no longer just to teach content. Students can
already learn anything they want to know – for free – by doing a simple Google
search. Instead, Bowen said faculty need to teach students how to learn, and how
to change, he said, so graduates are prepared to go to work in today’s rapidly shifting world.
And one of the most important things someone can learn in college, Bowen said, is
how to be OK with failure.
Bowen said sometimes the best way to learn is by failing, but being willing to try
new things is important in his field. Plenty of people thought he was crazy when he
announced the video applications concept, for example.
“I said ‘If I’m wrong, I’ll go on national TV and say I was wrong,'” Bowen said. “In
leadership, you have to be okay with the possibility of failure.”
But in their freshman year, Bowen said the students that applied via video
submission ended up with higher GPAs overall than those who applied using their
test scores and transcripts. So the video application option remains.
Goucher will keep growing and changing in the coming years, Bowen said. He
hopes to grow the student body from about 1,450 to 1,600 and wants to keep
evaluating students to see what is working about the curriculum and what isn’t.
The school is also building a new dorm where faculty will actually live among the
students, to try an integrate learning into students’ daily lives, even when they are
out of the classroom.
“It’s a pretty different way to think about the college experience,” he said. “But if it
doesn’t work, we’ll change.”