"The purpose of higher education is not simply to process students through a series of stages, checking off their satisfaction of a sequence of requirements; these measures do not alone speak of the achievement of the institution's mission and goals" (Keeling, 3).
Flashback: I was in the first semester of my senior year of high school. I was scheduled to meet with my guidance counselor. I sat down and he asked, "So, where do you want to go?" "I really have no idea." "Well have you looked at the US News Book or any websites with ranked schools?"
No. I hadn't. And maybe that was because I had the mindset that I was going to move to Manhattan, wait tables, and "struggle until I found my passions and make it". Maybe too, it was because I was not a fan of statistics and so reading a book full of them for potential colleges didn't seem appealing. But that was the advice I got: check the books. They'll give you what you need.
The aspects of college life that really drew me in and made me exciting for this next chapter were those opportunities outside of the classroom. The outside-of-class things that students get involved with have been known to be separate from their academic work. "education happens in class, and development happens everywhere else" (7). While this was my initial understanding of the two, the magic that internally revealed itself was that both education and development can have equal opportunities.
The beauty is those who work with education and development are constantly assessing their work to make it better.
"Assessment is a means; not an end" (5). Reading more about the process and procedures of assessment, it has a lot of effective strategies and reasoning that could be applied to a person's thoughts on learning. Assessment is known to bring clarity and balance to an activity or set of activities. Once that is achieved, the full breadth of what it means to learn can be understood.
The question I raise is more of a potential study: What if university administration took students who excelled in the classroom and also were involved in leadership positions or were actively involved in co-curricular activities. What transferable knowledge might come about? Does the idea of continuous learning reveal itself when students are involved in multiple types of activities?
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