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Degrees have become deliverables because we are no longer willing to make students work hard against high standards to earn them.

Rethinking higher education means reconstituting institutional culture by rigorously identifying, evaluating and challenging the many damaging accommodations that colleges and universities, individually and collectively, have made (and continue to make) to consumer and competitive pressures over the last several decades. What do we mean by “damaging accommodations?

We mean the allocation of increasing proportions of institutional resources to facilities, personnel, programs and activities that do not directly and significantly contribute to the kind of holistic, developmental and transformative learning that defines higher learning.

We mean the deplorable practice of building attractive new buildings while offering lackluster first- and second-year courses taught primarily by poorly paid and dispirited contingent faculty.

We mean the assumption that retention is just keeping students in school longer, without serious regard for the quality of their learning or their cumulative learning outcomes at graduation.

The primary problem is that the current culture of colleges and universities no longer puts learning first -- and in most institutions, that culture perpetuates a fear of doing so. Isolated examples to the contrary exist, but are only the exceptions that prove the rule.

In calling for the kind of serious, systemic rethinking that directly and unflinchingly accepts the challenge of improving undergraduate higher education, we are asking for four things; taken together, they demand, and would catalyze, a profound, needed, and overdue cultural change in our colleges and universities.

1. The widespread acceptance and application of a new and better touchstone for decision-making in higher education, linked to a strong framework of essential, core principles. A touchstone is a standard, or criterion, that serves as the basis for judging something; in higher education, that touchstone must be the quality and quantity of learning. A touchstone and a clear conceptual framework link our advocacy for change to a powerful set of ideas, commitments, and principles against which to test current policies, practices, and proposals for reform.

2. A comprehensive re-evaluation of undergraduate education and experience guided by those core principles. This must occur both nationally, as an essential public conversation, and within the walls of institutions of all types, missions, and sizes.

3. The leadership and actual implementation and renewal of undergraduate higher education needs to be led by the academy itself, supported by boards of trustees, higher education professional organizations, and regional accrediting bodies alike. Such rethinking ought to be transparent, informed by public conversation, and enacted through decisions based on the new touchstone, improving the quality and quantity of learning.

4. Learning assessment must become inextricably linked to institutional efficacy. The formative assessment of learning should become an integral part of instruction in courses and other learning experiences of all types, and the summative assessment of learning, at the individual student, course, program, and institution levels should be benchmarked against high, clear, public standards.

Cultural problems require cultural solutions, starting with a national conversation about what is wrong, and what is needed, in higher education. The country should reasonably expect higher education to lead this conversation. For real change to occur, discussions about the quality and quantity of learning in higher education and the need for reform must occur at multiple levels, in many places, and over a significant period of time -- most importantly on campuses themselves

If enough change occurs in enough places, and if our public expectations remain high and consistent, learning may become the touchstone for decision-making; the quality and quantity of learning -- documented by rigorous assessment -- may become both each institution’s greatest concern and the basis for comparisons between various colleges and universities

Richard P. Keeling is principal, and Richard H. Hersh is senior consultant, for Keeling & Associates, a higher education consulting practice. They are authors of the recent book, We’re Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), from which this essay is partly excerpted.

Every interview subject conducted some sort of a literature review as part of any research project

Every researcher described some strategies for keeping up with new developments in their area of expertise, all of which involved some scanning of new publications and some personal contact with individuals exploring the same territory.

For most, presenting research at conferences was a common part of bringing their research to completion. For all, writing up results for publication was an important final step, and they seemed acutely aware of the pecking order for publication venues in their field.

(In contrast, undergraduates mostly encounter articles within databases, called up by key words, not as artifacts within a particular journal which carries clout.)

One thing the students all gained through these interviews was an appreciation that research is not a matter of finding answers in other people’s publications. Every scholar interviewed described how they had asked a question that nobody had asked before, a question they couldn’t answer themselves until they had completed the research. It struck me that so much of what undergraduates experience as “research” is very nearly the opposite, a process of uncovering answers others have already arrived at.

I’m also thinking about what these interviews said collectively about how real research is conducted. It makes me a little crazy when students abandon a truly interesting question because they can’t find sources to quote that provide the answer, or when they change their topic based on what they can find easily. Or (shudder) when they say they've written their paper, but need help finding five sources to cite. Clearly, they are not learning how to do research; they aren't even learning what research is.  What I would really, really like is to figure out how to give every student the experience of not worrying so much about getting the right answers, but learning how to ask a really good question. The kind they won't find answered in the library.

I understand perfectly that faculty want their first-year students to find quality resources and they want their students to have an understanding of scholarly communication. But is the best way to do that forcing them to find scholarly articles for a research paper? That requires so many different skills that many of these students don’t have yet: 1. The ability to turn a topic into a search strategy 2. The ability to search in library databases 3. The ability to look at a citation and determine whether it is a scholarly journal or not (or maybe they’ve just checked a box in a database which means that they never need to learn this important skill) 4. The ability to read an abstract and determine whether the article is relevant to their topic 5. The ability to read a scholarly journal article and synthesize information from it 6. The ability to integrate evidence from the scholarly literature into their paper 7. The ability to write effectively

Another thing that the focus on requiring students to only find peer-reviewed sources does is that it distances them from research and information literacy.

But when the focus is on telling students that the only quality stuff comes from the peer-reviewed literature, we are distancing what students learn in school about information literacy from what they will do in the real world.

I also love the idea of giving all students in a class peer-reviewed articles from different disciplines and have them analyze them together. It can not only help them to understand and dissect peer-reviewed literature, but it can also show them the differences in scholarly communication in different disciplines.

Not being able to code doesn't make you digitally illiterate. Not being able to participate in  social, economic, cultural and political life because you lack the confidence, skills and opportunity to do so is what makes you digitally illiterate.