An association based at Colorado State University has launched a new commission chaired by some of the nation’s top higher education leaders to examine how to improve undergraduate education.

It’s a follow-up to the landmark 1998 report issued by the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University, which was convened by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. That report, “Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities,” featured a host of transformational recommendations in areas such as research-based learning, interdisciplinary education, information technology, capstone experiences, community building and faculty reward systems.

On Aug. 9, the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities, formerly known as the Reinvention Collaborative and hosted by CSU since 2013, announced the formation of the “Boyer 2040 Commission.” That group has been charged with designing a “2040 Blueprint for Excellence & Equity in Undergraduate Education at U.S. Research Universities.” It is being co-chaired by Barbara Snyder, president of the Association of American Universities, and Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. Together with their 14 fellow commissioners, Snyder and McPherson expect to issue a report in early 2022.

About UERU

The CSU-based association, known as UERU, has representatives from 85 universities, including the most recent additions of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt University, the University of Central Florida and Brown University. UERU was founded at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2000 to implement the recommendations of the original Boyer Commission’s report.

According to CSU Associate Provost Steve Dandaneau, UERU executive director, those recommendations changed how undergraduate students were viewed and taught in many ways.

“After that, it was no longer acceptable to imagine undergraduate students as cash cows that you bring onto campus, and whether they succeed or fail was up to them, sink or swim, survival of the fittest,” he said. “We don’t talk that way anymore. Now there is an understanding that all students deserve to be successful, they deserve to be supported and encouraged, and they’re important.”

Still, Dandaneau explained, more needs to be done because nationwide changes like increasing research-based learning and decreasing class sizes in first-year and capstone seminars, for instance, haven’t translated into significant improvements in retention or graduation rates. In addition, he said, other challenges have arisen in recent decades, like ensuring equity for the influx of first-generation, racially minoritized and limited-income students, and the economic obstacle of declining public funding for higher education and resulting increases in the cost of attendance.

Need for flexibility

Pointing to the COVID-19 pandemic as an example, Dandaneau said, students need to be prepared to deal with change.

“Students of today, looking ahead to their future, need to be flexible, adaptable, capable of coping with challenges and finding solutions, and that changes how we teach and think about our degree programs,” he said. “This commission will look at that big picture, a couple of decades hence. We know there is a lot in that timeframe that’s going to put responsibility on us as educators to do things differently, more effectively and more creatively.”