Interview with Debra Humphreys: Advancing a Vision of Quality in Undergraduate Education

An Interview with Debra Humphreys, vice president for policy and public engagement at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).

I think the thing we most need to do is make sure that no matter what major a student is going through, they’re having the opportunity to do real-world application and applied project-based learning. One of the things we kept hearing from employers in our focus groups was, “You are graduating students who have a lot of technical expertise and have some knowledge, but they have trouble if a problem doesn’t look exactly like it did in the textbook.” In other words, we’re providing them with some problem-solving abilities, but we’re not giving them enough practice solving problems that are messy, that don’t have one single answer, that require them to bring together skills and abilities across disciplines to solve a problem—often in groups of people who may disagree with them.

The Lawlor Group | Interview with Debra Humphreys: Advancing a Vision of Quality in Undergraduate Education