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As a sorority woman, I am no stranger to the importance of values, philosophy and history and how important it is to know and believe in them. Being an active member, both collegiate and alumna, of my sorority Delta Phi Epsilon, our values of Justice, Sisterhood and Love were the reason I joined and the reason I continue to stay so dedicated. In my opinion, the field of student affairs is no different. There is a great history behind higher education, and the values and philosophy have been shaped over time. The service that student affairs professionals give to their institutions and their profession have provided the mold to develop the field.

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The Values, Philosophy and History competency “involves knowledge, skills, and dispositions that connect the history, philosophy, and values of the student affairs profession to one’s current professional practice” (ACPA/NASPA, 2015, p. 18). Incorporating our philosophy and values goes hand in hand with the historical lessons learned: how can you truly develop an effective philosophy and informed values without having any backing behind it? Just like we cite our sources in our research, we should cite our sources in our philosophy and values.

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The history of higher education has such an ongoing nature, much like the world around us. Colleges and universities do not operate in a vacuum, and they never have. Even today, we debate on who goes to college, how it will be paid for, and why students should even go in the first place (click the hyperlinks for more). In Schuh, Jones, and Harper (2011), they say that to try and take a small snapshot of the history of American higher education over the past four centuries would yield very poor results. Instead, they say "a good resolution to carry away is to see the history of American colleges and universities less as a compendium of facts and more as a description of the lively process by which each generation of college students, administrators, donors, and legislators as wrestled with the issue of who shall be educated and how" (p. 21).

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Essentially, we should look at the history and see not just the facts, but the ideas and the world around them, and consider how the world shaped colleges and vice versa. How did we as a society get here today? What makes colleges the way they are currently? Why do we even have higher education in the first place?

 

That last question - why higher education exists - is something I've wondered. What is it's purpose? What's the point? Students spend so much money in order to attend college these days - statistics say that Americans owe over $1.4 trillion dollars in student loan debt (A Look at the Shocking Student Loan Debt Statistics for 2017, 2017). What could possibly make such a sum worth it? In order to answer the question of why it's all worth it, you need to narrow the question down further. When you think about the purpose of higher education, you need to ask yourself, “the purpose of it for whom?” It varies depending on the type of person you might be speaking about. 

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For my midterm assignment in my History of Higher Education course, I compared men of the colonial era to women

attending college. Using course readings, I broke down why men of the colonial era attended college, and why women

in the 1800s began to partake in higher education. What was the purpose for men, and what was the purpose for

women? Click the PDF icon to the right to take a look at this paper!

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As the Panhellenic advisor at MIT, I take women’s inclusion very seriously, which is why I chose to focus on women’s inclusion in higher education throughout history. To this day, STEM fields are known to have less women in them. Working with the women at MIT, it is important to encourage the women as best I can to succeed despite the pressure they might face – whether that is from society, faculty, or their male peers who do not face the same scrutiny.

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Something else to consider is the events, people, and communities that happened in the past are the only reason we are here today. This is why it is important to consider events such as the founding of Harvard in 1636, the Morrill Land Grant Acts in 1862 and 1980, and the Truman Commission Report on Higher Education in 1947, as the world-altering moments that they are. Maybe they didn't seem so world-altering at the time, but they ended up being events that marked a major shift in society.

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One particular event that changed society was allowing women to attend college. According to the U.S.’s report of the World Census, women make up just under half of the world’s population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016). Understanding the beginnings of women attending college, such as Oberlin’s “Ladies’ Course” (Gordon, 1991) is important when working with a population of women that still have an uphill battle to face. Recent events have shown that many women still are not considered equals, even in America, and so looking at the history can show us how to create change.

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As time has continued on, women gained more and more traction in the educational world. Here at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is a primarily STEM institution, just under half of the undergraduate population is made up of women (Enrollment 2015-2016), but it wasn’t always this way. The first woman to graduate from MIT, Ellen Swallow Richards, did so in 1873, but was not admitted until the faculty voted to admit her as a “special student” (The Women of MIT, 2014). Until WWII, the population of women at MIT remained small, and did not begin to reach the numbers it has today until the opening of McCormick Hall, a women-only dorm, opened in 1963.​

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Below, you will find a PowerPoint of a group presentation myself and some of my classmates completed during our History of Higher Education course. We focused on the role that women played in the history of higher education, particularly based on Alice Freeman Palmer's essay, "Why Go to College?," which was written in 1897.

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Fast forward to the present, and we find that many institutions are battling important topics, like mental health and sexual assault prevention. Twenty years ago, these conversations were not as prominent in the mainstream media as they may have been in student affairs - and some topics that we focus on today were not prominent in student affairs, either. In 1972, the in loco parentis role of student affairs came to an end. In loco parentis, when directly translated from Latin, means in the place of a parent. It had only entered the vocabulary ten years prior, but the staff at colleges and universities certainly filled that role long before it had a name (Sweeton & Davis, 2003).

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The GI Bill changed the entire course of the history of Higher Education, leading to a massive influx of students coming to college (History and Timeline, n.d.). Another such bill could be floating around Congress right now, slowly gathering steam until it changes everything about higher education as we know it today. The current world will certainly have an impact on the higher education of tomorrow, and the proof can be found in any history book on the shelves, because that is the ongoing nature of higher education and the world around it.

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References

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Values, Philosophy and History

Here is a PowerPoint from my History of Higher Education class. We were tasked with facilitating a 45 minute discussion on an assigned topic, and my group chose women in higher education.

Last Updated: 08/10/17

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