Most of the best ideas I encounter are in conversations with friends at EFI, when we are casually hanging out, with no formal aim of doing school work. Recently, I was speaking with Emily and she mentioned that in the food systems world there is a push to “make the best choice the easiest.” This comment struck me, as I’ve railed for years that colleges and universities seem to make the best choice the absolute hardest for students.
Take for example seeking accommodations for a learning difference. In order to complete this task at Nashville State, one of the largest college locations for many of the students I work with, setting up accommodations is filled with numerous steps, many extremely complex and requiring immense amounts of paperwork, filled with jargon, just to receive extra time on a test. I’ve long posited that the amount of students receiving accommodations in comparison to those who qualify for them has to be extremely out of whack.
My application for admission to EFI was centered on the need for colleges and universities to make radical systems changes, utilizing paternalism in the form of choice architecture in order to improve outcomes. Instead, we’ve seen the focus on the individual students and largely placed the research on what it takes for each individual to graduate, rather than on the broken systems. What would high school graduation rates be in Nashville if the same admissions and registration systems were in place to proceed to the next grade? It sounds like a ridiculous question, but one I believe is informative, as high school students most certainly are not wildly different from the beginning of junior year to the middle of their senior year, when they complete the college application process.
This conversation cemented my decision to return to my original idea for my project to understand if radical systems changes are happening around the US and if any of those changes could be applied to Nashville.
