What most institutions have not done is to create organized programs of study that make it easy for students in basic disciplines or professional fields to combine those three forms of education into an integrated experience. The most enduring learning will occur when colleges and universities enable students to move back and forth among the three educational traditions and to reflect on the insights they gain as they do so. Fostering practice-oriented programs is not as difficult as it might appear, as the experience at my university suggests. At Northeastern, which includes several professional colleges, a college of arts and sciences, and the largest program of cooperative education in the country, our efforts have followed two basic paths. First, we are developing many curricula that permit students to combine course work in a professional field with course work in the arts and sciences.
Double majors offer virtually limitless possibilities for meeting a student's diverse interests.
More-focused dual majors link two fields in an organized, streamlined sequence of courses, as in our programs of art and multimedia studies, or traditional business and foreign languages. Beyond recasting curricula, the second key element of practice-oriented education at Northeastern is integrating cooperative education with classroom experience. Traditionally, we have sought to place students in co-op jobs that are broadly related to their studies, but we have done very little to integrate the two types of learning. We are also finding ways to bring classroom instructors, supervisors of students on co-op jobs, and employers into much more intense communication in shaping students' education. One introductory course in our engineering college, for example, uses teaching teams made up of engineering faculty members and co-op advisers.