Taking a page from the education reforms in Europe, groups around the world have been exploring tuning as a tool for making university programs more relevant and transparent. In the US, physics was one of two fields Utah began tuning last year.
Utah’s nine publicly funded colleges and universities took part in a tuning pilot project that included schools in Minnesota and Indiana. With $150 000 apiece from the Lumina Foundation for Education, each participating state picked two or three fields to tune; the exercise is part of the nonprofit, Indiana-based foundation’s goal of upping the percentage of people in the US who earn a college degree from around 40% now to 60% by 2025.
Says Lumina program director Kevin Corcoran, “The Achilles heel of higher education is that people cannot describe what degrees mean without using credit hours.” Tuning is a faculty-driven process that aims to spell out—for prospective...
