Educational Paradigm Shift, I Like It

What can executives learn from a women's liberal-arts college in Milwaukee? The most important lesson: how to turn their companies into learning organizations. Sounds like a valuable source of competitive advantage for businesses to me. Want to know more? Read on.

At first glance, Alverno College appears unremarkable. With a campus of tan buildings on the south side of Milwaukee, it has just under 2,000 undergraduate students, all of whom are women, many of whom come to class on a typical day in hooded sweatshirts and ponytails. But appearances can be misleading: Alverno has been internationally recognized for its innovations in education. The reason why is both simple and revolutionary: Its students are actually learning.

"At the core of our philosophy is the idea of the student being conscious of what learning means as she goes through her life," says Sister Austin Doherty, director of the Alverno College Institute, which works with other educators who are interested in replicating Alverno's best practices. "When a student graduates from Alverno, it's not like, 'I got the degree. That's it.' It's more like, 'This was the formal setting where I focused on how to raise questions and make judgments.' "

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