The Creativity Challenge

Today’s students need more than good grades and polished résumés to thrive in a rapidly changing world. They need to be able to bring fresh insights to open-ended challenges, and to navigate uncertainty with confidence and agility. They need to be creative — a quality that more colleges are emphasizing, in part because it’s a skill that more employers say they value. The good news is that creativity is increasingly seen as a skill that can be acquired, rather than an innate ability possessed by a lucky few. But cultivating it requires a major commitment — a single course tacked onto the rest of the curriculum won’t cut it.

This Chronicle issue brief examines how colleges can help students develop creative skills that will help them in their academic careers and beyond. Designed for administrators and faculty members alike, it serves as a primer on why creativity is important, how students can develop it, and what higher education might look like if faculty members were to encourage creativity in every discipline and in every course.

Purchase the issue brief and learn: 

• Why recent studies show that employers value soft skills like creativity 
• The importance of teaching practices that present open-ended problems and ask students to synthesize material to create something new
• How college leaders can reduce barriers and provide incentives for students — and professors — to work creatively and across disciplinary lines
• How five colleges, featured in case studies, are helping students learn to think in new ways

Date: January 2020
Pages: 36
Digital file size: 2.46 MB

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