The Theory and Practice of Action Learning in the MPA Program at Metropolitan College of New York (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION: PURPOSE-CENTERED EDUCATION Audrey Cohen founded Metropolitan College of New York in 1964 as the Women's Talent Corps. The name of the college was changed to the College for Human Services in 1970, to Audrey Cohen College in 1992, and to Metropolitan College of New York in 2002. The college was founded, along with a number of other experimental colleges, in the midst of calls for educational reform in the 1960s. Cohen believed that knowledge had become over specialized in the helping professions, fragmented in narrow academic disciplines, and disconnected from action in life and work. She took as her life-long challenge an attempt to bring together knowledge and action, theory and practice in order to make education meaningful, relevant, and useful to students. As she said,