Change.edu, by Andy Rosen, charts the higher ed landscape and the course forward

Andy Rosen, CEO of Kaplan (and full disclosure, my boss), has just published his take on the American higher education system, Change.edu: Rebooting to the new talent economy. In addition to reinforcing the need for a variety of players, he makes a strong argument for why even more, and better, solutions to building skills at scale are needed – and, in many cases, solutions may be at hand, if we let them develop within the right kinds of frameworks tied to success for students.

Along with other authors (including our own Peter Smith, who's recently published Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning), he points out the mismatch in our American society's view of higher education: we often hear of it as if it were mostly 4 year programs, filled with eager young people just out of high school, many of them (“the Automatics” as Andy calls them) having been expected to fulfill their parent's college dreams and similar experiences.

After the whirlwind of demographics and economics across our country, “We're not in Kansas any more, Toto.” A huge fraction of our student base in higher education is now very different – older, with more responsibilities (family, work), often with a far narrower “social graph” (as our Facebook friends would put it) tied in to college experience and success.

Many have flocked to community colleges, as Andy points out, to work hard and get a leg up on very practical skills and understanding. At the same time, even the Department of Education's own statistics show that these students have far more challenges at completing college:

• The very complexity of their lives, with work and family running in parallel, can make inflexible college requirements and timetables tougher to meet, no matter how willing the student.

• Because community colleges are majority supported by state subsidies (students pay only a fraction of their costs), and because they've grown to be so large, when states have to cut back during tough economic times, community college “seats” can get limited, making it difficult for students to get the courses they need at the times they need them.

• The enormous diversity of students served by community colleges means that it is very hard to use conventional college metrics as the only judge of success. As Andy points out, if a student walks in with 9th grade skills, and emerges with 12th grade skills but no associates degree, do we label that person or that institution a “failure?” Or did they get that student “on their way?”

Part of the problem is with the metrics. Even Andy uses statistics and stories about how America needs more degrees to be competitive, and how other nations are graduating more students with degrees, which is said to be a national competitiveness problem.

Honestly, the problem is not a lack of sheepskin. Heck, if we did the right trade deal with New Zealand, they'd send us all the sheepskin we wanted.

The number of degrees is easy to count, but not really the correct “measurement to be managed.” The Wall Street journal reported recently that in India, some 80% of engineering graduates are not qualified for jobs in engineering! If we're competing against the raw “number of degrees” issued by these higher education institutions in India, then we're aiming at the wrong target.

The key shortage (which Andy and I talk about all the time) is a shortage of skills inside people's heads, hands, and hearts that match the work that they want to do, and that needs doing across America in rapidly evolving work environments. With millions unemployed, there are millions of jobs that can't find the skilled people to fit. Simply handing out degrees won't help, if the skills that are mastered by students over hundreds of hours of effort are not what their next stage needs.

That's where innovative new institutions need to get busy. It's very difficult (as pointed out by folks like Peter Smith, Andy, Vance Fried, and others) for conventional educators in typical universities to really focus, at scale, on what works for learning, course by course, department by department, with as much intensity as they put into their own domain-specific research. Community colleges, with admirable goals of access for all, still are mostly not making use of the tremendous amount of research that exists about how to improve learning.

There are other alternatives starting up, growing up, several of which (like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan's own higher education institutions) are at scale, with thousands of students in some courses and degree programs. The University of Phoenix has recently bought a highly innovative, learning-science-based education company, Carnegie Learning, with the express purpose of harnessing their adaptive instructional approaches across their higher education offerings. At an Educause conference last year, they highlighted their “Learning Genome Project,” to much more deeply understand individual differences and use those to empirically shape learning trajectories, students by student. And, of course, those of you who've been reading my blog know that we are deeply engaged in the learning science literature, working to apply those research results at scale to lift learning results and make learning more efficient, engaging, and effective through pilots done at scale.

So there are innovations underway, even empirically-founded ones, which will add to the menu of offerings in years to come – and deserve their place in the education ecosystem as they grow and find their way.

Andy takes a view about how the world of higher ed will change, too. Quoting from his book a number of points will reinforce each other:

• It will be more mobile. (Not stupidly mobile - “Oooo, look, I can put a page of our biochemistry textbook on the iPhone! Kids today, they LOVE this kind of thing. . .”)

• It will be more disaggregated. (Which will increase the need for trusted skill measures that can be converted.)

• It will be more personalized. (Which will make learning more efficient, engaging, and effective, based on decades of research. You learn more, and enjoy it more, when you are challenged, but not too challenged. )

• It will focus more on learning outcomes. (This should increase the interweaving of work related skills and “academic” skills – skills that match what the best experts do and know.)

• It will be more accessible. (Flexibility in approaches to reaching the same, high-quality, high-value learning outcomes.)

• It will be more global. (Those 80% of India engineering graduates who don't have the right skills? They should be able to fix that, perhaps before they graduate, through on-line courses.)

• It will be cooler. (Arguably, based on students' experiences, the bar is low. . . Still, the right use of technology to accelerate a match between students and the skills needed to be successful long-term, applying a bit of Jobs' magic to ensure simplicity for learners and faculty, should be WAY cooler, not just cooler. )

There's an enormous market already out there for a wide variety of post-secondary learning, from “finishing school” experiences that turn late adolescents into young men and women of distinction, to highly focused opportunities to fix and build skills that propel folks of all ages forward to their dreams, to opportunities at any age to pursue one's own curiosity about the world and its workings (and how humans think about all this). We need to unleash more opportunities (with the right guard rails) to tackle these – and, as Andy's book points out, we can see the start of all this, all around us, all around the globe.

 

 

 

Comments

[Andy1]

Indeed,handing out degrees does not help if not backed up by a lot of homework targeted for the next stage and particularly a keen interest in the field.