The college experience means many things to many people — it can be a place to make lifelong friends, expand the mind or learn some of the skills associated with participating in a democracy.
Still, over the past few decades, policymakers, employers, parents and students have all coalesced around one goal they believe college should achieve: Preparing students for a decent career.
But for Sally Chiu, a 22-year-old who graduated University of Houston last year, her degree in management information systems wasn’t enough to help her land a job. “Every single day I was sending applications, five, 10 times,” Chiu said. “I would land an interview here and there, but I guess I wasn’t up to par for what they’re looking for.”
So when Chiu received an email advertising an opportunity where she could get paid while learning crucial job skills, she jumped at the chance.
Now, after several months working for TalentPath, a company that trains entry-level talent and then hires them out to companies, Chiu picked up valuable skills like how to translate technical jargon into lingo that she can present to executives and the best ways to navigate tricky workplace email etiquette.
She’s also working as a business analyst at a large tech company — a job she believes she would never have known about or been prepared to take without TalentPath. “Having those basic skills to get into the corporate world, they don’t really teach in college,” Chiu said.
Right now, organizations like TalentPath are working with college graduates to help them fill gaps in their training and land jobs. Recent graduates participate in an immersive training program for 12 weeks and then TalentPath hires them out to companies for roughly 18 months, paying their salary while billing the client for their services. After the 18-month commitment, the company has the option to hire the TalentPath worker as a full-time employee.
Now, some believe these types of companies could be part of a suite of firms — including coding boot camps and other short-term training programs — that will transform the path from high school graduation to a first job. At the same time, some stakeholders worry that opening up what we now call higher education to non-traditional, often for-profit companies could put students at risk.
Over the past several months, stakeholders have been meeting in Washington D.C. to debate a series of proposals focused on innovation in higher education. The talks, which end this week, revolve around seemingly wonky topics like the definition of a credit hour or the flexibility of accreditors in providing their stamp of approval to a school.
Is college in need of a shake up?
But they point to a broader set of central questions: Is the idea of college in need of a shake up? And should we be providing federal financial aid funding to more companies and organizations that don’t fit in with the ivy-covered intellectually-focused world of higher education that exists in our imagination?
The Trump administration and Secretary of Education Betsy Devos have argued that preparing students for the workforce requires thinking more broadly about what qualifies as higher education. Consumer advocates worry that could open the door for unscrupulous companies to take advantage of students and taxpayers.
Already, some so-called traditional colleges are taking controversial steps to expand their footprint beyond the students who attend their classes and live on their campuses. In 2017, Purdue University acquired Kaplan University, a for-profit online education provider.
Arizona State University, which already enrolls more than 100,000 students online, announced earlier this month that it would launch its own for-profit company to work with employers interested in offering worker training.
All of these developments bring a renewed attention to the question of the future of higher education and Washington’s role in shaping it.
Students are preparing for their ‘fifth job’
Ryan Craig, the co-founder of University Ventures, a major investor in firms at the intersection of education and employment, is adamant that the connection between graduating high school and an entry-level job is ripe for disruption.
“Higher education is preparing students for their fifth job,” instead of teaching graduates the basic software, presentation and other skills they need for their first job after graduation.
But Craig is skeptical that type of transformation will come internally or through the levers of government regulation debated by stakeholders over the past several months. He imagines a system where students get training in basic, entry-level skills from providers designed to teach them those skills specifically. Then after a few years on the job, they may go back to school at an institution that looks more like today’s colleges to build the critical thinking muscles needed to move up the corporate ladder.
He envisions these programs being funded either through the employers themselves and/or through income-share agreements — a controversial funding model where students pay for their education and training through a portion of their future earnings.
‘We think the system is going to change because students or would-be students will vote with their feet.’ – Ryan Craig, co-founder of University Ventures
“We think the system is going to change because students or would-be students will vote with their feet and opt for new pathways that lead directly to the good jobs,” he said.
Still, leaders of some of the most notable programs already in that space say they’re wary of moving too quickly towards totally upending young adults’ path to a job — particularly if it involves opening up access to federal financial-aid funding.
“Measuring outcomes is really complex,” said Liz Simon, the vice president of legal and external affairs at General Assembly,a coding boot camp program, “but that’s got to be the cornerstone of any kind of federal funding” expansion, she said.
Simon says she recognizes why there’s such an “appetite for a more practical, ROI-driven approach to education.” Students are coming out of college with high debt loads and struggling to find jobs that pay them well enough to repay the loans.
But her organization has always viewed itself as complementary to the higher education ecosystem — most of their students already have a degree — and Simon said she doesn’t expect that to change any time soon. “The space of the General Assemblies of the world is still relatively nascent overall,” she said. “That’s part of the reason for proceeding carefully and cautiously.”
Demands for changes to higher education
This year’s set of meetings is just one example of many over the past several decades where policymakers, higher education leaders, parents and others have demanded changes to our college system.
A variety of factors play into this hunger for change, but a major source of angst surrounding how colleges are serving students has to do with the reality that a degree is more necessary now to succeed than it was decades ago, said Tony Carnevale, the director of Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce.
That means college students don’t look the same as they did when our college system was designed around relatively privileged 18- to 24-year-olds attending school full-time, and there are questions as to whether higher education as it’s structured currently is set up to help these students succeed, said Julie Peller, the executive director of Higher Learning Advocates, a bipartisan nonprofit advocacy group.
In addition, over the past several years, employers have pulled back from training their workers, which has left a void that educational institutions have been asked to fill, she said.
David Bergeron — a former staffer for the Department of Education for over three decades who has watched countless debates over the future of higher education over the years — divides calls for innovation into three categories.
The first, according to Bergeron, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank: “Everything else in our economy has innovated and higher education hasn’t.” The second: “Higher education costs too much, therefore you need to innovate to drive down costs.” The third: “You need to innovate because the outcomes we want, we’re not getting.”
Reasons why people call for innovation in higher education: ‘Everything else in our economy has innovated and higher education hasn’t. Higher education costs too much, therefore you need to innovate to drive down costs. You need to innovate because the outcomes we want, we’re not getting.’ — David Bergeron, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress
Many of our nation’s colleges function similarly to how they did 100 years ago. And the country’s $1.5 trillion student-loan problem has made clear that college costs are beyond many families’ reach. In addition, the challenges graduates face indicate that often the U.S. higher education system isn’t adequately preparing students for success, he said.
Risks to embracing innovation too quickly
But the way today’s advocates for change propose to fund these innovations is a large part of what makes them problematic, Bergeron said.
In the past, when colleges experimented with new ways of providing education, the federal government typically funded those efforts through grants to the schools, Bergeron said. These days, proposals for innovation typically involve some kind of tweaking of the federal financial-aid system to expand government loans and grants to areas where they haven’t been used before.
In other words, students are taking on debt or sacrificing some of their limited grant money to participate in untested programs. “We demand the students pay for the experimentation that is being played on them without disclosure,” Bergeron said. “Then, if it goes wrong, we still say they have to pay back the student loans that they took out.”
‘We demand the students pay for the experimentation that is being played on them without disclosure.’ — David Bergeron, Center for American Progress
Regardless of whether the rulemaking process that’s played out in Washington over the past several months results in any changes, it is likely our higher education system will be forced to transform in some key ways over the next few decades.
For schools that aren’t one of a handful of colleges where people are willing “to pay $60,000 to wear a sweatshirt,” Carnevale said, “there comes a moment where what you have to sell is careers.”
That could create a movement towards cutting softer, liberal arts courses — a process which is already happening at some schools — or towards a system of specialization, where individual schools develop an expertise, he said.
In the meantime, some colleges are already experimenting with new ways to prepare students for the future. The question is whether and how they will scale, Peller said. Some colleges are bringing coding boot camp programs in-house. In California, the state is working towards creating an online community college system to make it easier for students with busy work schedules to earn degrees.
Though ensuring graduates have tangible skills that they can take on to jobs is a valuable goal, policymakers need to be careful about the ways these kinds of changes are implemented, Peller said.
Creating a system that’s divided between these two different types of paths risks tracking certain types of students — likely those already underserved and underrepresented in college — into job training and allowing wealthier students the opportunity to have a liberal arts education, Peller said.
But she’s hopeful that the system will evolve in a way that serves the needs of today’s students and workers, who likely will be interacting with some type of post-college institution more than just once in their lives.
“The most helpful part of this conversation is getting the different kinds of emerging higher learning to talk to one another,” Peller said. “They’re there and people are using them.”
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