6 years on, this prediction has been pretty accurate:
I was having a great conversation with some thinkers on higher education on how traditional higher education can disrupt their own models. Here are my thoughts on the possible disruptions.
One of the burgeoning fields in education is centered around online programs. From MOCCs with Coursera to Harvard’s Extension School, the field of learners who have gone online for their education has been climbing for the past 12 years. It is unlikely that the number of students learning online will go down. However, the increasing costs of tuition that far outpaces both the cost of living increases and average American family incomes is not sustainable and has led students to look for other options.
Combined with students looking for other options, employers are starting to question the value of a four year college degree. From Peter Thiel’s success of setting up a fellowship to incentivize young people to start businesses rather than go to college, to the reliance of employers on certifications rather than specific degrees in a wide range of industries, it is uncertain if demand from employers will continue to be as high for non-STEM degrees. Furthermore, the 2014 U.S. Department of Labor rules on internships has restricted the ability of companies to try out interns before hiring them.
Therefore, in order for large well established universities to compete in the future they will need to position themselves for optimal ROI for students. The only way for universities to do this is by partnering with key employers in their region. While some universities have established Bachelors of Individual Studies degrees, I do not believe that these degrees carry much weight with students and employers because they neither provide the specificity of a BS in Mechanical Engineering nor a ready understanding of the accepted academic background of a BA in History. Therefore, a large university must think outside of the traditional degree mind set and focus on why the majority of students are attending college and their parents are pushing them to go to college: a good job after graduation.
To that end, a large university should look to the past for instruction on how to prepare men and women for jobs: apprenticing them. While there are several great target industries for this approach, the one with the least barrier to entrance and the highest probability of success is within the IT sector for the following reasons: coding boot camps are an excepted form of entry into the market place for programmers, the number of open source projects to work on is plentiful, and the IT workforce is highly remote and therefore the university’s partner reach can be expanded beyond its geographic location.
Unlike coding boot camps whose duration is too short to serve as anything more than an introductory to a programming skill-sets, and unlike a traditional university program that laces the bulk of a degree with courses that are not applicable to the chosen career field, this program would be shaped so that students have mentors at the partner organizations and are able to do real work. In conjunction with their apprenticeship, the university would be training them and provide them a place to experiment and experience new portions of the IT sector of which they might not have been informed. Lastly, because these students would be apprenticed throughout their time at the university, their graduation debt load would be reduced by their apprenticeship.
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Sources:
- US News. U.S.News & World Report, n.d. Web. 23 July 2016.
Rosoff, Matt. "Here's How Peter Thiel's College Dropout
- Entrepreneurs Are Doing." Business Insider. Business Insider, Inc, 2015. Web. 25 July 2016.
- "Labor Laws Apply When Your Intern Is Really an Employee." SHRM. N.p., 2015. Web. 25 July 2016.
- "Why a Coding Bootcamp Probably Isn't Right for You." Fusion. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 July 2016.