My Thoughts on the Future of Higher Education
Intro
This past semester in school I took a class called Higher Education Administration that was taught by the WashU Provost, Holden Thorp. The class was great and Provost Thorp is awesome.
As a final project, we were asked to write on our thoughts and suggestions towards the future of Higher Ed. I have edited my paper slightly for Medium, but below is the gist of what I learned and had to say:
Disclaimer: I understand how difficult and slow moving things can be in higher education, so some of the ideas that I have might be more attainable than others, but nonetheless here are some of the big things I have been thinking about.
Improving awareness of education
One of the things we talked about a lot this semester is a lack of high quality administrators in higher education. From all indications and many studies, I’d say that would extend not just to administrators but also to teachers and other college staff. While we have talked about how difficult it can be as an administrator and how that’s a turnoff for many people, I believe lack of awareness about such roles plays just as much of a part. As a small anecdote, I was recently talking to a friend who wants to become a teacher and she relayed to me that constantly hearing, “oh, why do you want to become a teacher when you can do so much better than that?” is incredibly discouraging. There’s definitely an inherent lack of respect and awareness for becoming a teacher, and based on many conversations that I have had, it seems like that extends to administrators as well. Many of the reasons behind this lack of respect and awareness are deep and difficult to solve (like salaries and general societal biases), but one place where I think there’s immediate room for improvement is in better informing people about the way that the education system works.
This semester I took two education classes, with the second being “Philosophies of Education.” Me taking these two classes this semester came from a relatively random sequence of events where I found an Ed Tech Startup in Denver that seemed exciting and I started doing some work for, then I attended a TedX Conference that got me thinking more about education, and then I decided to take a deep dive by taking these two courses and getting involved in other capacities. In just these two classes I have learned a tremendous amount about education that has opened up many new trains of thought for my career. I have learned that being a college administrator is a fascinating role that can have such influence; I’ve also learned about what it means to be a tenured professor, and, in the Philosophies of Education class, I have learned about many of the educational disparities facing children around the country, which interests me greatly.
The issue I see is that many people don’t have this initial exposure to education, and never even realize that they might have an interest in an education-related job. At the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is self-actualization; making a difference. Being involved in education gives someone an opportunity to impact hundreds or thousands, or even millions of lives, certainly in line with Maslow’s hierarchy, but I don’t think many connect those dots.
So, in short, I’m saying that I think everybody in college should be informed about the way that the education system works. I’ll talk about this below, but I foresee a lot of changes coming to society and if we don’t have competent people working to help change education to adapt to society, then we’re in trouble. By informing people about the way that the system works and exposing them to jobs and problems that those jobs solve, I believe more bright college students would pursue education-related career paths, which would trickle down and have a large impact.
In practice, that can be slightly challenging since it’s not like we can make it a requirement for students to take a class similar to Higher Education Administration (I suppose we could, but I don’t see that happening). Instead, I have a few thoughts about ways to do this.
First, the required reading for freshman before coming to WashU could change and instead be about higher education. To be honest, I don’t remember the name of the book that we had to read before coming here, but I remember it was about diversity. I know diversity is important and a lot of people care about instilling that in freshman, but we also get a lot of other diversity training during orientation, so making the book be about Higher Ed could be one route that would give people an initial exposure.
Another route is making subtle changes that could encourage more students to take education classes. We can’t dictate exactly what courses students will take, but there can be curriculum changes that would make a subtle impact like creating more incentives behind taking education classes (maybe adding a Social Differentiation (SD) attribute to the classes, making more of them writing intensive (WI), etc).
*NOTE that one SD and WI class are required for WashU Arts and Science undergraduates.**
Those subtle things would get many more students to enroll, since I know many students will take a class purely because of the SD or WI attribute. Another thing that could be done is requiring freshman (maybe only in Art Sci if it had to be that way) to take one semester of a freshman seminar that could be 3–5 different options with one of them being about Higher Ed.
The last place I see room for growing awareness is in starting more conversations about education. My rationale here is twofold.
One, there are a lot of people that are quite passionate about changing education but don’t really know what to do to get started since the issues that they see are so daunting. I have a friend, for example, that ended up deciding to start a focus group to discuss problems in education and come up with some ideas. While nothing from these discussions has led to action yet, we have been in communication with the administration about potentially starting a new WashU course, which has been a great channel for students passionate about education to have their voices heard.
The second reason here is that conversations and activism can engage people that might not have considered any interest in education previously. I have heard countless stories of “my friend dragged me to this event in college, I went because there was free food and it ended up changing my entire career path.” I was talking to an Olin Business School Distinguished Executive in Residence, Richard Mahoney, for example, and he shared that he was planning to major in English and then because of the free pizza, got dragged to a presentation from Monsanto about combining chemistry and marketing. He ended up loving the presentation and long story short became the CEO of Monsanto.
The conversations that bring people together to discuss education are one example, but there’s actually another that I’m more excited about. I have a friend who is working with a few other students on starting a nonprofit called AlignEd that is working on mobilizing college students to start conversations and take action on helping improve the child experience in PK-12 education (website at www.educationaligned.org if you’re interested). I’ve been helping/working with them, and I absolutely love the idea. I understand this is focused on lower education and this paper is primarily about Higher Ed, but this example still paints a picture of what I’m thinking about. There are all of these people that are so passionate about solving problems in education (I don’t have numbers to back that up, but I’ve talked with 15–20 this semester and I’ve barely done any exploring). The thing is that everything is so complicated and even from talking to my friend and going to AlignEd meetings, so many of these students think too big picture and don’t know how to get started, which is a huge missed opportunity. Being able to better channel that energy towards making positive changes would be monumental. So, what AlignEd is doing, as an example, is giving students routes to pursue research if they are interested, they’re working with public schools in Nevada to improve the educational experience, and they are beginning to work on expanding these campaigns and conversations to different colleges around the country.
This all ties back into the idea of increasing awareness about the way that the education system works. I really believe that a lot of people would love to be working on these problems if they knew that they existed. Increasing awareness could help create more teachers, administrators and policy makers, which would, no doubt, have a tremendously positive impact.
My view has become that throughout college, and even beforehand, we are exposed to a variety of different ideas, fields and interests. Some of them are naturally more interesting to each of us, and those are the ones that are often explored further (the same way that I decided to take a deep dive into education this semester). Someone could be meant to be an amazing lawyer, though, and if they are never exposed to law where they would discover those interests, then they will almost certainly never become a lawyer. By exposing more people to education, through books, classes, conversations and activism, more people will have the chance to dive into it more deeply if they are passionate about it, which will lead to more effort put towards improving and solving issues.
Better preparing students for the real world
My next thought is more big picture and not something as tangible to fix. What makes me most nervous about the state of higher education is adequately preparing students for life after college. Both in skillsets and mental/emotional capacity. I don’t want to get into mental/emotional capacity in this piece (in a Coddling of the American Mind sense), so I will focus more on skillset matching.
There are countless numbers and studies that talk about skillset gaps for new college grads, so to name just one, McKinsey found that even back in 2011, when unemployment was 9%, 30% of companies had jobs open for 6+ months that they couldn’t fill. Other studies extrapolate on that, but, in general, with the changing society, and many jobs becoming obsolete, I’d say there is undoubtedly a skill gap, and that it is growing worse over time. I have a few thoughts about some of the things that might be able to be done to help solve these problems.
One, as I mentioned above, that I think is crucial is getting competent people in the right jobs. To me, that doesn’t just mean in higher education, but also in politics. During WashU’s alumni weekend, I was talking to a ten-year alum who was in my business fraternity, and he has been out in San Francisco doing tech for the majority of his time post-graduation. As of last this past month, he moved to Columbus, Ohio to run for office on a platform of bringing in the next generation of needs and helping eliminate job/skill gaps through education. When I was talking to him, the way he put it was that while having people building things and pushing society forward, technologically, is important, there’s a huge portion of the country that is very behind the curve and it is likely going to take politicians throughout the country to bring everybody up to speed with society’s needs through new policies. I don’t know enough to take a strong stance on that opinion, but I found it interesting, nonetheless. Putting the right people in charge on college campuses (by motivating current students to pursue education as a career, and maybe even politics) would make big impacts. Still, the question remains of what these people should be doing once in the positions.
I understand the difficulty of changing college curriculum, but the way that information is presented to students as well as course offerings and interdisciplinary collaboration are more attainable to work towards. A good example here is in some of the changes that the Olin business school is beginning to make. I heard Dean Malter talk last week about some of Olin’s initiatives moving forward, and it’s these types of things that are going to help eliminate job gaps and mismatched skills. Dean Malter talked about how Olin is working with the Art and Engineering schools to produce dual/combined degree programs, which would much better prepare students for a variety of jobs. Another area I can instantly say needs more attention is digital marketing. Marketing to my generation through new mediums is crucial today, and the marketing courses offered in Olin are sorely missing the digital dimension. Looking across the board at all areas of study, there are places that could use a lot of work and pushing department heads to scrutinize their curriculums (maybe even leveraging recent alumni to share what they wish they had learned in specific areas of study) could pay off quite well.
Off of that, it’s not just about the course offerings but also about what students ultimately decide to study. There are definitely students that come into college and know that they want to major in mechanical engineering and build bridges, but a huge portion of college students come in with no idea, and it has led me to believe that a lot of students end up choosing a major relatively arbitrarily. It’s the experiences that they have over their freshman and sophomore years that influence what they end up studying, like a good teacher in a subject or meeting an upperclassman they look up to that’s majoring in a specific field.
I recently read a book called Nudge that’s written by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and the concepts in that book are ones that I think could be applied to college students to try and better prepare graduates. Nudge talks about the subtle changes that decision makers can implement that will have drastic effects on important outcomes. A great example is that Thaler sent out a form to a large group of employees asking them whether they would be willing to bump up the portion of their income that goes into their retirement by 5%, which was overwhelmingly met with “no” (about 98%). He asked another large group whether they’d be willing to increase their retirement portion by 2% each time they got a raise, which, over 75% of the time, was met with ‘yes’. The difference in the two groups is drastic, with the second group ending up saving about 5% more per year within just two years. That money adds up quite significantly over the course of someone’s lifetime.
We make these big decisions, like how much money to save for retirement, how to invest our money, and often even what we major in, very quickly, despite the importance of them (assuming that for many people, their major will dictate their career path). We also make these decisions infrequently, meaning that we don’t have the experience to know what we’re doing or how to make the best choice. This type of framework that Thaler and Sunstein applied towards things like retirement and investing could be applied to what college students end up studying and pursuing.
There’s an important distinction to note that this is by no means implying that we should force students to major in certain things, but rather to nudge them (libertarian paternalism as Thaler and Sunstein coin it) in certain directions with subtle cues. If these nudges were in the directions where our society needs more employees (like computer science), there could be a drastic impact. The details of the nudges themselves could be sorted out, but an example of a nudge would be showing all college students within their first week or two in school how much money recent computer science graduates are making upon graduation, the percent of them being hired, or even the growth that the computer science major has had across the country over the past 5–10 years. This isn’t limiting choices in any way and students still have full autonomy to study what they would like, but these small nudges could push students in directions that would end up giving them employable skills that would benefit society.
Finding the skills to emphasize would require research into growing industries. I like the suggestion that McKinsey makes in a report called “Education to Employment.” They write, “Imagine what would happen if all educational institutions were as motivated to systematically gather and disseminate data regarding students after they graduated — job-placement rates and career trajectory five years out — as they are regarding students’ records before admissions. Young people would have a clear sense of what they could plausibly expect upon leaving a school or taking up a course of study, while education institutions would think more carefully about what they teach and how they connect their students to the job market.”
Being more forward thinking about what students are going to need in the future is going to be a crucial step towards making higher education more valuable by delivering better prepared students to solve complex problems in the world. There are companies like Uber that have teams specifically working on company strategy 5–10 years out, and I see no reason that universities shouldn’t be doing the same thing.
Conclusion
Overall, I’d say that I’m optimistic about the future of Higher Ed. There are many problems to be solved and it’s going to take very strong leaders at the top to solve those issues (many of which aren’t mentioned here). That being said, I truly believe that exposing more students to education will inspire and empower more strong leaders at the helms. If those leaders can be forward thinking about society’s future needs and implement that into college curriculums, students will be leaving school much more ready for our society.
While the current administration might make things rather difficult over the next (hopefully just) 4 years, the topic of education is getting hotter and hotter, and this election cycle will likely draw even more attention to it. That is good news because it means people will get excited about solving these problems and we’ll have competent people on the jobs.
For final words, there’s this video by Youtuber Prince EA about education that I think everyone should watch called “I Just Sued the School System.” It always gets me excited about the future of education and solving problems. My favorite line is “teachers should earn just as much as doctors because a doctor can do heart surgery and save the life of a kid, but a great teacher can reach the heart of that kid and allow him to truly live.”
That’s all I got. Thanks for reading :)
Year 1, article 2.
N.B.A
