After the host announced that student debt in the U.S. topped $1 trillion, columnist Nicholas Kristof told CNN this morning that "Tertiary education in the U.S. is broken."
Sal Khan explained how the old formula -- get a degree, get a good job, have a good life -- is breaking down. More people are attempting degree programs but many of them didn't receive adequate preparation in high school. They pay more for a degree and are now competing in a stagnant job market.
The host showed a chart that suggested we're not doing any better than replicating social class in America -- if you're family makes more money you get a better education. Sal's Khan Academy is an attempt to break that cycle by building the specific building blocks of college readiness with algebra help (and a lot more) when and where students need it.
To dramatically increase the percentage of the U.S. population holding a degree or meaningful certificate, preparation is clearly the most important issue. But as Kristof pointed out, the post-secondary system is broken: it's very expensive, incentives for students and institutions are misaligned (if not perverse), and for the most part it is not well connected to the needs of the job market (as indicated by 3 million unfilled skilled jobs).
As noted during a brainstorming session on this topic yesterday, this is a very complicated set of problems combining personal behavior, institutional practices, and state and government policy.
I appreciate Texas Gov. Perry's provocative challenge to leaders in his state to invent a $10,000 bachelor's degree program. That sort of goal clarity requires breakthrough thinking. The solution set will likely require new learning technology, new consumer behaviors, and new incentives focused on speed, quality, and completion.
It's interesting to note that the lower the price, the closer you get to do-it-yourself model and the more important student choices and behavior becomes. As David Brooks pointed out this week, individual behavior is a mixture of the rational (Moneyball) and intuitive (Blink).
Post-secondary choices -- perhaps the most consequential and expensive decision in a young persons life -- are made with little data and are a complicated function of tangible variables like location, entrance requirements, cost, and reputation, but also a set of intangible variables including social pressures, self-esteem, felt need, and life circumstances. Post enrollment behaviors are also a complicated mixture of motivation, engagement, convenience, perceived benefit, and family influences.
About ten years ago we passed an important threshold in human history where anyone with a broadband connection can learn almost anything almost anywhere. So why isn't everyone learning everything? New tools that organize knowledge and make learning easier and more engaging are gaining traction and beginning to impact formal education -- Khan Academy being the most notable example.
In DIY U, Anya Kamenetz, outlined the rise of informal and nontraditional post-secondary education. She, like Kristof, makes a compelling case that tertiary education is broken but that emerging alternatives are promising.
Given the complexity of boosting college completion rates, change efforts attacking the problem need to be rather comprehensive. They may include:
1. Market signaling: rewarding some promising models and ideas.
2. Support for R&D networks: a mixture of new and existing organizations that that agree to pilot low cost degree/certificate programs
3. An advocacy effort (the post-secondary equivalent of DigitalLearningNow.com) that encourages funding based on speed, quality, and completion.
4. Demand pull: organizing groups of employers to recognize new certificate/badge programs.
We need more college graduates particularly in science, math and engineering. We need to make degrees and certificates much more affordable. Achieving this important goal will require support for bottoms up and top down change and the work of social, tech and policy entrepreneurs. It's time to push.
Follow Tom Vander Ark on Twitter: www.twitter.com/tvanderark
Lens of a Parent:
I have two teenagers and we are talking about their post-secondary goals: We are researching colleges and wow, the price of tuition and room and board is unbelievable, just looking at some state schools is a minimum of $26,000 a year, multiply that by four and we come to a whopping figure of $104,000. And that is one child! I started a college fund for my kids when they were infants, but have not come close to saving this much due to the market adjustments we have experienced in the last 15 years. So now what? Loans, refinance the house? It is frustrating.
Lens of an Educator:
I understand that the model of HS, College, Diploma, Job is not the same as it was when I entered the work force 20 years ago. How can we, as educators, look at our students and say "You have to go to college" when seeing the RoI decreasing.
How can we ever get out of this hole and provide assurance that our future leaders can actually have an opportunity to be leaders?
You don't need to post this.
Recognize that and you are half-way to understanding why the education system is failing.
Education used to be a means toward the advancement of society, thought, science and culture.
All that I am seeing in this article is it as a means toward the advancement of the individual’s bankroll.
We are a culture that celebrates mediocrity and ignorance.
We are a culture that eschews and ridicules intellect.
Maybe the true problem is somewhere therein.
Now that is a really funny sentence. Talking about college in relation to technology and consumer behavior.
How intelligent can college educated people be if they can't figure out planned obsolescence is going on in cars 42 years after the Moon landing when we have computers everywhere?
As long as "Profit" rules America in Education and Healthcare America will continue to collapse. Neither of these is sustainable for a Country.
The old formula of "get a degree, get a good job, have a good life" is failing because in a nation of warehouses, it does not require a degree to drive a fork lift. We don't manufacture much of anything anymore. Now, it's "get a degree, go into debt, take any kind of job you can find to pay off your student loans, good luck with your life."
The point being that there is no manufacturing environment to support engineering and science degrees. Those jobs have gone to where the manufacturing is being done--and it's not in the US. I'm in favor of higher education for a better job, but it seems to me that in the current job market, students are financing the higher education industry by going deep into debt in exchange for a worthless piece of paper.
Then these same students get to college and fail out.
I'm not surprised in the least little bit with our educational system or how we've slipped in the rankings. I've been watching it happen up close and personal for the past 6 years, and I promise, if the kids that I work with are any indication, things are only going to get worse.
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/quizzes/8thgrade_test.cfm
This should open your opaque eyes to what extent U.S. educational standards have truly been "dumbed-down"
So, as I see it: too many of our "modern" students cannot read for comprehension, write with pen/pencil to paper, understand basic math, speak a foreign language, locate states of the U.S. on a map, believe cheating on tests is OK, hold sports and entertainment in higher esteem than the teachers who are trying to prepare them for life after K-12 ...
To add lifelong insult to immediate injure, we continue to LIE to them by preaching that a college education is the path to financial success IGNORING the non-existant training for the trades.
You know: pipe-fitting, plumbing, electricians, heavy equipment operations.
Check out the cleverly designed names attached to insane degree programs offered in some of our colleges that lead to no jobs and you get a clear picture of the challenges our children (and their parents) face.