☕️ Good Morning! Thanks for reading Next.If someone forwarded this to you, get your own copy by signing up for free here.
In today’s issue: The ‘College or Bust’ movement might be going bust; the college that educates more schoolteachers than any other might surprise you; and the future of the dorm RA.
🙏 Thank you to everyone who reached out about being a beta reader for my forthcoming book. The responses were overwhelming, so I can’t say yes to everyone. I already reached out to those who were chosen. For everyone else, I’ll be sharing previews and how you can pre-order the book in early 2025.
I highly recommend you order this book today if you’re thinking about switching jobs, or if you advise young adults on their careers–whether they’re just starting out or already in their first job.
EVENT
🖥️ On the December edition of the “Next Office Hour,” I’ll be joined by Dan Porterfield, CEO of the Aspen Institute and author of Mindset Matters: The Power of College to Activate Lifelong Growth. Dan is also former president of Frankin & Marshall College and a vice president and faculty member at Georgetown University.
We’ll discuss real-world examples of how different mindsets shape student outcomes and future opportunities.
Wednesday, December 4, at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT
👉 Register now for the free, live discussion or to get an on-demand recording afterwards (Supported by the Gates Foundation)
THE LEAD
Yesterday, the New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy photo essay (gift article) about the Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA) county where I was born and raised, Luzerne County.
The piece illustrated how the county – where my grandparents worked for the coal mining companies and dress factories that powered the economy there in the early 20th century, and thus, was a union and Democratic-stronghold for decades – had moved even further right since the 2020 presidential election.
This is a county that as late as 2012, voted for a Democrat for president. President Obama won there by 5 points. In 2016, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) profiled the county days after the election because its swing to Trump was the “state’s most dramatic,” accounting for 40% of Trump’s winning margin in Pennsylvania that year.
In the two weeks since the General Election, there have been plenty of hot takes about why the electorate moved right, and why Trump won the Electoral College and the popular vote this year.
Election results are never as simple as the media pundits make them out to be. But one thing seems to be clear, at least since 2016: the diploma divide. While gender, race, ethnicity, age continue to drive voter behavior, the deepest division in the last three election cycles was whether you had a college degree or not.
In the last decade, Luzerne County has become the go-to place for national journalists to stake out in election years, perhaps because it’s only a few hours from New York City. I always find it ironic when I see these pieces because all of them are written or produced by journalists who never spent more than a waking moment in a place like Wilkes-Barre.
As David Brooks wrote in a compelling cover story in the newest issue of The Atlantic (subscription required), “journalism is a profession reserved almost exclusively for college grads, especially elite ones.” We know that most Ivy-plus grads come from the wealthiest families, and according to this new analysis from the Harvard Crimson, “over the past 15 years, 1 in 11 students at Harvard have come from just 21 high schools” (emphasis added).
My friend Ryan Craig, who has authored several books on new college models and alternatives to traditional higher ed, asked me last week if I was surprised about the election results. I described to Ryan my trips back to NEPA this past summer to visit family. Where I grew up is on the west side of the Susquehanna River, across from the county seat of Wilkes-Barre. Nine of these small boroughs made up the district where I went to elementary, middle, and high school, and graduated from in 1991. As I drove the streets, I recalled what used to be in the shuttered storefronts, the people I used to know who took great care of the clapboard houses, some of which were now showing their age.
What happened?
When I think of my classmates from the Class of 1991, the kids I went to church with or those who lived nearby, their parents worked in jobs that didn’t require a college degree: manufacturing, banks, small businesses.
Then I remembered the kid in middle school whose uncle lost his job when the pencil maker Eberhard Faber closed its factory and moved to Mexico.
Throughout the following decades, factories closed and small businesses that supported them followed. They were replaced by low-wage jobs in warehouses and big-box stores. It’s a story that played out in communities across the U.S.
As a result, the message to many in my hometown and other communities was college or bust.
And while college enrollment grew in the early 2000s, that was partly the result of a baby boom twenty years earlier. The percentage of students going right on to college from high school did grow slightly from 62% in 2001 to 68% in 2011, but it has since dropped back down to the low sixties.
While I was lucky enough to go right on to college from high school, plenty of my classmates didn’t. Given my grandparents didn’t have the opportunity to go to college and my mother didn’t either, I wasn’t necessarily predestined to get a degree, which feels strange to think about now considering what I cover.
When I went off to college there were still jobs in every profession, including my intended career of journalism, that didn’t require a college degree. But over the last thirty years, employers increasingly required college degrees for positions that did not traditionally require higher education.
There’s been a movement to tear this “paper ceiling” and reduce the number of jobs requiring a college degree. In fact, Vice President Harris in a campaign stop to Wilkes-Barre in the last weeks of the campaign promised to nix unnecessary degree requirements.
Several states including Pennsylvania, Utah, and Maryland have eliminated degree requirements for thousands of jobs, as have many Fortune 500 companies. But advertising a job without a college degree is one thing; hiring someone for that job is another. Data from LinkedIn (below) show the uptick in advertising jobs without a degree, but not so much in hiring without one.
Simply doing away with degree requirements isn’t the right answer.
It’s not going to suddenly give people in broad swaths of the country the skills they need to do jobs.
What we should do is understand why we have the degree requirements in the first place. Often employers use the degree as a signal of discipline, rather than a proxy of the skills actually learned in college.
If we really understood the skills that one needs to start a particular job, we could turn more career paths into apprenticeships. Right now, we mostly see apprenticeships as a way into the skilled trades. Yet in many other countries, apprenticeships are also an entry point into jobs as diverse as marketing and nursing.
Instead of doing away with degree requirements, we should instead formalize pathways that already exist, where young adults start work and use employer-provided education benefits to complete their degree alongside their job.
Ryan Craig makes the point in his new book that entry-level jobs and entry-level skills will be replaced by AI. That means employers will expect their young hires to do “second-level work” out of college, which he maintains you can’t do without experience that comes from an apprenticeship or a job with education on the side.
Whatever happens, a political party that builds a coalition around the college degree will face losses for a very long time: Voters without a bachelor’s degree outnumber those with one in the electorate by 57% to 43%.
A New Working Learner
Not only is the percentage of students going right on to college from high school fallen in the last six years, but how they’re consuming higher ed is also shifting.
🚨 The latest numbers from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center show that dual enrollment (high school + college), certificates, and community colleges are all having their moment now compared to traditional four-year colleges.
Take Western Governors University (WGU), as an example. When it was started in the late 1990s, WGU was seen as serving working adults. Today, the non-profit, online, competency-based university, which operates in all 50 states, is seeing some of its biggest growth among younger learners.
🎓 Pre-pandemic under 24 population at WGU: 6,000 students or 5% of enrollment.
📈 Today: 30,000 or 18% of enrollment.
—WGU has gone from the size of the undergrad population at a small private like Georgetown to that of a flagship like the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota, or the University of Maryland.
As Scott Pulsipher, the president of Western Governors University, told us when we took the Future U. podcast on the road, the new definition of the university’s student is a “working learner.”
WGU doesn’t really have a campus, so we took Future U. to their School of Education Summit in Orlando, where 1,000+ of their faculty and advisors gathered.
Diving into the numbers: WGU educates more American teachers than any other college. Five percent of all bachelor’s degrees in education now come from WGU, some 5,000 a year.
At the same time, residential schools of education—including those that started as Normal Schools and Teachers Colleges last century—have been shrinking, some by 20% or more in recent years. WGU ended last year with 12% growth in its education programs.
Post-pandemic, when education might have changed more than any other sector of society, WGU is rethinking how it educates teachers, according to Stacey Ludwig Johnson, WGU’s dean of the school of education.
This all comes at a critical moment for teaching in the U.S. According to data compiled byteachershortage.org, there are an estimated 55,289 teaching vacancies in the U.S. alone.
🎧 Or give a listen, and while you’re at it, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
SUPPLEMENTS
AI as Transformation, Not a Tool. One takeaway from being at the Educause conference a few weeks ago, and listening in on some of the sessions about AI, is that higher ed sees AI as either an efficiency tool or a threat to be addressed, but not for the potential of transformation.
It’s like if we saw the internet in the ’90s as a tool for email (tool) but not for online education (transformation).
If leaders thought of AI less as another piece of software and more as a strategy and approach to the future, higher ed could use AI to transform itself, as I wrote in this brief, “Navigating Change,” from a keynote I gave at Element451’s conference in the summer. (Element451)
Risk Factor: Number of Athletes. I’ll write more about this in my new book, but one of the biggest warning signs of a college about to fail is the percentage of athletes on campus. The “line of demarcation” for small schools might be 44%, Steve Dittmore wrote in his Substack newsletter. “Of the seven schools that announced closures last year, all but one (College of St. Rose) were at or exceeded the 44 percent line of demarcation. All six of the schools with fewer than 1,000 undergraduates met the threshold,” Dittmore wrote. (Glory Days)
The Future of the RA? The presence of resident assistants has long been part of the American collegiate experience. But now RAs are facing increased challenges due to expanded responsibilities and insufficient support. Many RAs report being overworked, undercompensated, and lacking adequate training for complex situations, leading to burnout and mental health concerns. (Esquire)
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