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In today’s edition: Building a global higher ed movement; the future of the PhD; and remember all those degreeless hires (well, never mind).
🚨Calling all parents/guardians of teenagers/young adults!
For my next book, I’m conducting an anonymous survey about what factors influence college choices, how much you’re really willing to pay for prestige, and what you’re willing to compromise on if you’re given substantial aid.
I’d be so grateful if you can give 10 minutes of your time to take the survey and pass it along to friends. I created it with the help of a researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
After you close out of the survey, it gives you an option to complete a separate form if you’re willing to share your story, either anonymously or with your name attached.
Thank you for your help and I look forward to sharing the results in the new book.
🔨 ⚙️ 🔧 The “Next Office Hour” on Tuesday, March 19 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT will focus on keeping up with a job market that is expanding and contracting at an alarming rate. Joining me in the discussion will be:
Kathleen Plinske, president of Valencia College, who will talk about Valencia’s Accelerated Skills Training program, which has more than 1,000+ grads a year in everything from the 10-week Electronic Board Assembly program to the 22-week Robotics & Semiconductor Technician program.
Luis Felipe Rincon, co-founder and chief strategy officer, Acadeum, to discuss how their online course sharing marketplace solves institutions’ challenges in adding industry-recognized training alongside degree programs.
Johnese Harris, a working learner from Bellevue University
Esther Stine, Senior Director, Organizational Learning & Development, Workday, who will discuss what employers need.
Plus, I’ll have separate discussions with:
Paul LeBlanc, the outgoing president of Southern New Hampshire University about his effort with George Siemens about the future of AI in higher ed.
Maria Flynn, president of Jobs for the Future (JFF), which is sponsoring this Next Office Hour.
Late last week, I returned from the IFC/World Bank Global Education Conference, which brought together 400 government leaders, business executives, and university officials from around the world.
After months of talking with families, high school counselors, and admissions deans about the craziness of the U.S. admissions system right now, being in Mexico City was a change of pace in terms of the higher ed issues that are most on the minds of global leaders. Hint: test optional, merit aid, and getting into a top-20 U.S. university were not among them.
What is a worry everywhere (including the U.S.) is the expectation gap between those who already have a college degree and those in the younger generation who want one. As you can see in the graphic below, which I showed in my keynote speech on Day 2, in every industrialized country the capacity of the education system lags what’s needed.
Of course, we’ve been here before. The development of higher ed as a natural resource worldwide is one of the greatest success stories of the 20th century: In 1900, only 1 of every 100 young people enrolled in universities; by 2000, it was 1 in 5. A similar movement is going to be needed again–in this century.
A few takeaways from the sessions, dinner conversations, and my keynote plus the panel discussion I moderated last week:
🏗️ Onshoring could be slowed by lack of skills. Mexico, in particular, but also large parts of Latin America (as well as the U.S.) stand to benefit from manufacturing and the shift in the supply-chain from China after Covid. But the discussion last week was about the reality of a workforce that lacks critical skills–both basic and advanced–and how it might take too long for the education system to play catch up.
💡 Innovation, including partnerships. Arizona State University president Michael Crow gave the opening keynote about the need for higher ed to scale to meet the challenges of educating the workforce at all levels, as well as the need for institutions to look up and out and partner with each other, with private industry, and with governments. Indeed, in the panel that I moderated afterwards, Sheela Ram, vice-chancellor of Botho University in Botswana, made the point that economies in many parts of the emerging world are too small not to partner to propel their workforces.
⏰ Optionality. In my keynote, I pointed out that the academic calendar and credit hour in higher ed are like “shelf space” on the old television schedule that has been upended by streaming. In much the same way, we need similar optionality to meet the challenges of higher ed right now: in how students access learning (in-person, hybrid, online) to credentials (certificates, degrees) to how those experiences stack together for lifelong learning.
🏫 Culture in institutions. The common thread throughout the conference was how the culture of institutions (both universities and governments) needs to change so our structures and practices can evolve. Too many people in higher ed right now are employing a scarcity mindset and seeing every change as a zero-sum game. If you’re not happy about the present, as many attendees suggested you’re not going to be excited about the future.
Most of my work is centered around U.S. higher ed, so I welcome the opportunity to leave the States on occasion to try to understand what’s happening elsewhere.
🌎 And if you have an interest in global higher ed, be sure to check out Karin Fischer’s newsletter, Latitudes, which is my go-to resource on the topic. You can sign up here.
The Future of the Professoriate
Of the 21,000 Ph.D. recipients in 2022 who accepted jobs, only 33% said they were going to work at a college or university. Half said they were going into industry, according to the Survey of Earned Doctorates. Fifty percent is the same proportion, who as recently as 1992, said they were going into academia.
Why it matters: Everyone who wants to go to college will likely be at some point taught by someone with a Ph.D.
Who teaches and does research on our campuses is of critical importance to anyone who is shelling out tens of thousands of dollars a year for their education.
Second, as Cassuto said, changes at the graduate level tend to filter down to the undergrad level and eventually to K-12. So what happens to graduate schools matters.
Background: Our view of the Ph.D. as the ticket to an academic job is firmly planted in the 1960s, when as Casuto told us, there were more openings for professors in that decade than there were in any of the years leading up to that–combined.
“It’s taken a long time to recover from that,” Cassuto said. “Now at least we are ready to admit that that wasn’t the norm, that was the anomaly.”
–Graduate school in general, he said, is in the “ICU” and in need of some “pretty urgent attention.” He outlined a three-point plan to us to fix graduate education:
Make it more “student-centered,” so that it’s not just about helping the professor write their next book or get the next grant for their lab.
Make it more “career diverse,” so that students know the odds of academic jobs coming in and are better prepared for jobs outside of academia.
Make it more “public-facing,” so that the work of graduate schools matters more in local communities.
🎧 Give the whole episode a listen because Cassuto is an entertaining guest who has specific ideas for fixing this crisis. And then stay to listen to how Michael and I would address the crisis in graduate education.
SUPPLEMENTS
🎢 The Simplified FAFSA’s Complicated Rollout. The updated Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) was a lesson in bipartisanship in an era when there is so little. That was until last fall when the story of the FAFSA became more about the inability of the government to get it in the hands of students, and now the data into the hands of colleges. On the newest episode of Future U., we talked with a former senior aide on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, who gave us the backstory of the legislation, and then were joined by the president of Colorado Mesa University, which responded in an unusual way to the FAFSA’s rocky rollout.
One of my favorite parts: where the former Senate aide, Andrew LaCasse, tells us that one of the original proposals was for a FAFSA with two questions.
“You would’ve thought that they had introduced a bill that eliminated the Higher Education Act because we had all of the DC intelligentsia trade groups coming and saying, ‘It can’t can’t be done. You guys are bananas. This is crazy,'”LaCasse told us. “Look, we knew it was never going to be two questions…but instead of starting from 108 questions and whittling it down, let’s start from two and then you tell me what you want to add. And I think that was a successful strategy.”
✏️ Another University Goes Back to Testing. The University of Texas at Austin became the latest institution to go back to requiring tests for admissions. “Analysis of the University’s own data…revealed that on average, students who submitted standardized scores performed significantly better on those exams and in their first semester of college, relative to those who did not take the test or chose not to have their scores considered as part of a holistic review,” the university said in a statement.
Of first-year students enrolled in 2023, those who opted in to supplying a test score were estimated to be 55% less likely to have a first semester college GPA of less than 2.0, all else equal.
