I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what’s on my mind this week:
Students need new skills for our changing economy. Are companies starting to get it?
Conventional wisdom says higher-education enrollments fall off in a strong economy, particularly among older students. When jobs are plentiful, the logic goes, many people would rather just get the job than go to school to skill up for a theoretical job.
But when companies like Walmart, FedEx, and Disney offer free tuition to their lower-wage employees, as each has recently done, I begin to wonder: Is it time to rethink the conventional wisdom? Maybe at this stage of our economic development, the combination of employers’ and employees’ needs for a better-educated work force has started to change that dynamic and made education a higher priority even in an era of high employment. Or will those gestures of corporate largess — and perhaps self-interest — fade away once the next downturn hits? Can colleges count on companies as reliable pipelines?
Walmart’s announcement, in May, was national news. Its program is open to all 1.4 million of its employees, although the company estimated about 68,000 would take up the offer in the first five years. (Technically, it’s not free; students are required to pay the equivalent of $1 a day in tuition.)
Disney’s “Aspire” program, announced last week, is specially designed for the 80,000-plus hourly-wage earners who work at its studio, theme parks, and stores. Like the Walmart program, the company is paying the costs upfront — averting a cost barrier that often deters lower-income people from taking advantage of tuition programs — and the program will be coordinated through a company called Guild Education, which provides coaching services to students. Disney’s program offers greater flexibility to students in choosing an institution and degree program.
But only colleges that work with Guild can get in on the enrollment action, and they forgo a share of the tuition revenue as part of the bargain.
The FedEx arrangement, with the University of Memphis, is designed initially for the 11,000 or so employees who work at the company’s nearby World Hub, but may soon expand to its smaller hubs in Indianapolis and Oakland, Calif. After just two weeks, the university has already received 1,100 inquiries. The university’s online program now enrolls just under 3,000. “We feel like we’re into a good thing here,” Memphis’s Richard Irwin told me. He’s vice provost for academic innovation and support services and helped forge the “Learning Inspired by FedEx” program.
FedEx, Irwin said, was interested in the education program as an employee-retention tool that could not only reduce turnover but also help prepare entry-level employees for promotions. FedEx was also looking for an educational partner that would provide a program to help students who might not otherwise qualify for admission, deal with their anxieties about going to college, and not be too expensive for the company.
With its Finish Line program, based on open-source courses and other services designed to help adult students complete college affordably, Memphis had some of those pieces in place already. It has also creating a special Prep Academy designed for students who lack a high-school diploma. Memphis plans to hire its own student coaches for the program too. “We wanted to keep it local,” Irwin told me.
Some will argue that deals like these are signs that companies are starting to “get it” — that they recognize that, in our changing economy, it is in their own best interest to provide better educational benefits to employees so those workers can better cope with what’s coming.
In fact, that is exactly the argument I heard this summer as one reason the giant worldwide staffing company Adecco decided to buy General Assembly, a digital-skills training company, for $412 million. “Both of us want to see a world where companies are meaningfully investing in the work force,” General Assembly’s founder, Jake Schwartz, told an audience of D.C. journalists and policy wonks. And Adecco was betting that they would.
I don’t entirely buy that argument, especially after seeing how so many big companies used the proceeds of their big federal tax cut to buy back their stock — a common tactic to jack up stock prices — rather than announce major new investments in research and training. But I do think colleges — even those that don’t happen to have the likes of a FedEx in their backyard — would be wise to engage more vigorously with employers now, while the economy is strong and the employers could use their help.
If they don’t, companies like General Assembly will be more than willing to pick up the slack.
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But are colleges already behind the eight ball?
Maybe so, at least according to Ryan Craig, an investor whose latest book, A New U, argues that alternative education models — including many his firm invests in — provide a better path to employability.
“A decade from now, the fact that young people were encouraged to load up on debt just as they were starting their careers will seem bizarre and anachronistic — a practice that benefited providers of higher education more than the Millennials they aimed to serve,” he writes in the book.
I interviewed Craig last week. You can read that here.
Book report
A few weeks back, inspired by an academic who told me he frequently recommends The 100-Year Life to colleagues, I asked for your suggestions on other non-higher-ed books that might provoke or inspire our thinking about the future of higher ed. I wish I had more to report back, but I’ll be honest. The response wasn’t overwhelming. Maybe you’re all preoccupied by your own summer reading of that great beach book.
Among those who did come through was Anthony D’Angelo, whose suggestions included White Working Class, by Joan C. Williams, for its descriptions of their circumstances and “how we can engage them with grace, dignity, and respect.”
He also suggested BOLD, by Peter Diamandis, which he called “a mental map mind blow for both personal and enterprise success in the 21st century.” (D’Angelo, who founded Collegiate Empowerment, an organization that runs seminars for higher-education administrators, said to take note of the book’s Six D’s Framework: Digitize, Deceptive, Dislocation, Dematerialize, Demonetize, Democratize. “This book is a roadmap for our future.”)
Rovy Branon, whose book recommendation started this all, also weighed in with a suggestion: The Content Trap, by Bharat Anand. His reason: “Universities tend to focus on ‘what’ we teach, but our content is not necessarily what distinguishes us. Connectivity and other aspects of the experience may be more important, as companies are discovering when they go digital.”
Quote of the week
“A true evidence-based approach to policy making would do more than cite a few phrases from a scholarly article. It would carefully review evidence about the causes and costs of students enrolling in institutions and programs that fail large shares of their students. It would design policies that would ameliorate these problems, strengthening existing policies and making them more effective rather than erasing years of hard-won progress.”
—Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute, in a blog post assailing the U.S. Department of Education and its secretary, Betsy DeVos, for misrepresenting her research in proposals to undo the gainful-employment regulation
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues or sign up to receive your own copy, you can do so here.
