Having recently written two in-depth reports — “The Adult Student” and “Career-Ready Education” — I know that some colleges are already deeply engaged in such challenges, and those just getting started have plenty of good advice upon which to draw. But many still are on the sidelines.
With an eye toward the economic changes ahead, the McKinsey authors describe the range of decisions that employers will be making about investments in training and retraining, and they note that “this period of transition could be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform many ‘dead end’ jobs into more interesting and rewarding work.” Higher education needs to find its way into as many of those conversations as possible.
All of which brings me back to that first map. I find myself imagining an overlay that shows the locations of colleges across the country. Many of the gray areas on the McKinsey map would be covered by dots, representing many of the same small, private and regional public institutions now facing enrollment and financial challenges. You get my drift here, right? The regions of the country likely to face the biggest economic challenges in the next decade because of automation are also the places filled with established educational organizations that may need a new agenda. Talk about an opportunity.
Read these books.
For the panel I moderated last month at Columbia University (part of a conference that also had “the future of work” in its title) I received several great suggestions from newsletter readers for questions to ask my panelists on colleges’ relevance for “a work force in flux.” In return, I asked each panelist to suggest a book that might be useful to readers on that topic, or the future of higher education in general. Here’s what I got.
From Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education: Artificial Intelligence in Education, a new book from the Center for Curriculum Redesign. Dede said he recommends it because the influence of AI should change the goals of education: “Since the division of labor is changing, we need to change the curriculum in powerful ways.”
From Kelly Otter, dean of Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies: Robot-Proof, by Joseph Aoun, although she doesn’t buy all of his predictions for the future. “I do not look at it as a road map,” Otter said. “Read it with a grain of salt.”
From Chris Mayer, associate dean for strategy and initiatives and an associate professor of philosophy at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point: The Fuzzy and the Techie, by Scott Hartley. The book focuses on the technology sector but shows how the people with “human skills” — the fuzzies — “actually do quite well in the tech world.”
To those I’ll add one of my own: The just-published How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World, by Neil Irwin. (Irwin, a New York Times reporter, was a fellow moderator at the conference.) This book, copies of which I’ve already given to two of my early-in-their-career nephews, is a smart look at how to create a successful career in a world that has evolved to favor large, global, digitally advanced companies. Through interviews, Irwin makes the case for a “winding career path,” showing how people who take on a variety of experiences and roles become the “glue people” best positioned to help connect silos to one another and to help their organizations advance.
Some updates.
A couple of months ago, I told you I’d be following along (and writing) as a consulting firm spends two years advising a college on a turnaround strategy. More than a dozen colleges applied for this Project Capstone opportunity, which will be provided by Entangled Solutions. Entangled’s founder, Paul Freedman, tells me that the applicants include an eclectic mix — public and private, large and small, and rural and urban, including an HBCU and a college “with an entirely unique mission.” Entangled will narrow the field, and I plan to observe this summer as the company and its specially chosen advisory board make the final choice.
About a year ago, I described a project by the Education Design Lab to test whether employers really care about the value of “badges” that colleges might use to help students define and communicate skills. Now that work — which is designed especially for students who may not have all the networks of connections that students at more selective colleges can more easily acquire — is expanding. On Wednesday the design lab will announce plans to further develop the badges in three regions of the country, working with as many as two dozen employers, including Enterprise and the Jaynes Corporation. Three of its original academic partners on the project — Central New Mexico Community College, San Jose State University, and the University of Maine — will continue with it as well.
The lab will also release a paper about some of what it has learned so far, including the finding that using the word “badges” isn’t such a great idea. “Learners,” the paper notes, “are more inclined to participate in a ‘micro-credentialing program’ as opposed to a ‘badging program.’”
Got a tip you’d like to share, or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com.
