Four ideas to widen access and improve learning.
For eight years I’ve been inviting entrepreneurs and other education innovators to pitch ideas to make higher ed better during the annual SXSW EDU conference in Austin, and each time, I think of these presenters as bellwethers for the challenges folks are seeing in the sector. This year held true to form, as the four contestants in our “Shark Tank: Edu Edition” last week brought forth ideas to broaden access, better engage students, and maybe — just maybe — help stave off the extinction of humanities majors.
After being sidelined by an injury in 2022, I was grateful to be back in the tank with fellow sharks Catharine (Cappy) Bond Hill, managing director of the nonprofit research consultancy Ithaka S+R, and Paul Freedman, an education entrepreneur and executive adviser at Guild Education.
Neither the judges nor the audience offered investment money — just advice and commentary, which per one contestant, was more like “cordial nibbles” than hard bites. What can I say? I guess deep down we’re softies for folks willing to put themselves out there for the cause.
Here are the pitches and reactions:
The idea: A model to help military veterans connect with higher education, presented by Jonathan (J.D.) Due, executive director of the Center for Military Transition at the College of William & Mary’s business school.
The pitch: Nearly 158,000 service members now leave the military every year. Building on William & Mary’s existing program, which helps ex-service members better understand their career and personal goals before they enroll in college, and connects them with a network of services and mentors, Due wants to expand to other institutions, especially in states like Florida, Texas, and Washington with military-heavy populations. The program supports veterans before enrolling at William & Mary, said Due, a 20-year Army veteran, but it will also help them make an “informed choice” about going elsewhere.
The reaction: No surprise that all the sharks liked this idea, which Hill praised for its potential to help veterans “match well” and avoid wasting their GI Bill benefits at colleges with low graduation rates. Our questions centered on the sustainability — and transferability — of the model, which is now largely supported by an alumna’s gift to William & Mary. Right now, said Hill, too many selective colleges don’t actively recruit veterans, but she suggested that by taking a page from programs like the Posse Foundation and QuestBridge, which primarily help colleges recruit low-income students, this effort could expand to more colleges and also generate some revenue. “Universities could pay you as an outsourced admissions office for the veterans,” she said. Freedman, meanwhile, cautioned that out-of-classroom support services wouldn’t be enough if faculty members themselves weren’t sufficiently attuned and empathetic to the needs and expectations of ex-military students. It’s important, he said, “to get the faculty enlisted in this mission.”
The idea: A tech tool for managing group assignments and deterring students from “free-riding,” presented by Chris Du, co-founder and chief executive of Ensightful.
The pitch: Born out of Du’s own frustration with classmates who weren’t carrying their weight on a group project, this project-management tool helps students pace their work and see others’ contributions, while also giving professors a view into how students are divvying up and completing their assignments (or not). Many students find grading of group projects unfair — just search for “group projects” on Reddit for a sampling of that sentiment, Du told the audience — and instructors have “very little insight” into the group dynamics on these assignments.
The reaction: I was (and remain) intrigued by this idea, not only because I’ve experienced the frustrations of group projects, but also because I hear often from educators about the importance of these teaching approaches in an era when teamwork is an increasingly valued workplace skill. So I welcome anything that can make group projects more ubiquitous and fairer. But Hill raised some doubts. By giving professors the ability to grade students on their individual efforts, she told Du, “you’ve destroyed some of the lessons about teamwork” and working collectively toward a collective end. “This could create incentives not to work well as a team,” she said.
The idea: A new model for community college, called Workshop U, that is built around experience-based courses, presented by Matthew Riggan, co-founder of The Workshop School.
The pitch: Having seen too many graduates of its Philadelphia experimental high school “slogging” through college experiences that seemed unconnected to their lives — and plenty of other “21 and drifting kids” as well — Riggan and his colleagues are aiming to create a college-level program of field-based courses and mentorship that prepares students for a life of “security, connection, and purpose.” Workshop U plans to start a small pilot program next year, in collaboration with accredited institutions, and try to expand to 500 students within five years.
The reaction: No arguments from us about employing more-engaging teaching practices. In fact, Hill wondered why the program seemed aimed only at low-income students rather than all students. (Riggan said he’s learned that designing programs for students with the greatest social and economic needs typically make them effective for all, but “the reverse does not work.”) With most or all its emphasis on skills like prototyping and teamwork, I wasn’t sure where more-traditional course content might fit in, and how that might affect students’ ability to transfer to a four-year college. Riggan acknowledged “some risks to that” in this model.
The idea: A “Humanities Plus” curricular model that integrates courses in applied computing into majors like English, history, and theology, presented by Travis Ross, an assistant professor of history at George Fox University, in Oregon.
The pitch: Proclaiming a liberal-arts education “the most powerful tool that we have for upward social mobility,” Ross developed this interdisciplinary approach to encourage George Fox students to continue enrolling in such courses while also equipping them with key skills in programming and data science. The exact format is, in Ross’s words, still a little “loosey goosey” (it could involve some courses from the computer-science department, some peer teaching by students, and perhaps some data and programming projects overseen by college administrators), but Ross said it’s received the go-ahead from George Fox leaders. If you get students to major in history or English, he said, “they’ll let you do just about anything.” He’s hoping other institutions adopt the model, too, even though, he noted, “It’s not a major. It’s not a minor. It’s not a certificate.”
The reaction: All the sharks appreciated that this model could, as Hill said, make both computer scientists and humanists stronger college graduates. And this humanities-plus idea is exactly the approach I’ve been hearing labor-market analysts praise for several years. But the many unanswered questions here left us uneasy. For me and Freedman, the absence of any credential associated with the “plus” skills seemed a lost opportunity for students to use the program as a signal to potential employers. And as Freedman noted, the central role Ross is playing on his campus is both a tribute to his skills as an entrepreneurial faculty member, but also a weakness. Ross knew the ropes well enough to get the idea to the launch pad, said Freedman, who also has been a consultant to colleges, but without a clear template for others to follow, it could be “really hard to move it from institution to institution.”
Want to learn more? Check out the whole session here. And if you’re curious about the conversation from our other session, on “How Diverse Students Access and Thrive in College,” featuring leaders from the City Colleges of Chicago, One Million Degrees, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, you can find a recording of that here.
Overheard at SXSW EDU
Away from our pitchfest, I was struck by other comments I heard at the conference. I didn’t buy them all, but here is some of what made me think.
- In a session on “Expanding Pathways in Postsecondary Education,” Julie Lammers, senior vice president for advocacy and corporate social responsibility at American Student Assistance, noted the ways that language — not just policy — sends signals about the value of programs. When “everything is an alternative to college,” she said, that gives other offerings an air of being less worthwhile. Likewise, she argued, because short-term education programs aren’t eligible for Pell Grants, that too colors the perception of their quality. (Of course, concerns about how to ensure such quality are at the core of the current debate over whether to extend the grants to such programs.)
- Because funders these days seem enamored of projects that “scale,” I appreciated another moment in that same session when a speaker highlighted the merits of “small, inefficient” programs, too. There’s no silver bullet, said Hudson Baird, co-founder and executive director of an Austin-based student-coaching program called PelotonU, so support is vital for grass-roots programs designed to meet various communities’ particular needs. (I’ve known Baird since he was a contestant in our second “Shark Tank” in 2016)
- During a live taping of an episode of Jeff Young’s EdSurge podcast on “Lessons from This ‘Golden Age’ of Learning Science,” Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University, in Michigan, suggested that every school of education should have a neuroscience division. The field is so integral to learning, she said, that “all teachers should have some understanding of that.”
Was it really a “black swan” moment?
Three years ago this week, I wrote a newsletter on the unfolding “black swan” moment for higher ed, prompted by the spread of a novel coronavirus soon to be known as Covid-19. My predictions weren’t all spot on, but some (especially around online ed and online services) have held up. Did yours? And pulling back the lens a bit: Will history see this pandemic as an inflection point for higher ed? Or will other factors (political interference, for one) ultimately be seen as more of a factor? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Write me, here.
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, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. If you want to follow me on Twitter (yeah, for now at least, I’m still there), @GoldieStandard is my handle.
