The automobile industry has come a long way. Higher education can innovate, too.
The current demand for education and training is unprecedented. But traditional higher education offerings, designed to prepare students for their first opportunity, don’t fit the size and shape of the demand we are seeing, which is largely a demand to prepare for the next opportunity. For the vast majority of the 50 million Americans who have filed initial claims for unemployment, spending four years on a bachelor’s degree is not a viable solution.
As the economy recovers, the jobs that will be created will be different than those that have been lost. Workers need tools to help them adapt to the post-Covid-19 economy. Workers themselves know this, and over a third have consistently reported during the pandemic that they expect they would need to retrain in order to find a new job. Progressing against our circumstances is the essence of the human journey–and now, more than ever, it is a national project. Here are three innovations we need in order to help workers adapt in a tumultuous economy:
Higher Education Needs to Embrace Workforce Alignment
The 1950s and 1960s were the era of the big car, buoyed by economic expansion and growing consumer demand, the suburbanization of America, and the building of the interstate system. The competitive trajectory was about horsepower: automakers competed to make bigger cars with more power. U.S. automakers cast a skeptical glance at the low end of the car market, occupied first by the Volkswagen Beetle and then by a range of Japanese models.
These cars were tiny and fuel efficient, but they made no sense for U.S. carmakers; despite occupying a growing share of the market, these cars were far less profitable than the larger, iconic models of the midcentury. But America’s appetite for small cars grew steadily, and then exploded in the 1970s, as the oil crisis wiped out demand for big cars and inspired federal mandates around fuel efficiency. U.S. carmakers weren’t prepared: the success of their business models had blinded them to underlying changes in demand.
Higher education finds itself in a similar position. Demand has been shifting since well before the pandemic—employer satisfaction with college graduate job readiness has been low, nontraditional providers have proliferated, and the return on investment of a college degree has been falling. But the economic displacement around Covid-19 creates a critical need for higher education to adapt to workforce needs: we need to design our programs to prepare students for the jobs that exist today. It is impossible to serve students well without seeing employers as a core customer of higher education.
Higher Education Needs to Modularize to Reflect the Needs of Lifelong Learning
High-quality, workforce-aligned credentials can help workers reskill for available jobs. Higher education should use its expertise in teaching and learning to address workers’ upskilling needs and help individuals prepare not just for the first career opportunity, but for the next opportunity.
The Ad Council recently released a new campaign, Find Something New, to help job seekers identify education and training programs and new career options. Many of the educational opportunities highlighted are provided by emerging players—the VWs and Toyotas—not traditional higher education institutions. But there is no reason that this should be the case.
As employers increasingly focus on talent with the skills necessary to drive their enterprises, demand for skills-based, lifelong learning will follow. Higher education should modularize its curriculum into microcredentials that are directly relevant to the emerging jobs and workforce, while being transferable and stackable into the next credential, including degrees. This allows learners to build the skills they need for their next opportunity, without sacrificing longer-term momentum.
Policymakers Must to Prioritize Funding Based on What Drives Value for Learners
Anthony Carnevale at Georgetown’s Center for Education and Work has observed that we chronically underfund upskilling and reskilling needs, and prioritize traditional degree programs almost exclusively, spending $500 billion annually on higher education and only $8 billion a year on workforce training. Higher education matters—especially to me, I’m a university president. But just as higher education should recognize that demand is shifting, policymakers should too. The future of learning is lifelong, and increasingly bite-sized so as to be accessible and relevant to where tens of millions of Americans are.
We should measure educational experiences by the value they create for students—not by inputs like credit hours. We need to broaden our approach to financial aid, supporting students in the educational experiences that propel them toward their next opportunity, even if those experiences do not fit the mold of a traditional academic program. And we need policymakers to actively drive the digital infrastructure needed for the future of learning, like student-owned records of learning that can articulate between academic institutions and the workforce.
Employers Recognize the World is Changing
The Find Something New campaign was developed by the Ad Council under the direction of Apple, IBM, and the White House, and is supported by a large coalition of public, private and non-profit organizations. The vision for this campaign came from Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, both leaders who have had to think strategically about their talent pipelines, and who have invested deeply in learning pathways for their employees. Their message is simple: the era of the big car is over. This should inspire innovation on the part of higher education.
