Bridging the Gap Between Higher Ed and Employment
By Ben Roome and Hank Holiday, Co-Founders of Badge List
Japanese students attempt to connect with employers at a university job fair.(Image Source: Dick Thomas Johnson on Flickr.)
What is the value of a college education? There’s the intrinsic value of learning, of course, all of those tangible and intangible benefits that come along with the pursuit of knowledge. And then there’s getting a job. For most students that’s the big one, the main reason they choose to endure the ever-growing financial burden and dedicate years of their life to the pursuit of a college degree.
The problem is that the college degree is struggling to keep pace with the dramatic shifts we’re seeing in technology, employment and the nature of learning itself. To be certain, the college degree remains one of the most respected and valuable learning signals ever. But in an environment where a 12 week, $20,000 code academy is yielding 98% graduate hiring rates, it may be time for college administrators to take a hard look at their practices and ask if their organizations are truly preparing for the future.
New technologies have brought an era of rapid change which has increased the importance of higher education while also creating an environment which has allowed a generation of nimble, tech-infused upstarts to begin chipping away at the dominance of the collegiate model. And while these ed-tech success stories may be the stuff of nightmares for many college administrators, they contain within them the seeds of opportunity. A picture is beginning to emerge of a future where engagement with higher education extends well beyond the bounds of traditional degree programs, potentially following learners throughout the courses of their entire careers. This potential future offers higher ed organizations new opportunities for growth but only at the cost of reevaluating some of our most treasured educational traditions.
Threats to the Existing Model
Three major trends are posing a growing threat to the status quo within educational organizations: the evolving nature of the workforce, the changing shape of the learning process and the slow but steady failure of traditional learning credentials. These trends add up to an environment ripe for innovation, but in order to create the solutions of the future we first need to have a clear understanding of the problems of the present.
Today’s jobs are increasingly independent of geographic location. Companies are looking to hire more contractors and fewer full time employees. Even when workers are hired full time they are moving on to new roles with increasing frequency. A recent survey of Millenials shows that they expect to hold twice as many jobs in their lifetime as Baby Boomers. Additionally, the growing prevalence of the so-called gig economy hints at a future landscape as foreign to the current environment as Wikipedia was to the Encyclopedia Britannica. As Marina Gorbis, Executive Director of the Institute for the Future (IFTF) recently stated, “the way we have come to think about work—that is, 9-to-5 predictable jobs in formal organizations—is less and less a reality for the growing number of working-age adults.”
In this new environment simply hosting a job fair won't be enough to ensure that graduates are set up for success. Instead, administrators will need to look to new tools to help connect their students and alumni with with the skills and employers they need. Preparing students for today’s work environment means not just training them on specific job skills but training them on how to navigate the job market itself. Students need to experience real world job requirements and figure out how to match them with their own unique strengths.
Growth of this new sector continued in 2015 with over 35 million students participating in at least one MOOC.
(Source: Class Central)
As IFTF and others have recognized “education itself is moving out of episodic experiences in traditional institutions and their classrooms, into learning flows that course through our daily lives.” Millennials have grown up in a social-media-saturated environment where an individual’s contribution is measured in part by their ability to navigate the wilds of the internet and extract meaning without external guidance. This growing importance of self-directed learning can be seen as a natural response to the increasingly rapid pace of change all around us. But this trend also represents something of a cultural shift away from industrial age hierarchies and towards internet era meritocracies--collaborative communities of empowered individuals.
“All of this informal learning represents a large and growing blind spot for traditional educational organizations. Learning that isn’t being measured is learning that can’t be guided and can’t be incorporated into a curriculum.”
The good news is that millennials bring all of this experience to school with them, constantly questioning the topics put before them and naturally supplementing their formal classes with self-directed research. This trend is evident in the ever-growing mountain of educational videos on sites like YouTube and in the overwhelming (if overhyped) excitement around MOOCs. The bad news--at least for school administrators--is that all of this informal learning represents a large and growing blind spot for traditional educational organizations. Learning that isn’t being measured is learning that can’t be guided and can’t be incorporated into a curriculum. What most schools are missing today is a way to not just validate these informal learning experiences but to embrace them, helping to guide students and train them to stay up-to-date with the constant change that working adults face daily.
Non-Traditional Credentials
The college degree has stood for decades as the gold standard of learning credentials. Employers have long needed signals to help them identify promising candidates and the college system has built its success in large part on its ability to consistently provide one of the highest quality signals available. As the pace of private sector development has accelerated, however, colleges have struggled to keep up. Roger Templin, former president of Northern Virginia Community College, describes the challenge of hitting a moving target saying “just in the last five years, new careers in fields like health information technology, cyber security, geospatial systems, these are fields [that] a decade ago didn't even exist. So trying to prepare someone for a job that is not yet there is pretty difficult.” One needn’t look far (Forbes magazine, the job titles on Glassdoor’s annual best jobs list) for evidence of a job market in a state of accelerating flux. How fast does the pace have to become before many of higher education’s existing credentialing structures lose their signaling power altogether?
Tuition is up 1,100% since 1980 which has led to record student debt. Meanwhile the economic value of the college degree has steadily declined.
Cost is also an issue. Some advocates, such as UnCollege founder Dale Stephens, argue that, for at least some professions, college has already become an over-priced luxury. And Kevin Carey’s New York Times article on badges notes several ways in which non-degree credentials threaten the current higher ed landscape. With major employers such as IBM and Microsoft insourcing their education needs, as well as large universities making their course offerings available for free or cheaper than their standard degree programs, institutions that are unable to issue credentials other than degrees are likely to suffer. As Marina Gorbis has recognized, “reputation and digital performance trails will increasingly weigh more than college degrees, attendance, or other proxies for assessing knowledge and competency levels.”
This trend is perhaps the most alarming for college administrators because it threatens the very revenue streams that provide the lifeblood of their organizations. The way forward for colleges is to embrace more modern and more granular models of accreditation. These new models can help accomplish a few critical goals:
Increased granularity can allow colleges to align their offerings more closely with market needs, simplifying employer consumption of their credentials and solidifying their claim to the “premium” end of the educational market.
Briefer, more focused credentials help fit course offerings into an increasingly heterogenous learning environment.
Breaking course offerings into smaller pieces can make them less expensive and more accessible.
The shifting workforce, the growing prevalence of self-directed learning and the emergence of new forms of credentialing all point to an educational environment in transition. New structures are being called forth, structures which can integrate employers’ needs, embrace informal learning and provide learners with more flexibility. What do these structures look like and how can colleges implement them? For the most part these models are still in the testing phase, but glimmers of the future are appearing with increasing clarity in thought-leading educational organizations, innovative software companies and beyond.
“Badges can help provide a language of learning, a way of turning skills and achievements into objects which can be collected and arranged into pathways.”
Holly Moore, the Executive Dean of South Seattle College’s Georgetown Campus, has shared her solution to capturing skills and abilities gathered both inside and outside the classroom in order to help students get jobs: “Stackable credentials are an economic imperative for students today. We as educators have to be listening to what employers are saying in terms of the jobs in demand and the skills those jobs require.” Kathleen Radionoff, Dean of Continuing Education at Madison College, explained in a recent interview, “Noncredit education has been really an informal way for adults to further their skill sets or keep current with topics. I immediately saw that we could use badges as a way to provide an assessment and then a verification [of informal education].” Radionoff, Moore and other administrators have recognized that badges respond to an urgent need in higher ed. By recognizing learning experiences that happen in all contexts, administrators gain a clearer picture of the learning cycle, helping them to guide their students more effectively while giving the students valuable experience charting their own paths.
This same need has been recognized by the American Association of Community Colleges and the Lumina Foundation with “The Right Signals Initiative”, a thought-leading project launched in 2015. The purpose of this initiative is to “demonstrate a new credentialing model that recognizes multiple quality credentials to send ‘the right signals’ to employers, students, and colleges.” Ryan Craig, Managing Partner of University Ventures, recently underscored this vision in TechCrunch arguing that “technology’s transformation of higher education lies not in the transformation of teaching and learning, but the advent of a new digital language that connects higher education and the labor market.” This statement neatly sums up the changes that are coming to higher ed. While the the techniques and methods of teaching used in higher education remain sound, what needs to change is the language through which educators and administrators communicate with employers and other stakeholders outside of the traditional academic sphere.
“Educators need to build feedback loops which not only link their curricula to employer needs but provide the infrastructure to sustain those links as the needs continue to evolve.”
In the corporate world this transformation is already well underway. In addition to IBM and Microsoft many other corporate learning solutions such as Salesforce Trailhead and Deloitte Leadership Academy are now using badges to help organize the learning experience. What these organizations are discovering is that badges can help provide a language of learning, a way of turning skills and achievements into objects which can be collected and arranged into pathways. As higher ed organizations begin to adopt these practices as well, it is critical to connect these pathways, mapping college badges to badges from employers and the surrounding community. The effort needed to translate between academic and corporate languages of learning is significant but likely very well spent. This work may indeed hold the potential to bring the education system’s many stakeholders into closer alignment than ever before and help to unlock much-needed efficiencies.
As Alex Usher has noted, it is the responsibility of faculties and administrators to know who employs their graduates and what skills they will need to remain competitive in the workforce. In order to do this in today’s rapidly changing environment, educators need to build feedback loops which not only link their curricula to employer needs but provide the infrastructure to sustain those links as the needs continue to evolve.
Clear Steps to the Future
A Cornell University student studies in the historic Andrew Dickson White Library.
(Image Source: Jenn Vargas on Flickr.)
Institutions of higher education have a lot to offer the future of learning. They foster networks of experienced educators, they maintain physical spaces for learning and they carry the wisdom of an approach to education that has been successful for over a millennium. And though technology and change threaten many aspects of the collegiate model, higher ed orgs have a path of innovation available to them--a path well worn by threatened industries of the past, from automobiles to newspapers--which can retain and strengthen their position as the producers of the most reliable learning signals available. But this path will require colleges to adapt, not merely using new technologies but taking them into the core of their structures and cultures.
“We’re creating ways to use badges as rallying points for entire communities--local and global communities stretching into the past and future.”
At Badge List we, of course, see our young platform as an important piece of this future landscape. While software cannot fix these problems on its own, it can be a powerful ally and a formidable force for change. So we’ve been dreaming up ways to make the mapping of badges to jobs and courses easier, ways to help badge creators establish pathways that span offerings from many different organizations, ways to use badges as rallying points for entire communities--local and global communities stretching into the past and future. Some of these pieces are working in Badge List today. Many more are still developing as we work with our growing community of educators and learners all around the world.
We invite you to join this conversation. You can find us on Twitter (@BadgeList) or you can contact us directly at [email protected]. Reach out and let us know about the problems facing your organization and about the solutions you’re envisioning. If there’s one aspect of higher education that will never change it is that drive to share, the infectious joy we derive from the pursuit of knowledge and the satisfaction we get from seeing that spark of learning spread to others.
