Over the years a study after study tells us that college graduates make more than high school graduates. Yet, most of us have experienced the fact that most college graduates come to work with very little clue as to what is going on. The college graduates have better vocabulary, can better communicate, have proven that they can stick it out for four years and that they can learn abstract facts, but many of them are not ready for the work that is in front of them. So, while colleges certainly add value, there is room to add a lot more value.
Obviously, part of the problem is the quality of incoming students. There is a strong correlation between the graduation rate and incoming grades. Yet, much of it is still a matter of the post secondary educational system. The colleges have recognized this and many have supplemented their programs with internships. The best schools pride themselves on their students working in the relevant field before the graduation. My alma mater, MSOE, for example boasts that between 2/3 and 3/4 of all of their students already work in the field of their choice before they graduate. I would submit to you that this is at least one reason MSOE can continue delivering top notch education.
Yet, we must go beyond. We must get to the point where education and experience entertvine so tightly that it will be hard to say where one ends and the other begins. Only in that environment, will the education be truly relevant.
To achieve this, I suggest that we completely decentralize the educational process, replacing it with educational networks. We separate the function of the instructor and assessor; make guidance counselor, not instructor, the center of educational process. By having assessments be based on practical measurable results (for a business student: the performance of their actual business start-up; for a liberal arts student: the performance improvement of their students; for engineering student: quality of the engineering solutions that they developed for an actual business problem with actual business constraints) the students and instructors will have to work together to deliver. The guidance counselor would work with the student to identify their career goal and advise them on the best paths to learning the specific tasks.
Imagine a world where acrediting body, instead of basing accreditation on the number of hours completed, or other such irrelevant information, accredits based on expected outcomes of student projects that demonstrate the expertise in particular areas. It than audits student submitted portfolios to verify their accuracy and completeness.
Imagine a world where a student goes to college to receive an assessment and a counselor. They student than works with the counselor to develop a lifetime study and career plan that gets adjusted every few months. The counselor than advises the student on achievements that they must document in order to receive their degree and helps him identify ways in which these achievements can be completed. These may mean taking an occasional class anywhere in the world, with any instructor, but more typically it means working on a project that is specifically designed to illustrate the competency in a particular area. This may mean working independently, with a group, or with a coach through actual situation that impacts the world, not just a classroom simulation. Along the way, they accumulate certificates, degrees and build their portfolio, but they do not ever have to be done, since they are only paying couple thousand dollars a year for the counseling and career support.
The counselors rely on the online/worldwide list of instructors and coaches who have ratings based on the success rate of their students in completing the projects and based on student submitted ratings. The student never again has to take a class with an inept instructor. And the best instructors are in the position to charge accordingly. They now have their own brand, that is not tied to any particular University.
Meanwhile, since all of the portfolios for all the students are store online, plagiarism can be easily verified. Deep audits that require random students to explain their projects and occasionally even repeat aspects of their projects insure that fraud is kept to a minimum.
The world gains access to the collective knowledge of all the (lifetime) students, being able to see and understand what and how they did on their projects. This causes a tremendous knowledge explosion. It also causes us to have a very effective employing system, since we can always easily find a person who has completed a similar project already. People can thus truly focus on doing what they are good at. As they do, the only transition that will happen is that in the beginning of their life they are likely to work on projects withou compensation, or even pay to participate (since they are deriving educational and portfolio building value from it), but very quickly they build enough of a portfolio that others seek them out to employ them on their projects, or to have them act as their coaches.
Everybody wins. The colleges generate a lifetime of revenue, while streamlining their costs, since they no longer have to have expensive infrastructure. The instructors have a tremendous opportunity to develop truly exceptional programs. Anybody who has either the money or the credentials can start projects that employ people at all levels of learning. The government no longer has to subsidize colleges, since colleges act as profit centers, having the students complete projects that generate revenues. Students get great education that fits their needs and their level of learning. They pay only minimal fees, since their learning is also generating revenues. If they cannot afford even those fees, they just contribute more on the projects that have lower educational rating but generate more revenue. Anyone can now pay their way to get started. The small communities benefit, because now every community can have the benefits of this deversified educational system. They no longer have the problem of the brain drain, with their young people leaving for college. The college towns benefit, since now colleges really become centers of entrepreneurship, innovation and change that they purport to be. The country benefits by having a deversified and always learning work force. Not only will this help our economy to steer what kind of workforce that we need, but it will help people focus on that which they think they can get good at and that which they like enough to be able effectively teach.
This will create a society that is open and has a high trust, thus making it wealthy and successful. It would make stealing knowledge pointless, since new technologies will develop so rapidly as to make even year old projects obsolite. In any case, it would be very easy to prove who was the first to publish that particular concept or technology.
In this new world ideas and identity are the only things that really matter, but if ideas are tied to identity, we can easily verify if the person has both the capacity and understanding of the particular ideas. Our legal system will have to morph to be able to quickly authenticate people’s ideas and identities.
If you like my ideas and want to pursue this, I will gladly partner with you to bring about this change in our society. An article more specifically focusing on post secondary business education is available here.
3 responses so far ↓
1 TurboBorland // Nov 21, 2008 at 2:10 pm
I like the ideas presented in this article.
I believe that education is our future, but a future that is looking rather dim. With the rapidly rising costs of college and my recent college experience, sadly, greatly below expectations of actual learning, post secondary education is looking like a star. We can still reach it, but it is millions of miles away.
1.) Online classes are the way to go. Instructors that know what they are doing, but are in the field right now doing just that, can take a couple of hours to teach if they so felt like doing so. This is what I experienced the most from college, but it was not as good as it sounds. The instructors were usually really busy. There was no chatroom system where you could go and talk to your instructor if you wanted. The instructors were also usually busy with their own jobs. So the only real way to contact them was through email, which was a flip of the coin as to how fast the instructor would get back to you and how well they could explain the answer in one email.
What we need are teachers who are actually willing to teach and can give a couple hours of their time to go online (chatroom built-in to school CMS) and give lectures, answer questions, and etc. It would be up to the teacher how to use the chatroom, but as long as the student can interact with the teacher in some way that is immediate (not like playing email tag) than we can make online experiences much more enjoyable and educational to the student(s).
2 TurboBorland // Nov 21, 2008 at 2:22 pm
2.) Counselors need to know the subject in which their students are learning. I went to a specialized private school and the people working with the students to help create a schedule, pick classes, get job help, and etc. did not know anything about what the students were going for. This would be very difficult when I would try to explain to one of these counselors that I wanted to learn more about reverse engineering with Linux and they give me a blank stare. If I am going to ask for help in my degree, I expect full well that the people who are going to help me plan my educational career knows exactly what I am going for and what skills the current job market is looking for. If it changes, I expect them to also call me into their office and tell me about this change and what I can do to move fluently with this change. I also expect a meeting at least once a month with these counselors to help direct me, seeing if the classes I am taking are actually helping, and etc.
3 Oleg // Nov 21, 2008 at 5:34 pm
1. I have both took and taught classes both online and in person. Online is often a lot harder in the traditional format. But if it was project based. If you studied reverse engineering by actually reverse engineering on an actual project for an actual customer, you would sure learn a lot, online or in person (realistically it would be a blend of the two anyways).
2. You are exactly right, the counselor should be the expert coach, who has many years of exerience in a particular field. They should be able to act as the instructor, but also have enough wisdom to point the student to others who are more expert in the specific aspects of the course of study.
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