What if consumers demanded the unbundling of the 4yr undergraduate degree?

The 4-year, single-institution-loyal, core-curriculum driven undergraduate degree is a bundled product. If it were a cable/telephone/data package, or a new car/warranty/service package, or an all-inclusive cruise ship vacation,

we’d be quicker to call it what it is. We’d be poking around the edges, asking ‘Why would I want this?’ and ‘I could do without that,’ and ‘How much if drop all of these things?’ In short, we’d each pick it apart and demand product and pricing according to our own interests.

But for decades now — and particularly the past decade, when Udemy, Udacity, edX, Coursera, MasterClass, SkillShare, Praxis, KhanAcademy, Preply, and a wide range of other free and fee-based, online and blended offerings crowd into this space — we accept as a given that this bundle must exist.

Progressives that call for lower costs, debt forgiveness, or outright socialization of tertiary education unwittingly cement this bundled product in place. They aim for equity and access, but frame it according to a rigid product design — SATs, admissions committees and fees, large and growing administrations, time-consuming core curricula, institution-specific degrees — that benefits the incumbent college industry more than the rising student. Looking to northern Europe is a good indication of how the socialization of costs applies further standardization to tertiary learning, deterministic testing, inflexible prerequisites, and set-in-stone curricula.

I think it’s imperative — before the next U.S. presidential election cycle — that young people, industry leaders, public figures, economists, and learning experts come together to voice a demand for something else:

UnbundleUnbrand: The overdue demand to unpack the undergraduate degree.

1. We are a group of economists, neuroscientists, high-tech employers, and public figures.
2. We are watching with anxiety the volume of American student loans at $1.5 trillion, 11% of which in default, 14% in forbearance, with predictions of 40% in default by 2023.
3. American young people are chasing the false promises of knowledge, skills, and career acceleration from institutions that foremost seek to bundle and brand, that hike tuitions absorbing nearly all federal debt subsidy, that entice young people into levels of debt that are costing households more, and lasting more years than any generation has witnessed before.
4. American high schools are chasing graduation rates and rates of placement in 4-year universities, also false promises to communities that place statistical improvement-at-any-price ahead of the real interests and needs of young people.
5. American employers are slow to refine talent identification systems to acknowledge smart, hard-working, skilled candidates on the basis of their demonstrated learning and results. Undergraduate degrees are too often used as a baseline metric for eligibility when there is almost no correlation of knowledge or skills attained to the obtaining of the degree, nor to the demands of many careers.
6. Meantime, the proliferation of online courseware, gameware, tutorials, face-to-face and blended learning models, subscription-based, and pay-per-use content continues, but is underused by our teenagers. The promise of individualized learning is limited not by technology or logistics, but by the social imagination, that still sees teens moving through set schedules and an arbitrary, standard hierarchy of 5 or 6 subjects.
7. We believe that if teens will be encouraged to pursue intensive, individualized learning by making use of already abundant tools, combined with mentoring, internships and real work experience in a more flexible learning environment, the arbitrary urgency to apply and commit to 4-year undergraduate degrees would decline.
8. Unless and until the simplistic recognition of the so-called undergraduate degree as a measure of education is unbundled, our counterproductive culture of college-readiness is depriving youth of enormous opportunity, while our economy is imperiled by students’ misguided borrowing. The loan crisis may cost America hundreds of billions. The opportunity cost of a decade of young people’s lives spent mechanically going through motions, not exploring their interests, not intrinsically motivated, is unknown.
9. Given these concerns, we appeal to America’s universities to: 

• Offer unbundled, a-la-carte course enrollment to anyone, anywhere, anytime
• Stop differentiating price or credential value for “full-time”, “for credit”, versus a-la-carte students
• Accept in any course any interested student, irrespective of prior degree attainment, or based on performance in online prerequisite study that is open to anyone
• Enable click-to-buy or free courses, such that enrollment is quick and simple, and prices are transparent
• Dismiss the admissions committee and eliminate the cumbersome admissions process, including fee-based standardized test-taking, essay-submission, and racial and ethnic identification
• Offer courses in a greater variety of durations, frequency and times of year, to break down the rigidity of continuing learning

10. We appeal to America’s leading employers to:

• Eliminate the “highest level of education attained”, simplistic human resources drop-down menu;
• Revise human resource systems to recognize the wide range of relevant, competitive learning and experience that prospective job candidates can attain alternative to an undergraduate degree;
• Stop differentiating salaries for the same work based on a candidate’s having or not having an undergraduate degree.

11.  We trust in the intrinsic curiosity and rebellious spirit of our youth that when these artificial constraints are removed, our youth will naturally diversify their efforts across a much broader range of subjects, problems, work and study modalities fitting to their interests and needs. With responsible guidance and supervision of family, community and state, these diverse learning approaches will enable a more motivated and productive young population, fitting a modern economy and free society.

Woe is my department! Downsizing universities try to build a public sob-story, but students aren’t missing-out, they’re migrating!

When you get no claps on Medium, or your Udemy course gets 6 buyers and one star, there isn’t half the tantrumming you’re gonna hear from an associate professor who didn’t get tenure. From the headlines of higher-ed journals that mourn the downsizing and budget rationalization of colleges coping with declining enrollments, declining selection of humanities majors, and declining interest in foreign language study, it would seem we are a sad, regressing society. Doleful professors of obscure art genres and literature are looking for work, woeful foreign language departments are closing their doors. Alas, youth don’t appreciate humanities and the wide world of languages. 

Cut the crap, academia!

Has anybody checked out the meteoric rise of Duolingo, that built a US$700 million business providing the basics of foreign language learning without charging users? Or Preply, the Ukrainian start-up that links aspiring students--mainly foreign language learners--with low-cost conversational partners and tutors around the world?

If it’s art appreciation you’re after, there’s a wide range of course and short-tutorial options from Artsy to Sootheby’s Institute to MoMA Research and Learning, not to mention college-style courseware on edX and Coursera. If it’s making art or craft or music, there’s SkillShare, MyBluPrint, New York Institute of Photography, and so many resource and lesson sites like Mutopia Project, Art of Composing, and JustinGuitar.

And of course, you would have to be crawling out from under a rock right now not to have found better lectures on just about any author, artist, or ancient civilization on YouTube (e.g., the most popular sort to the top) than the particular adjunct lecturer who’s teaching the particular course on your campus during the times you’re available this semester, and which satisfies your pre-req. See what I’m getting at?

It’s not necessarily the collapse of civilization that is foretold by declining enrollments in undergraduate humanities classes. It’s the emergence of better alternatives. But universities and students aren’t looking at this the same way. A deeper client engagement might be a place to start…

Why does the undergrad humanities student believe that she is sitting in your class?

• * Her parents and teachers said she should do this.
• # She’s looking for a group to fit into.
• # She’s postponing tough decisions about her life.
• # She feels better when her work is organized into neat steps that lead to a concrete endpoint.
• # She works harder when she has a definite schedule and deadlines.
• She hopes she’ll see something inspirational that could become a business model for her work.
• She wants to build a brand for herself, narrow-in on a market niche where she can add value 
• She wants to find people who will believe in her, build a client network, create a blog, offer free webinars, get invited to fairs and exhibits, raise money on Patreon, and create some kind of FB marketing strategy. 
• She wants to make money. 

Stop and ask yourself which of these objectives is really served by your university class. I have put a * next to the one I think is uniquely served by universities. I put a # next to ones that are served by BOTH universities and other learning resources.

OK, so why does the instructor think she is in his class?

• He has unique knowledge and skills.
• * These knowledge and skills will be important to completing a degree.
• # These things should be valued by society in general. 
• * These things satisfy a university pre-req.
• The skills he imparts will be vital to her career pursuits. 

Now I don’t mean to hurt feelings, but only to point to market signals. Anyone who gives a lecture on Dostoevsky is competing with a whole YouTube genre, YaleOCW, and numerous threads on GoodReads, among other resources. Maybe he is really trying, but as the number and modalities of learning resources proliferate, if his presentation is not really AWESOME, then she is compromising by sitting in his class. And do I need to go into the disconnect between college classes and career pursuits? What are we left with, then? As any professor (including Bryan Caplan) will attest whose students gleefully fled the scene when he ran 11-minutes late, most college classes exist on the rationale of core curriculum requirements and the bundled 4-year, 120-credit-hour degree. Meantime, the rapidly expanding market of shared notes and hired essay-writers, creating quick-wins for firms like OneClass, StuDocu, and Stuvia, is emblematic of the cynicism inherent in this whole process.

That a society values liberal arts is as true as its concert ticket-sales, public library usage, museum foot traffic, and digital media subscriptions. And, by the way, all the above services do cope with market tastes, convenience, perceived utility, and price sensitivity. ...All except one. Alas, the university culture. Give us more subsidized debt! Protect the core curriculum!

Don’t worry, humanities bureaucrat! You have a few more months. Graduating high school cohorts have been drinking the college Kool-Aid, and a new cohort is prepping for its PSAT right now. Meantime, you are protesting and digging in your heels and calling your critics illiterate buffoons.

But it’s not just me calling you out, buffoon that I am. You have graduated thousands of today’s bloggers, editorialists, art curators, craft-online-market-makers, freelancers of every stripe. They emerged to a job market that took no notice of the bachelor’s degree, and where anyway they had to build business model, branding, reputation and client-base from scratch. Everywhere are signals that the staid, gerito-cratic corporate careers of our forefathers are vanishing into sepia-tinted memories, giving over to AI and rationalized staffing that prefer the outsourced solution. And what are those “solutions”? They are scrappy, small teams working out of apartments day and night, eating and drinking work, work that transforms as quickly as the clients’ needs change. Ask anyone on that team if he would fund a colleague to get a liberal arts degree. Hell, no!

OK, so I concede that a few fields are not going to change so fast. University professors, for example. They’re pretty rigid when it comes to demanding formal degrees. And then there’s the State. In my recent podcast, I questioned whether President Trump could get up to pee at night and tweet that the Executive Branch doesn’t recognize the undergraduate degree as a meaningful measure of knowledge and capability anymore, and thereby force HR officers in every department and agency under him to re-formulate job qualification matrices more specifically. Well… Not impossible given the precedents he’s already set. Yes, there will be laggards to recognize the irrelevance of the undergraduate degree, and both the slow, inflexible employers and the late-to-learn, Kool-Aid-drunk bachelor-holders will find themselves at a loss.

The disruption is only beginning with humanities departments. Watch what happens to mathematics when large sections of content could be mastered on Khan Academy for free, and then fewer paid courses are needed to reach one's goals. Watch what happens to laboratory science with students shop around for semesters here and there to access best labs and best professors. Watch what happens to finance and entrepreneurship and pre-med and a hundred other subjects where students pick and choose the courses and micro-credentials that work best for them, here and there, mixed with internships and work experience, online and face-to-face. Humanities departments are just the first dominoes to fall in a system that rapidly collapses when users will unbundle and unbrand the 4-year, undergraduate degree.

College-aged kids before 40? The lonely feeling of 'Stop! This whole thing is a hoax!'

So I started having kids at twenty, and now we have five. No need to go over the odd demographic niche I’ve been living in from attic-of-pizza-restaurant to condemned-tear-down in northern Virginia. I love my kids, I go to church, I homeschool. I also have a graduate degree, speak three languages and worked as a development economist for twenty years. It’s the running theme in my life that I kind of don’t fit in anywhere.

But in particular, it hurts to watch my older teens struggle with the overwhelming cultural demand for college-going, when I know the hype-in-slick-packaging, the readily available unbundled alternatives, and the real pain of debt repayment. It hurts, because their friends’ parents are all 50+ and happy as pigs in shit to send Zoe and Chloe to Barnard and Smith ($72,000/year be damned! She’s my pride and joy!), and because my age-mates are all at Gymboree.

I post rants against high school (it subdivides and micro-manages teens’ days to the point that nothing excites them. They become cynical, disengaged, mechanical models of what they think admissions committees expect), and my family and peers quietly click elsewhere. They are all happily snapping photos of 3- and 5- and 8-year-olds at school and pumpkin patches. Most of them see school as the heart of their lives, the wellspring of activities, friendships and community.

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength."

I post to homeschooling groups, but I feel like only a handful of us are homeschooling teenagers. Other posts are about physically juggling children, cooking and crafts, and the kind of hesitant creativity that seeks continual validation from a thousand other moms. Which books are you using? Which curriculum for such-and-such? Approaching the teen years is a fall-off in conversation. Seems like the kids quietly returned to school, or moms felt over their heads with pipe-cleaner and construction-paper projects. A few tentative mentions of things like edX and MasterClass, but so little reaction that it seems most haven’t heard of it yet. I’m not even sure if I belong in homeschool groups, because in fairness, I’m not really the one doing the schooling. I co-write curricula with my teens every about every two months, then find online resources and hire grad students to co-implement with them.

Among the overseas parent groups that we’re part of, as with most homeschooling groups, it seems the brave, pioneering approach to younger kids (He’s learning so much in Phnom Penh! Life is his classroom in Bishkek!) gives way to timid, conformist pragmatism with teens (He’ll need his APs, and we’ve got to work on that resume!), and so the return to U.S. and formal high school enrollment.

And then there are my tech-industry friends. I guess these guys also belong in the Gymboree category, because the smarter you get, the longer it takes to make a baby in America. I get so confused talking to them. Nobody wants to sound stupid. Of course we are all using Scratch. Of course we follow Sebastian Thrun’s tweets. Everybody is advancing in his free time in coding and art-photography and home micro-brewing. The revolution in education, skills and networking has already happened, Colleen, didn’t you know? They are a curious bunch, because as social progressives, by-and-large they are instinctively defensive about public schools. Teachers are heroes. Schools are the root of the community (cause none of them goes to church). And it helps that they’ve all got great zip-codes. But I suspect theirs is the kind of backyard, wine-and-cheese progressivism that will ease toward closed-circle Math Olympiads, ArtofProblemSolving teams, engineering tutorials, and timely, well-documented volunteer initiatives around the Bay area, all in time for an MIT application. In short, there hasn’t really been a revolution in education, skills and networking, but new formats to an age-old, elite choreography whose subtle cues--wink, nod--their offspring will certainly follow.

And so, my parental peers turn out to be thickly padded, brand-sensitive, or else dimly aware of lower-cost alternatives. My age-peers are still lactating, or else caught up in the warm-and-fuzzy-feeling of zip-code-lucky primary schools.

Believe, believe, believe!

School-bashing to them is like Santa-denial. I can’t bear the reactions in their faces.

But somebody’s got to listen, and I’m finding kinship in my expanding network of Facebook friends, about 18-25 years old in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, and Ukraine. Our connections are the result of years of university-project work and I think a message that’s resonating. School sucks! It’s not only boring, but where they live, it’s devoid of relevant content, corrupt, and required by law. Worst of all, kids are swept into it at a trusting age, conditioned to comply and that compliance--that is, obedience, obsequiousness, neatness, memorization, regurgitation--promises success in the real economy. As teens, they feel, but can’t say, that a decade of their lives is being stolen and wasted. Public universities in these countries often looks much the same.

And so it’s these young adults, 19, 23, 25 who link up with me and seem to share an excitement in finally speaking out. They are emerging from a brain-washed process. They’re disillusioned. They’re pissed. It’s a generation that asks, “What the hell have I been doing?”

Girls gathering in Kart-e-char Kabul for BreakAway
Learning mentored co-study session. They are
pursuing individualized study plans in health,
 journalism and coding.

Because only now they are seeing that the real stuff is on Udemy, YouTube, 24Symbols, Udacity, Codecademy… They have nothing that a modern corporation or international employer wants. They are starting from scratch.

It’s for them that I’m speaking out, even as my age-mates respond with blank, hurt smiles, my sons’ friends scream and flap their hands when their mail arrives, my techie friends have written me off as a Christian conservative. It’s hard to jump in front of anybody else’s teens, wave your arms and say “You’ve got it all wrong! Get off the train now!” And among the upper-middle income, social-signal-sensitive families, the track that Zoe and Chloe will follow in these years is sacred. What I’m shouting--“Get off! Spend a day clicking around YouTube! Volunteer full-time for two-months! Go study at Kenyatta University or NIT-Delhi for a semester! Check out Bartleby! Try Udemy! Take a homestay in western China! Skype daily in another language! Try a local internship! Link-up with experts around the world!”--offers none of the trusted branding and packaging. It sounds suspicious and perverse.

Too bad for brainwashed-by-high-school American teens with plenty of household credit, low ambition and no sense of ownership of their learning. Have fun at Wet-Paper-Bag-College-of-Undergraduate-Degrees. While you are plagiarizing essays and parroting each other’s politics, an unseen cohort is passing you by. They are the emerging millions of intermediate- and advanced-English speakers in low-income countries. They have mobile 3G and cracked-screen Samsungs, but they are sensing sooner than you will that the system is a waste of time. They are cobbling together at $20 and $30/month skills in coding, machine learning, project management, graphic design, translation, and social media-marketing. They would be thrilled to earn $10,000/year. And that’s about a quarter of the student debt that the average American 24-year-old has.

Am I crazy?

College debt begins with a perilous teen fantasy. If your kid's in high school, the brain-washing is already done

As U.S. interest rates rise, outstanding college indebtedness rises, and both the number of defaulting borrowers and the proportion of default-category loans increases, it’s timely to ask What is college debt?

In concrete terms, college debt is the second-largest debt category in the U.S. (The first is home mortgages. It surpasses consumer and credit card debt). It is $1.5 trillion outstanding, representing 44 million borrowers. By 2023, it’s estimated that 40% of those borrowers will be in default. For the class of 2016, the average debt load is $37,172. By debt volume, 11% of that $1.5 trillion is already in default (over 90-days non-repayment), each quarter another 2% falls into default. Another 14% of that debt volume is in deferment or forbearance.

College debt is a different kind of debt from mortgages, auto-loans, corporate debt or working capital. College debt has no collateral. The student-borrower usually has no income history or assets. He has

No income, assets or business plan.

no business plan. There is no incremental demonstration of his strategic viability. Unlike credit card debt, there isn’t even an incremental demonstration of repayment culture, since repayment is typically deferred until after the completion of studies. College debt is nearly impossible to discharge through bankruptcy (The College Investor explains how here). There is no pledged asset that can be foreclosed or short-sold to facilitate the borrower’s climbing out. It is very difficult to run away from.

This handy tool provided by FinAid.org may be a helpful visualization of repayments by loan amount at current interest rates. Assuming an interest rate of 6.8% and a 10-year repayment plan, a graduate paying off the average debt load of $37,172 would expect to pay $428 per month. FinAid also advises what a borrower should aim to earn per annum in order to manage his loan-size; for this average loan volume, he needs to earn $51,000 to manage repayments if his household size is 1 person--and that's less likely over 10 years. 

College debt and default are growing differently for different groups, and that’s also revealing some deeper problems. A recent Brookings study found that black and African-American borrowers on average hold three-times greater outstanding college loan volume than white borrowers, and default five-times more frequently. Attendees at for-profit colleges and universities show default rates that are almost double that of graduates from 4-year undergraduate programs at public universities. The borrower profile is aging, too, and that tells us something not only about later-in-life education, but longevity of debt; 30-39 year-olds hold 30% of the $1.5 trillion college debt, and that has increased by nearly a third in the past 5 years. Borrowers over age 40 constitute 36% of the 44 million outstanding borrowers; they are paying off a long tail-end of educational leveraging.

Sixty-percent of that $1.5 trillion is undergraduate debt. And within that, the worst-performing segment is for-profit colleges and students who started but didn’t complete degrees.

Interestingly, borrower default does not correlate with overall initial loan size, suggesting that it’s not just a question of over-borrowing by volume that drives the college debt trap. According to the Brookings study, defaults are highest among those who started with initially relatively smaller loans (e.g., $10,000-20,000), but these borrowers are stretching out repayment periods, compounding overall debt well into their late-30s and 40s.

This is where it may help to read through the numbers a cultural narrative about young people. How does the fairy tale start?
Here we see an uncertain young person. It’s not clear that she is excited about classroom learning; the practice of lecture-listening, note-taking, essay-writing might not come easily. But nor has school introduced or allowed any time that she might learn a skill on Udemy, take up a 30-hour-week internship, work for her parents, or seek an online micro-credential. She found the secondary classroom monotonous and dull; her focus during those years was somewhere else, disengaged, waiting for the bell to ring. Doing as little as possible was a release from the annoying controls. Somewhere late in that process she sensed an external urgency that she needed to “make something of herself”, and college seemed to be the key.

Here we see secondary teachers and administrators. They see themselves as champions of knowledge, the stamping out of young people's days into uniform templates around uniform subjects as a social good driving equality and opportunity. Their credibility rides on the claim that such-and-such percentage of the graduating class is moving on to 4-year colleges. These claims are held up

Reach for the stars, right?

from state to state and town to town as if all students need and want the same thing. They are also judged on graduation rates, which had better improve year-on-year during anybody’s tenure. And one way to make sure that happens is to fudge it; let students take summary refreshers, inflate grades. They welcome the proliferation of colleges of all stripes, because it means there is a place for everybody; any kind of student, if goaded along to apply, can get in somewhere. And that’s the statistic that counts.

Here we see the parents and community. Who wouldn’t want to believe that anybody can become anything? That everything is possible when you put your mind to it? That the sky’s the limit? This is the American-dream narrative. And families buy into it bit by bit, so that they are not thinking about the $1.5 trillion, or 25-years of $250/month payments, disillusionment and entrapment at the beginning. Instead, they are thinking about high school recognitions and how good that feels. And sports and clubs, and putting their child in the right light. Then PSATs and how important it is to prepare for standardized tests. Then SATs and application packages and where so-and-so got in. As in an auto showroom, it’s about momentum, pride, and feeling like a winner. The financing package comes last.

Here we see the college industry. There are literally thousands of these guys, and they come in every possible form. All of them are claiming to make dreams come true. They keep up the appearance of selectivity, print viewbooks, solicit 15-year olds, and impress grandmothers with tours of ivy-covered buildings and quadrangles. They raise money, show off new athletic centers, choose and partially-fund incoming students through an opaque process that leaves everyone uncertain how much things really cost and what it really means to “get in”.

Here we see the first employer. She couldn’t care less what the 24-year old applicant read in freshman composition, and will never ask her to write an essay about anything. She doesn’t ask for political discourse. She is looking for an adaptable person who will learn fast, cooperate within her team, and master skills specific to this job. Her HR officer assumed that meant that a BA would be required, so she has a drop-down menu, and cut out all the candidates who don’t have one. Now the employer is surprised during interviews at how little experience, and how distant from reality her candidates seem to be.

Something like this iterates during the young worker’s life, as ambitions for advancement and fears about raising a family on a limited income drive further loan-taking and degree-seeking.

If we can be honest with ourselves about what’s driving college debt, then policymakers would be honest, too, about what it’s going to take to fix this.

It’s not a question of making college more affordable through subsidy. The most frequent defaulters took relatively smaller initial loans. Further, there’s decades of evidence (see this Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2017 staff study) that universities hike tuitions year-on-year directly absorbing all increases in federal student loan support, so that it’s unlikely that additional subsidy would reduce average loan volumes.

And I would further counter Scott-Clayton’s two take-aways from the 2017 Brookings study cited above:

--That degree-attainment should be “improved” for enrolled students, a vague allusion to the kind of grade-inflation, course-repeating and watering-down of skills requirements that does nobody any real service neither in secondary nor university education; to the contrary, it keeps pumping hot air into a degree-inflated culture, such that the degree itself diminishes in value as more people of varied scholastic aptitude all have one;

--That income-contingent loan repayment options should be promoted, which implies substantially more expensive and risky loans at the outset (and perhaps the need for loan pricing that takes account of degree type, major, non-profit/profit-status of the school), or an uncertain Federal government posture toward future loan forgiveness (and uncertainty itself may undermine repayment culture), or introducing another ex-ante forgiveness scheme (which perversely incentivizes greater loan-taking, all else equal).

If we can be honest with ourselves, the college debt problem is about a well-intentioned but misdirected dream that moves further and further from reality. And one particular industry has hitched itself (and taxpayer liabilities) to that dream, politicized it, amplified it, so that the dream is about loving our children, valuing knowledge, self-improvement and the American way. Who could argue with that?

The alternative dream is modest, unsexy, and not-so-fairy-tale-like. The kids who have been vegetating in secondary school should be broken out, to spend more hours pursuing with energy

Time for a new fairy-tale narrative.

and enthusiasm things that they actually want to do. And communities need to re-calibrate expectations of teenagers not to measure-up on scores and standards, but to diversify, volunteer, get involved in the real economy, connect with mentors. Students with limited motivation and showing weak scholastic aptitude need to find their own paths, even when this means that teachers and parents won’t see the standard progress indicators. All of this will look a lot more sloppy, cut-and-paste, and individualized than it does now.

Kids won’t be pushed off a conveyor belt by self-interested secondary administrators, but would self-launch at different times into online studies, micro-credentials, vocational trainings, and a wider variety of much lower-cost learning. [Professional schools and certifications are still out there, but they shouldn’t need a BA to get in!] Parents and young people won’t take a gigantic loan for the “big event” of 4-year college, but rather will have to make with their children month-by-month cost-benefit decisions about online credentials, visiting enrollment, internship opportunities and housing costs that begin at a much earlier age and may continue well into the young person’s adult life (and policy regarding the use of 529 educational savings accounts should follow suit and become more flexible!). Thousands of charlatan and half-baked colleges need to go under. And the best of individual trainers and educators have been emerging (for a decade already!) in online and blended, pay-per-use formats that make interactive, quality learning far more accessible.

It’s the culture that has to catch up with already-existent potential.

It’s a brain-washed, false American dream that has to be stopped where it starts in the families of young teens.

If the Goal Is Broadening My Horizons, Then Why Am I on This Campus?

We’re hearing the defense of liberal arts education more and more, from the critics of Betsy DeVos and defenders of loan forgiveness to the embittered humanities professors squeezed out by universities’ shifting priorities. They portray a battle between vocationalists and poets, business and ivory towers.

Was it serendipity that brought
these two together?

I’m a lover of books, of exploration, of living in new places and trying new things. I’m a defender of the liberal arts; but that’s why I can’t understand going to college.

Broaden your horizons! Learn to learn! Take time to explore! So goes the parent and guidance-counsellor wisdom about 4-year liberal arts degrees.

Getting in to the more elite schools requires looking like an explorer and free-thinker. A volunteer trip to Guatemala. A teen summer leadership conference. A provocative essay. (Never mind that many schools have used these subjective indicators as cover for years to disguise racial profiling in admission decisions, and one is now dragged before a Federal Court.) But better not explore too much. Not actually work two years in Guatemala. Not actually enroll for a semester in Delhi. Certainly nothing that would disrupt the pathway from high school to competitive (Oh please! Oh please! Pick meeee!!) enrollment at a single, in-residence, 4-year college.

Embarking on the journey

Teen exploration is a Panda Express version of a real thing that’s abundantly available all around us, made of real stuff, and infinitely cheaper, too.

If I should get comfortable working, living and cooperating with people very different from me, why don’t I get a job at McDonalds? Or cleaning restrooms in my nearest airport? Why not extend that volunteer work in a faraway country long enough to really make a difference? Why do we instead count on the army of admissions officers and their opaque selection model to place me with people who will supposedly broaden my worldview?

If I should learn to learn, then why is the process administration-led and not student-led? Why should I only take classes during defined intervals and only from this one school? Why shouldn’t I pursue the topics that interest me most from the sources (whether it’s Udemy or Masterclass or another university or person) that deliver the most value to me?

If I should explore, then why is there a required curriculum? And even as critics point to the erosion of supposedly “essential” education toward trendy, preachy progressivism, administrators still dish it out like a pre-set menu: so many credits of race and ethnicity, so many credits of foreign language, so many credits of social science… Why is my path so mechanical and contrived? Wasn’t Picasso exploring when he dedicated years of his life to the color blue? How have we become such bean-counters about exploration?

What you won’t hear ivory tower-defenders admit is that the ivory tower itself is a business model. And a very illiberal one. Excessively complex and untransparent selection. Bloated administrative function that poses to ensure diversity and uphold fragile identities while driving up per-student costs. Bundled product that raises switching costs and leverages simplistic HR systems (highest level of education= drop-down menu) to over-price a product that costs far less in unit-form. Inflexible product terms and conditions (e.g., timing of course availability, core requirements) that always advantage the seller. Indirect subsidy distribution and third-party payment schemes (think Sallie Mae and American taxpayer) that limit buyer incentives and information for true price comparison. Final price tag double the median household income.*

So if the goal is broadening my horizons, then why should I go to college? If I am the most liberal, liberal arts student, then I should grab my backpack and head for an internship far away. Tuck Jack Kerouac under my arm and hop the next Greyhound. Hook up to Udemy and Coursera from the sofa where I end up sleeping tonight. Show up on some college campus not starry-eyed and contractually bound,

Thrilled!!!

not primed by some elite, inaccessible process, not riding on mom and dad’s home equity line of credit; but with twenty bucks, a backpack, and a one-click sign-up for the course that interests me. And a few years from now, my mix-and-match courses, my pasted-together knowledge and experiences shouldn’t wear like a stigma on my first big job interview, but should be a legitimate and understandable credential to the HR blockhead. That would be a real liberation.

Be wary of those who defend liberal arts from inside university campuses. There’s a business process at work that’s sifting, sorting and stamping the foreheads of over-eager teens (Louis Vuitton! Prada! Gucci!) while pretending to celebrate learning.


*U.S. median household income, 2016, acc. U.S. Census Bureau was $57,617. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2017/acs/acsbr16-02.pdf
In 2017-2018, the average cost of 4-year undergraduate tuition and fees was 2018 school year was $138,960 at private colleges, $39,880 for state residents at public colleges, and $102,480 for out-of-state residents at public colleges. https://www.collegedata.com/cs/content/content_payarticle_tmpl.jhtml?articleId=10064

When the 4-year undergraduate degree stops being “the thing”, will high school have an identity crisis?

There are so many hollowed-out Main Streets in America that one hardly needs to recount the story of what happened when shop-retail gave way to big-box retail. And there is an even uglier asphalt wilderness left behind when big-box retailers bankrupted each other, and then ultimately lost to online shopping. People in small towns still need a Main Street that is about strengthening families, civic engagement, getting outside, and supporting the arts. But in many towns where retail stood in for those goals, its demise meant the demise of greater Main Street, too.

In case you didn't know,
college is the thing to do!

We shouldn’t let that happen to secondary education! Teen learning should be an exploratory and idiosyncratic process. It should be the recognition of one’s place in a historical continuum-- deference and respect for those who came before, curiosity and identification with one’s local and religious community, and an emerging sense of duty to contribute further to it. It should be many brave attempts, numerous failures, and the first glimpses of opportunity.

But in most high schools, it’s not.

The culminating moment. 

Rather, the association with college preparation has become so pervasive that many accept the two as inextricable.

Just as retail is not civic engagement, nor are preparatory classes and obligatory service assignments human exploration and growth opportunities (don’t let those college essays fool you!). Quite the opposite.

For the most ambitious teens, a fixation on grade-point average, class rank, and what “looks good” on a resume squeeze out time for real intellectual exploration (is there really time to pick up a book, even an article, of one’s own choosing?), limit risk-taking, and preempt the budding of a spontaneous, judging, moral self with a contrived, mechanical, inert and compliant self that ticks off the boxes of grades, sports, and volunteerism.

For teens that don’t show ambition, struggle with behavior, or admit that they’d rather be someplace else, high school is an externally-applied machinery to which they are subjected for 7 hours each day. And that raises a million other questions that we should be thinking about. Is conceptual dialogue meaningful, even possible, when forced against the participant’s will? Is there a point to content recollection when it’s almost immediately forgotten? Is the effort to achieve measurable, standardized results placing an abstract social prerogative ahead of the human being that’s subjected to this process? More simply, if you were forced to sit through this against your will at age 40, would you resist?

And yet we not only accept, but endorse high school’s current role. Why? Because it is preparing a generation of teens for college-- that great ‘transformative’ journey of lectures, projects, parties, sex and debt sewn into the quilt of American coming-of-age. High schools measure their worth on the percentage of graduates heading to 4-year colleges. They adorn their entry halls with commendations of the college-acceptances of their seniors. The whole junior and senior curriculum is built around college prep and advanced college credit. Counsellors, teachers, and administrators strenuously shepherd wavering teens back into the flock, moving forward in unison toward one certainty. The thing to do is college.

But what will happen when college is no longer “the thing” to do?

There are predictions of a college enrollment implosion and of a slow decline. Personally, I think if we are to take cues from the housing sector, we’ll see a loss of confidence in securitized student loans, a shake-up of political commitment to Sallie Mae, a spike in student loan interest rates and further defaults. We’re already seeing the rise of microcredentials, loss of distinguishing value in a Bachelor’s Degree, multinational recruitment and distribution of tasks across an increasingly anglophone world talent population. None of that bodes well for the last sheep to be herded toward American college admission, and what today averages $36,000 (public in-state), $100,000 (public out-of-state), or $136,000 (private) for four-year enrollment.

What could the “next thing” look like? I think it will be 18-25 year-olds who continue studying on Coursera and Udemy and other coursewares to achieve specific skills targeting work opportunities that they are undertaking in parallel. I think it will be young people living from one Airbnb to the next in shared spaces in large cities. I think it will be a blending of micro-credentials and internships, whereby those who invest the most in social networking, build their LinkedIn referrals and recommendations, demonstrate jobs well-done and connect themselves to promising projects will emerge with more opportunities. I think teams will increasingly form around temporary projects, but the breadcrumbs of their shared interests and positive feedback will contribute to new forms of validation, more timely, specific and discriminating than undergraduate alma maters. This has the potential to be hugely empowering to brilliant, hard-working people from very low-income backgrounds, at the same time that it’s horribly unsettling to the parents of low-ambition, go-through-the-motions teens from middle-income America.

[Don’t get me wrong, professional certification will still have its role. Surgeons, dentists, operators of heavy machinery, and hundreds more job classifications will require special training in state-accredited programs, culminating in tests and certification. But the presumption that the 4-year undergraduate degree is the precursor to such specific study will be broken.]

Which brings me back to high school. It’s one thing to turn one’s tassle, take a life-guarding job for the summer, and self-importantly drive off to University X in September. Administrators and parents applaud a job well done, and dust their hands of another class. But it’s something very different to factor quadratic equations one day, and struggle to self-network, set up temporary domicile, build reputation and secure health insurance the next. John Knowles expresses nostalgia for those last months of adolescent boys’ innocence, awaiting a WWII draft in A Separate Peace. For today’s young people, it’s not so much a leap from innocence, as an incompetent, self-absorbed, and morally empty tripping into a hyper-cost-conscious, commoditized, automated, decentralized, transient, unforgiving reality, to which their “preparation” has been exactly wrong. For those touted as the brightest students, the narcissistic emphasis on self-enrichment, individual achievement, and stylized pretending at community engagement instill attitudes and behaviors that adults would find abhorrent to work with in a team, to manage as an employee, or to be married to. For those that endured, rather than enjoyed high school, it’s hard to say what could have been of those years. Dreams, creativity, rebellious spirit and outside commitments have been hollowed out by a relentless daily process into which those things didn’t serve any purpose. They will have to recover and rebuild a part of their intrinsic selves. Young adulthood will not consist of gym coaches, history tests and algebraic equations, after all, but the potential energies of these students will have to be discovered from scratch.

I know I’m making gross simplifications. I know that numerous teachers are reaching above and beyond to identify students’ special capacities, to encourage extra-curricular projects and increasingly to train in vocational skills. But here’s the point. These are added-onto a thing that is called high school, where pre-defined curricula, standardized testing, arbitrary timing, and college prep are at the core. My argument might come across as a No shit moment, but it’s precisely because we accept these things as the DNA of high school, that high school cannot adapt to what’s coming.

So what comes next? I believe that an alternative model for teen learning is emerging at the periphery. Homeschooling was the first wave, but the mainstream looked at is as inaccessible-- too demanding of parents, too nerdy, too weird. Even among homeschoolers, few continue through the teen years, and very few take a try-and-see, exploratory approach (the most common posting on homeschool Facebook groups, I think, is “Can anybody recommend a curriculum for my xx-year old?”). But the very small try-and-see group is onto something. Their teens remain close to their parents, follow social and political issues, read books out of curiosity, visit foreign universities, speak multiple languages, intern at real jobs, participate at their churches, and volunteer when nobody is keeping track.

I believe we can learn from and expand this approach through a million local efforts in families, community groups, churches, synagogues and mosques.

Learning cluster in Kabul,
Afghanistan. Learn more about them at:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/
breakaway-learning-project-
kabul-kids/x/17612837#/

I believe that a new format called “cluster learning” will foster thoughtful, creative, and brave young people from the roots of parents, pastors and mentors. They’ll meet in living rooms and coffee shops and church basements. They’ll be a tangle of laptop chargers and headsets, a jumbled bunch of different-aged young people reading and skype-chatting with tutors and taking online courses, in between talking with their supervising mentor, or playing frisbee together at the park. They’ll come and go some months studying, and some at a homestay in another country, at an internship or visiting a university campus.

This learning cluster in Bo City, Sierra Leone,
is still short of furniture, but students are pretty happy
to be working with tutors and mentors,
taking university-level courses and one-on-one
chats for $24/month.

It won’t look like much, and it might take a few more years than high school, but each one will be navigating her own path, racking up her own kind of credentials, and moving eyes-wide-open into the new adult reality.

Defenders of high schools have already tried all means of discrediting this movement (religious fanatical, neo-conservative, anti-diversity, etc), but it won’t help their identity crisis. And when some states introduce vouchers, the exodus of the brightest, most self-disciplined and motivated students toward cluster-learning will strengthen the perception that public high schools are behavior-management facilities. Their adherence to group-management and an outcomes-driven approach will deepen their alienation from individualized learning, as their identity crisis goes from bad to worse.

Could high schools be saved from becoming the next shuttered Main Streets? Yes, but like Main

Don't let these become another
asphalt wasteland.

Street retailers, a massive and irreversible dislocation is coming. Unless states can loosen rules governing standardization and outcomes-focus in secondary education, high schools themselves

Maybe time for another sofa.

will have to stop being high schools in order to be relevant. If they can reinvent themselves, they are local assets that could be re-modeled as smaller, cozier, flex-use spaces offering ready mentors, tutors, wifi, devices and other resources. (Personally, I would prefer a comfy Airbnb space or a coffee shop, but hey, some people dig painted cinder blocks and Lysol-smell).

I hope that the transition can be a productive one, like the small towns that have creatively re-invented their Main Streets. Parents and community leaders should look at 15 and 17-year olds as emerging 20- and 25-year olds. They need choice, risks, and agency in their lives. Because the “next thing” is going to be a lot less comfortable and certain than it was before.

What’s the difference between an identity-verified certificate and course-credit?

It seems like an obvious enough question. Imagine arriving at Walmart and being presented with a pre-filled shopping cart at a price far beyond what you had wanted to spend and containing numerous items you could see that you didn’t want. You could alternatively take your own cart, walk up and down the aisles and select merchandise yourself, and it would cost 1/100th of the pre-fill price to get the products you actually wanted.

Everyone looks up to you when you're
pushing this shopping cart 

Sounds like a ridiculous choice, right? But try to imagine that the pre-filled shopping cart is the socially-prized way to shop. You had to compete through a tortuous and uncertain process to have the right to purchase it, and your family and community congratulated you when you got that chance. It represents belonging to something. It comes with a bumper sticker and a sweatshirt that tell everyone you’ve got this cart. And it’s so overpriced and laiden with unnecessary extras, that it seems like only people of a higher caliber are pushing this kind of cart around. 

If you’re the parent of a 16-18 year-old, you know what I’m talking about.

Not that a la carte shopping in higher education is anything new. Udemy was founded in 2009, Udacity in 2011, edX, Coursera and FutureLearn in 2012. Identity-verified course certificates soon followed, along with subscription-based specializations. Technology that tracks students' eye movements holds promise to improve student engagement and identity-assurance. The potential unbundling of how young people study, explore and certify is more than six years old, but the preference for the pre-filled shopping cart stubbornly remains.

Let’s consider some prices. University of Michigan offers a 5-course specialization in Applied Data Science with Python on Coursera. With each course fairly intensive and requiring 4 weeks, let’s assume equivalent of 8 “credit hours” for the whole specialization. Coursera offers the first 7 days free, and then charges $49 per month to continue. So that’s just under 250 bucks. On campus in Ann Arbor as a part-time undergrad in the Computer Science Department, you’d pay $6,832 as a Michigan resident and $17,880 as a non-resident for those 8 credits (you’d save only slightly by enrolling full-time). MIT, the incubator of edX, has put a huge stock of courseware onto MIT OCW for free. But 8 credit hours physically in Cambridge, MA would cost just under $25,000. The student could also have chosen Codecademy, Hackerrank, or Udemy as pathways to mastering Python and machine-learning, making great strides for well under $100.

The continuing preference of families/government/large employers/schools/communities that teens should be channeled toward a 4-year undergraduate degree based on competitive selection, full-time enrollment, and single-institution loyalty seems like an irrational consumer decision. But its persistence shows us how powerfully social cues drive our behavior. The fact that University of Michigan, Yale, Harvard, MIT and scores of other high-priced universities give away their course content free or nearly free, indicates how strongly they expect young people and future employers to differentiate an online, identity-verified course certificate from “credit,” and that from “degree-granting credit”. High schools establish the basis for this difference with Advanced Placement tracks, usually a very narrow selection of courses promising potential college “credit” if students perform well on exams. The same credibility is not given to an identity-verified certificate from any of the thousands of online university courses that a teen might take. The message is clear: those courses “don’t count”.

This view is underscored in American education policies. A 2017 Brookings study examines high-performing secondary students in a sample of states where high schools send students to community colleges to take advanced classes not available on their premises. The report concludes that the additional cost is not warranted, and that “the public cost for a high school student to take a three-credit class via dual enrollment was actually higher than if the student waited to complete high school and took the same three-credit class once she got to college”. The use of the term “credit” as a presumed currency deserves greater attention. Why had the researchers not compared the costs of students walking down the hall to an open room with wifi, logging into edX accounts, and taking any one of thousands of university courses, or tutorials on Udemy or Udacity for that matter? The policy implications go further. Families can only apply 529 educational savings distributions to “for-credit” tuition costs (and since January, up to $10,000 per year for K-12 school tuition). FAFSA assesses need-based financial aid of “for-credit” enrollment. Student loans are defined, and interest eligible for tax credit, when applied to “for-credit” study. “Credit” is more than just a word. It has become the underlying justification for the irrational, over-priced product bundle that is the “undergraduate degree”.

Bryan Caplan’s January 2018 critique of the 4-year undergraduate degree should be required reading for parents, counsellors and teens. He takes on the well-guarded myth that college is a transformative experience, repeated ad nauseum in college promotional materials, that it turns young people into critical thinkers or develops a lifelong love of learning. University promoters talk about some kind of alchemy in the classroom where smart young people and brilliant professors get together and "something magic happens" as one university president called it. But Caplan presents embarrassing data about how little effort most students put into it, how little is remembered, how little is applied later, and how overwhelmingly more stock is placed in the diploma-paper than the entire process. 

Understanding our strange preference for bundling makes us ask a few things about our motivations for learning in general. Do consumers find utility in the incremental process-- that is, conversations, ideas, histories, methods, problems? If we saw utility in each of these things, then we would want to assign value accordingly. We would be like cable customers who really want to know whether the phone, data and television plans serve us better individually or all together. After all, who would sign onto a cable bundle that they knew cost more than all the individual parts?

But then again, maybe if we saw value in these things, our teens would already be on Udemy and edX. We’d be inside of libraries more often. We’d be making and doing things that didn’t award “credit”.

But maybe many of us aren’t sure about the value of the incremental learning process, and that’s precisely why we continue purchasing bundles. If that’s the case, then the sweatshirt, the bumper

It feels good to have a college sweatshirt
in this group. 

sticker, the camaraderie of other elite shoppers, and ultimately resting our heads on our pillows at night knowing that our confused/unambitious/uncertain/wandering teen has “made it”, is really what we’re after. 

And that’s OK.

As long as I’m not the one paying for it.