Blog

Rob Sabal and Robert Lusch, University of Arizona

Traditional colleges and universities are confronting challenges unlike any other time in their history.  The situation has been widely reported: the cost of a college degree continues to rise faster than inflation or median family income; to pay for college, students are taking on enormous debt; the job prospects for many college graduates is, at best, uncertain; and lower-cost alternative providers are pulling students away from traditional institutions.  A 2012 NACUBO report documents enrollment declines at 45% of the 383 private non-profit institutions that it surveyed.

Government and industry leaders are calling on colleges and universities to be both more affordable and more accessible to a wider range of the population; to graduate a higher percentage of their incoming students; and to better educate and prepare the students that do graduate.  A college education has always been expected to fuel social mobility, but lately, it is reproducing class divisions and income inequality; there is consensus that this has to change.

In order for colleges and universities to thrive, not just survive, they need to embrace a service-centered model of higher education.  This service-centered model embraces many new realities that currently bedevil traditional institutions: that there are now more “non-traditional” students attending college than 18 to 23 years olds; that life-long learning is essential for employment in a post-industrial economy; that information, knowledge, and educational material is abundant and easily accessible, unbound by time and place constraints; and that students and their families are more pragmatic than in the past—wanting assurances that a college degree will lead to better employment prospects that will not only offset debt but will also lead to a more comfortable and meaningful life.

For more than a century, colleges and universities have relied on an industrial model of higher education.  The industrial model conceives of students as raw material to be shaped and honed.  It requires students to be taught: people of a particular age, come to a specific place, are present for a specific amount of time, and check off a certain set of requirements.  The process is analogous to an auto assembly line.  The degree certifies the completion of the program; getting to the end of the line—not the learning or the educational attainment—is what it’s all about.  Traditional higher education is an output-oriented system that conceives of a student as a product of the university.  Just as car companies identify their output by model year, i.e., a 2013 Chevy Volt, higher education brands students by graduating class.  This spring, all across the country, colleges and universities launched the class of 2013.

The service model conceives of students as co-creators of their education.  As people in the process of self-definition and development, students seek knowledge, skills, and abilities.  They undertake this learning both to satisfy curiosity and to prepare for the workplace and a meaningful life.  Co-creation is made more possible because knowledge and information is no longer confined to books, journal publications, or face-to-face interaction but is widely distributed and easily accessible in text, image, and graphic forms to those with access to computers or mobile devices.

Students who have access to the Internet live in a world of abundant information, obtainable whenever and wherever they need it.  Beyond Wikkipedia and other educational sites, there is ready access to free or low-cost lessons, tutorials, and courses on Youtube, Lynda.com, Coursera, edX, Khan Academy, and Udemy.  All indications suggest that this explosion of learning and information sites will grow exponentially in the forthcoming decades.

The incremental shift from teaching to learning underway in higher education is a move toward a co-creation model.  To embrace this change, colleges should adopt project-based and problem-based modes of investigation.  Rote and fragmented “just in case” learning is replaced by “just in time” learning, as students discover what they need to know and immediately apply it to a problem or project.  In this model, the university values real and consequential work as a mode of learning.  Students experience the full value of the their education as they are confronted with the same kinds of tasks and expectations that they might find in a workplace and in other aspects of their lived experience.  “Value-in-use” relies on the co-creation process as contrasted to the old dominant paradigm, “value-in-exchange,” where one party pays and the other party provides.

Ideally, the co-creation model swaps standard length courses with a variety of labs—faculty initiated scholarship that can involve students at any level.  Teams of students in sciences, social sciences, humanities, art and design, engineering, business, law, and communications collaborate on product development, business formation, community services, creative projects, or policy research.  Framing questions, analyzing problems, conducting research, integrating information, collaborating on tasks, testing solutions, developing technical skills, writing, speaking and incorporating feedback are competencies that can be developed through applied project-based and problem-based education.  As students progress in their skills and abilities they can contribute to teams that focus on intractable problems that increasingly characterize the world they live in.  It is exciting to imagine teams of students researching and developing innovative approaches to some aspect of clean water access, housing, energy conservation and alternatives, public health issues, environmental concerns, hunger, or one of the many other problems that we confront.

Shifting from degree completion based on outputs (courses) to competencies will be a difficult transition for colleges and universities.  The entire business model rests on the course/credit-hour structure.  Yet a new approach is critically important as employers (and soon students and parents) care less about a college degree and more about the demonstrable skills and abilities gained through the college experience.  Employers increasingly seek “T-shaped” graduates, those who combine a broad range of knowledge with depth in a particular skill-set.  Certifying competencies in critical thinking, critical analysis of texts, creative problem solving, writing, speaking, systems thinking and collaborating, instead of simply time spent in the classroom, will make the case for the value of a college degree.

Here’s how it might work. The college determines the skills and abilities it wishes student to develop and the level of skill and ability it expects students to demonstrate in order to earn a degree.  There is a base level for every competency and more advanced levels for particular areas of specialization.  Every entering student is assessed and his/her ability level is determined: beginner, apprentice, proficient, expert, or master.

The college offers a number of labs every year and posts positions that are available for students and the level that is required to participate.  A student chooses a lab and is placed in a role commensurate with his/her qualifications, regardless of age or class rank.  Each student would have learning objectives that s/he would pursue during the project.  At any time a student could test to see if his/her level had improved sufficiently to advance to a new role on the same or another project.  At the end of the project, teams would undergo a thorough review based on the studio review and critique process that has been successfully employed for years at art, design, architecture, and some engineering schools.

Of course, opportunities would have to exist for individual students to undertake their own in-depth research or to sole author a work of creative writing, art or scholarship.  Depending on the mission and focus of the institution this might be reserved for work at the highest and most specialized levels.

One of the advantages of competency-based assessment is the opportunity for students to show tangible accomplishment along the road to mastery.  Colleges should adopt Mozilla’s “badge” initiative so that students get real credentials on their path toward a degree.  While it is difficult to generalize because of the way students are tracked, it is fair to say that at least 30% of first time, full time, undergraduate students start but don’t complete the requirements for a college degree.  Many of these students leave college with enormous debt but without the higher earning potential the degree affords.  Colleges would better serve students by offering badges—emblems of certified skills and abilities—something that a student could promote to a prospective employer.

Badges for skills and competencies could form a higher education currency that would allow a student to co-create his or her education across a range of institutions.  Some badges would be awarded from industry training programs or for public-service work.  Graduate schools might use badges to help shape their entering class.  One could imagine that some of the most sought after graduates may be those with badges from a broad range of institutions: a local community college, summer employment and training programs, a state college, and perhaps from a global research universities such as Stanford and Cambridge.

Taken together, this vision of a college or university fundamentally changes the population the institution might serve.  Anyone at any age or any stage of learning would be welcome.  A person could enroll in order to develop one set of skills or many.  They could work mostly at their own pace.  They could demonstrate achievement by the badges they earn along the way.  Their relationship to the institution could continue over the whole of a person’s lifetime, addressing changing needs and interests through the course of several careers.

As institutions re-imagine themselves as “learning service providers,” they could diversify offerings to include both virtual and place-based (but not necessarily on-campus) workshops, seminars, simulations, boot camps, peer-to-peer forums, think tanks, and mentor networks.  They could also see themselves as part of a learning ecosystem as they collaborate with other institutions in offering both project and problem based labs and badges for competencies.   As online educational content proliferates and services disaggregate, colleges could become “education guides,” helping students create unique pathways that bundle educational services from MOOCs, online courses, workshops, traditional courses, and competency based instruction.  Colleges and universities could offer testing and certification—verifying that the student had completed the work and attesting to the skills and abilities that the certificate represents.

College and Universities would no longer use selectivity as an imprimatur of quality.  An institution’s reputation would be based on how much the college or university experience contributed to the students’ competence.  Everyone should question the value of the education at an institution where a student enters and exits at the same level of competence, even if it is an expert level.  Learning gains would have to become the new measure of institutional quality.

Traditional college and universities are in the best position to serve the higher education needs of students across the country, but not without dramatic structural and pedagogical changes—and soon.  By embracing a service model, colleges and universities shift their emphasis from faculty research and teaching to faculty/student inquiry and learning.  Institutions that adopt a learning co-creation model as central to their mission will discover new ways to thrive in the world of educational abundance that we now inhabit.