Job fairs had lines down the block in 2010 when unemployment hit 8 million. As unemployment creeps … [+]
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The single most important job higher education will be asked to do over the next few years will be getting Americans back to work. With a staggering 38 million Americans unemployed, higher education will need to be laser focused on pathways to work that are affordable, shorter term than two or four-year degrees, and in demand. Affordable because the pandemic is disproportionately impacting the working poor, such as those in the restaurant and hotel industries, where the average annual salary is $30,000 (including tips). Fast, because the majority of the unemployed have little to no savings, so do not have the luxury of two or four years of retooling. In demand, because the poor have no buffer for making the wrong choice of field or for exploring possibilities.
While higher education does many things — think research and scholarship, coming-of-age education for high school graduates, sports entertainment — there is always one job that takes priority over all others at any given time and it changes with the evolving needs of society. In the sixties, it was advancing America’s STEM fields in the face of Soviet scientific achievements, embodied by Sputnik, and the Cold War. Then it was expanding access to more people, and then it shifted to college completion (as we realized that far too many starting college were not completing it). When unemployment reached 8 million during the last recession, the priority for higher education was providing education that led to secure, good paying jobs.
Aligning post-secondary education to workforce opportunities and employer needs has remained the top priority (one that traditional higher education has met with ambivalence), even as the economy recovered and we neared full employment in many regions of the country. This was so because automation, artificial intelligence, and dire predictions of coming job displacement kept our national discourse focused on the future of work. We have thus seen a migration of students to health care, which seems immune from automation, or to technology, which seems part of the winning team in what many called the new Fourth Industrial Age, the age of algorithms instead of assembly lines. Health care and technology have seemed safe bets for robot proof careers.
What will be needed of us now as unemployment steadily rises to unprecedented levels? My university just completed a survey of almost 900 people recently unemployed or forced to switch to part-time work. They were from 47 states and represented a broad swath of educational backgrounds, from those with some high school education up to master degrees holders and an average age of 34.
What did we learn?
· People in the hardest hit industries – retail and hospitality – want to change industries. Their number one choice is health care, despite the current financial crisis and layoffs in health care systems, and they rarely mention information technology as a desired industry. Perhaps because they are coming from people-centered industries.
· The majority recognize that they need new skills to make that shift and their number one criterion for choosing an educational program is “Learning skills specific to a particular job.”
· Importantly, they need that program to be affordable (most cited $110 to $243) and fast. The majority of respondents clustered around 15 to 17 days.
· Overwhelmingly, those surveyed want proof that the learning will unlock an opportunity – a job, an internship, or an interview.
· If the program is delivered online, it better be mobile first in design, as 96.6% of the respondents use a smartphone for their Internet access.
· Interestingly, for an industry that is exceedingly brand conscious, when choosing the learning they need now, “Having it be from a school I’ve heard of” is the least important factor in their choice, while convenience – “Being able to learn at a time that works for me” – is the number one criterion when cost is omitted as a factor.
Most worrying for anyone looking at the responses is the degree to which higher education is not designed to meet the needs of the unemployed. That’s not the job the four-year college system was built to perform, yet it is the single most important job it is being asked to do right now.
To meet the challenge, higher education needs to embrace three major changes in how it thinks about its work:
Focus on what students can do with what they know. Higher education mostly concerns itself with knowledge making (research and scholarship) and conveyance (publishing and teaching). It has been a largely unexamined article of faith that graduates could do the work required of them in their careers, as academic programs focused on what students should know. The focus must now shift to what students can actually do with what they know. Our survey respondents seek skills, employers think about jobs in terms of skills, and higher education must embrace skills or competencies as the real measure of learning, not the credit hour. The latter is good at telling us how long a student sat at a desk, but not what they know or, more importantly, can do.
Get really good at assessment. All those who support higher education — employers who hire graduates, funders, students and their families – need to know that students can live up to the claims we make for them as graduates. In a skills focused program, that means performance-based assessment. Higher education, which is generally poor at sound assessment practices, only does good performance based assessment in areas where our lives depend on a graduate’s demonstrated ability to do what we say they can. In aviation or health care, for example, we augment classroom assessment with clinical rounds, simulations, additional exams, and time under the watchful eye of an experienced professional. We need to get good at real world or authentic assessments that prove a student’s proficiency.
Deliver learning in smaller bundles of skills. Whether we call them micro-credentials or badges, we need to offer smaller packages of skills focused learning that carry some form of recognition and that stack along a pathway that eventually leads to a degree. While two and four year degrees will remain important milestones, we need more granularity in program offerings and credentials for those who need to urgently re-skill in order to rejoin the workforce.
Even for traditional campuses serving traditional age students, these changes yield enormous benefits and would improve the work we do with 17 and 18 year-old learners. They are a must for the 30 year old with kids, monthly rent to pay, and dwindling unemployment benefits. That student, often forgotten in the larger discussion of higher education, needs us to respond now, to respond in new ways, and to get them back to work.
