Changing Higher Education

Carl Camden and Michael Spence on the future of employment

The most recent McKinsey Quarterly (registration required) has a very interesting pair of interviews entitled The US Employment Challenge: Perspectives from Carl Camden and Michael Spence. Both of these relate to the question I have posed in  several posts - how do we need to be educating our students so that they can excel in this rapidly changing world?  

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Carl Camden, CEO of Kelly Services brings a though-provoking perspective to the subject of the changing nature of work and employment. He argues that we have generally not recognized the myriad implications of the increasingly short job cycle - the time for a job to appear and disappear, either in terms of a location or a whole category of jobs.  One of the major consequences is an increase in free-agent workers:

So jobs aren’t permanent, locations aren’t permanent, and workers are returning back to what I would call a free-agent type of work style. Independent contractors, part-time employees who move in and out of the workforce, temporary employees, consultants who move in and out of the workforce—that group of individuals in most of the industrialized world is already 25 to 35 percent of the workforce, on its way to becoming 50 percent of the workforce, I think, over the next decade.

Brief update on StraighterLine, one of my potential disruptors

In a recent post, I described several organizations that seemed to me to be potential disruptors on the higher education space.  StraighterLine, which focuses on offering introductory college coursework on line, is one of these.

StraighterLine has now issued its first "report card", a survey of their students. The survey looked at such things as student satisfaction, convenience, perception of course rigor, and whether the student was able to obtain credit from a college of their choice for the StraighterLine course. In brief, the students seemed highly pleased with the courses on all parameters. Importantly, over 90% of those who sought college credit for the course were able to obtain it.  

The response rate to the survey was modest, and it would have been nice to see some validity discussion in the survey. Nevertheless, the report card indicates that StraighterLine is finding strong student approval of its method of offering an inexpensive way to get college introductory courses online, and that those courses are being recognized and accepted by traditional institutions.  Sounds like a good step along the path of disruption! 

Moody's looks at student-debt problems

Moody's Analytics has published a very nice analysis of the student loan situation by Cristian Deritis :

In this study, we examine the rapid growth of the student loan industry over the past few years, the weakening performance of loan portfolios, and what these trends suggest for future performance and lending volumes.

I will not go through the interesting analysis here, but simply show two very powerful graphs from the paper, and jump to the conclusions. The first of these graphs shows the rapidly growing student loans balances, which continue to grow although total loan balances have been shrinking:

The second graph, similar to many I have shown before, demonstrates a major driver behind this growth in loans - higher education tuition increases compared to increases in other sectors:

Always impressive how increases in higher ed costs outpace the rest of the pack!