Changing Higher Education

California still not addressing the workforce gap - plus ca change

Five years ago in a post, I described a thesis study by Lauren Cooper on potential solutions to the looming workforce gap in California. Her analysis was based primarily on projections of California workforce needs in 2025 made by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). Dr Cooper's analysis of the CSU - level workforce shortfall suggested that CSU needed to open 12 new campuses by 2025 to meet needs - an unlikely solution to the problems given the finances of California.

PPIC has just published an updated California workforce projection, this time aiming at 2030 needs. The new projections are similar to the earlier ones:

Our projections indicate that the demand for college graduates will outpace the supply by 2030, if current trends continue. The gap is substantial, with the economy needing 1.1 million more college graduates than the state will produce. But if the state, its educational institutions, and its people are able to improve educational outcomes, California and its residents will experience a much more successful future, with higher incomes, greater tax revenues, and lower use of social services.

Pretty much what we saw 5 years ago. Very few steps have been taken over this period to improve the situation, despite some strong efforts by Governor Brown to create movement.

The key to a better future for California residents is obviously the California public university sector. Thus far, that sector has proclaimed loudly and consistently that it cannot increase the number of graduates significantly without proportional increases in budget, i.e. it cannot find more effective and more efficient ways of educating students. This position is of very questionable merit, since numerous institutions around the country have rethought their educational approaches in order to increase participation without sacrificing educational outcomes - and in many cases have improved educational outcomes in the process.

But the bottom line remains, California's future prosperity is largely in the hands of a public higher education system that thus far has fiercely and successfully defended the status quo, supported by regents who view their job to be to protect the university rather than the State and its citizens. Surely, there is a responsible adult somewhere in the mix.

MIT's self-disruption: an update

In The future of MIT undergraduate education: a case study of disruption, I described two reports from MIT that laid out a stunning vision for the future of MIT undergraduate education. Among the suggestions of the reports are that education of the future will be unbundled and disaggregated, with online components enabling flexible time scales and location-independent participation. The second and final of the two reports calls for, among other things, bold experimentation to realize the vision,  and a recommendation that MIT move forward to consider the types of certifications that can be supported through MITx and edX. 

MIT recently announced a very interesting new program that embodies these two aspects of these reports: a new twist to MIT's one year Master's in Supply Chain Management. This modified degree program is, in effect, modularized and disaggregated. The first semester's courses will be available through edX, enabling students around the world to access them for free. Students who do well in the courses, pass a proctored exam and pay a small certification fee will be awarded a new MITx MicroMaster's certificate. For those students who want to continue with the full Master's program, the MicroMaster's greatly enhances the likelihood of acceptance into the on-campus program. Accepted students could then complete the Master's in one semester on campus.  MIT describes this as an example of "inverted" admissions in which students first try the courses, then apply for admission: 

Inverted admission has the potential to disrupt traditional modes of access to higher education....We’re democratizing access to a master’s program for learners worldwide.

Students who enter the program in this way will be charged only for their one semester on campus, saving half the price of the traditional program.

One can only imagine that MIT views this as a way to do a great study of the effectiveness of their brand of online learning versus traditional classroom learning: which group of students does the best in the second semester?  And what of the student demographics? Does this approach bring increased geographic or gender diversity to the class?

When the reports referred to above were first released, Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX and Professor at MIT, imagined a future MIT where freshmen would spend the first year taking on line courses, then come to campus for (most of) the remainder of their degree. This new program also should be providing useful data for considerations of that future.

Finally, the MITx MicroMaster's itself is an important step. This is a credential that MIT expects will have career value for those who have earned it. That is, employers will value it and reward its holders appropriately. Thus, the program is structured so that it can create value even for those students who decide not to continue to the Master's.  In addition, MIT is actively discussing with other universities the possibility of having the MicroMaster's convertable into credits in their own Master's programs. In other words, MIT is hard at work creating a name brand for its MITx MicroMaster's:

"The new MicroMaster’s is an important modular credential for the digital age, and promises to serve as academic currency in a continuous, lifelong-learning world,” says Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. “It also affords an evolutionary path for universities in the face of mounting costs, and a way to leverage technology to blend online and on-campus learning pathways.”

Is this the beginning of the creation of a second brand at MIT?