Changing Higher Education

Knowledge Management: an expanded role for higher ed in a changing world

In a post back in 2006 entitled What business are we in?, I suggested that a broader definition of the business of higher education might be Knowledge Management. At the time, the pieces were not in place to envisage how such a definition might usefully extend the roles of the university. Some key pieces now seem to be in place. Lifelong post- baccalaureate learning has become a career necessity for an ever-increasing number of workers; employers are struggling to hire and retain employees with skill sets needed to meet challenges and opportunities created by rapidly developing technologies and pressures of globalization; the development of competency based stackable modules has opened up the potential for just-in-time learning that meets career needs of learners and simultaneously fits with knowledge needs of employers; and the centrality of the traditional academic degree hierarchy is being challenged by development of competency-based descriptions of workforce needs. The present COVID -19 upheaval of life in general has upended the job market, and the eventual recovery of the economy can perhaps be facilitated by a universities playing a more expansive role in meeting knowledge needs of industry. This post considers how a Knowledge Management role for universities might be envisaged today.

 

 

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.

Whither alternative (and improved) credentialing?

I recently served on a panel at a meeting organized by the California Higher Education Innovation Council to look at "Alternative Credentials and Unbundling the Degree: Meeting Employer Needs or Short-Circuiting Proven Approaches?" Our panel was challenged beforehand by its moderator, Ryan Craig, to imagine how conditions had to change over the next decade in order for alternative credentialing ("e.g. nanodegrees and badges" according to the meeting invitation) to become a major force in higher education. I will make no attempt to review the many arguments advanced on this subject at the meeting, but simply describe some of my own thoughts (however tentative) that were stimulated by this challenge.

There are obviously three broad constituencies interested in questions of higher education credentialing: students, government, and employers. My belief is that the most important of these in determining whether alternative credentialing takes hold will be employers: if employers find it truly useful, most students will enthusiastically sign on, and government will see little reason to block something that employers and students find to be of real value. 

The problem with CA higher education is that no one asks what the problem is

The advertisements in a newspaper are more full of knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.
Henry Ward Beecher

The editorial board of the Los Angeles times weighed in on December 29 on the funding situation of the UC system with Finally, UC gets budget attention  . This latest Times editorial joined earlier ones about the UC in demonstrating a certain naivety on the part of the Times editorial board in matters of higher education in California. The editorial strongly supports President Napolitano's solution to the UC problems - send more money - and egregiously mischaracterizes Governor Brown's proposals as "mechanistic". If only the UC issues were simply about "budget"!

Now here is something that could be really disruptive

David G.W.Birch recently posted a very thought-provoking contribution Badges? We Don't Need No Linkedin Badges on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network. In it, he argues that social networks are beginning to replace other intermediaries (hacks) in the trust networks that we use to build efficiencies in society. These hacks are such things as credit ratings, badges, dress codes, and (most pertinent for this post) diplomas - they increase our confidence that we understand the characteristics of people with whom we interact. However, through social networks, which enable everyone to contact everyone else instantaneously, we can now get real information about the actual knowledge, productivity, etc of an individual. As a result:

As social capital (the result of the computations across the social graph) becomes accessible and useable, the hacks will fade. A college degree will be worth less than it is now. Using hacks instead of real data is just not good enough in a connected world. Google was famous for its rigorous hiring criteria, but when its analysts looked at “tens of thousands” of interview reports and attempted to correlate them with employee performance, they found “zero” relationship. The company’s infamous interview brainteasers turned out not to predict anything. Even more interesting: Nor did school grade and test scores. As job performance data racks up, the proportion of Google employees with college degrees has decreased over time.

A step forward in California, an ambiguous step at HLC

California's Democratic State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg has just introduced a very important bill called An online student access platform (with details in amendments):

Creates a faculty-led, quality-first framework allowing online course providers to have strategically selected courses approved and placed in a state-level clearinghouse through which students may access the courses and receive credit at the UC, CSU, and California Community Colleges

This bill seeks to remedy the very significant lack of capacity in California public higher education that is reflected in the enormous number of applicants unable ot gain entrance into the systems, large wait-lists for seats in important classes, and the delayed times-to-graduation.

Should professors be replaced by a computer screen?

Cathy Davidson,  the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English at Duke University, has just published a post on the HASTAC site that I recommend to all. Its conclusion is clearly conveyed in its attention-grabbing title: If We Profs Don't Reform Higher Ed, We'll Be Re-Formed (and we won't like it). Her message is further underlined by inclusion of the slide (above) which closes many of her presentations.

Davidson discusses four reasons why there is currently a great deal of discussion about replacing professors with computer screens:

(1) Too many students worldwide want to go to college to be able to accommodate them all.

(2)  College in the U.S. costs too much

(3) Online education promises to be lucrative to for-profits

(4)  Our current educational system (kindergarten through professional school) is outmoded. 

 Davidson makes excellent cases for each of these points in her post. She closes by briefly describing some of the efforts she has encountered in her travels that are beginning to address some of these issues. Rather than weakening her excellent arguments by attempting to summarize them, I will simply recommend that you read the original.

I would add another reason to this excellent list that is a slight modification of the 3rd point above:

(5) Online education promises to be lucrative to nonprofits

Just as Davidson says that (3) really bothers her, I will say that (5) really bothers me. Many of the traditional nonprofit universities and colleges are jumping into the online business because they see it as a new source of much needed revenue. As a former administrator, I understand the need for new revenues as much as anyone, so I am a fan of increasing revenues. My concern is that in most cases the online initiatives are not being done in a way that incorporates the online education into the educational mission of the institution - it is a financial, not educational advance. As a result, little emphasis is being placed on educational effectiveness in many of the new online programs. I have great fear that when the educational outcomes of many of these new programs are evaluated, they will be shown to be relatively ineffective. This result will lead many to conclude that online education is intrinsically inferior, when all it will really show is that inferior pedagogy leads to inferior learning. Nonetheless, such a negative, albeit flawed, analysis could be a big setback in the much needed expansion of effective online learning in 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?  

********

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.

The coming shortfall in workers with postsecondary credentials

The Georgetown University Center on Education and the workforce has just published a fascinating report entitled Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements through 2018:

The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce shows that by 2018, we will need 22 million new college degrees—but will fall short of that number by at least 3 million postsecondary degrees, Associate’s or better. In addition, we will need at least 4.7 million new workers with postsecondary certificates…..

The shortfall—which amounts to a deficit of 300,000 college graduates every year between 2008 and 2018—results from burgeoning demand by employers for workers with high levels of education and training. Our calculations show that America’s colleges and universities would need to increase the number of degrees they confer by 10 percent annually, a tall order.

Their analysis suggests that most workers with a high school diploma or less are working in 3 occupational clusters that either pay low wages or are in decline.  Job growth is to be found in those areas that require non-repetitive tasks, jobs that typically require some level of postsecondary education.

As noted above, the shortfall in postsecondary degree and certificate recipients will be very difficult to fill in. Given the constraints (both fiscal and mission) on the non-profit world of higher education, it is unlikely to be the major source of the needed additional graduates. 

For-profit higher education institutions, because of their flexibility, costs, and access to capital, are likely to move most aggressively to provide the needed educational opportunities.  Indeed, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, a recent Eduventures report predicts that :

For-profit universities will have 42 percent of the adult-undergraduate market by 2019, nearly doubling their current share…

By that time, for-profits will lead both public and private universities in the number of adults enrolled. They will have approximately 60,000 more adult students than will publics, and 800,000 more than privates.

I have not seen the report, but these predictions certainly must be based on analyses such as can be found in the Georgetown report.   I made similar points with respect to the situation in California in an earlier post.

As the powers-that-be in Washington move to control some very real abuses by some members of the for-profit higher education world, let us hope that they note the critical role that that world will play in meeting the educational needs of the next decades.  New rules should certainly address egregious behavior, but without destroying the badly needed innovation and drive that the sector brings to higher education.

For-profit higher education moves to fill gaps left by state budget shortfalls

 
 UB Daily for December 23, 2009 pointed me in the direction of a very interesting article in the Times-Herald, which covers the Sonoma and Napa regions in northern California. The article is entitled “Private Universities Covering the Gaps in Higher Education.” The gaps of the title are those resulting from the crippling state budgetary cuts to public higher education in California, and the “private universities” that are rushing in to alleviate the problems are all in the for-profit sector. Although several for-profits are mentioned, The University of Phoenix is the focus of this article. 

According to the Times-Herald, a northern California official of The University of Phoenix reports that they are seeing increased enrollments due to two cut-related effects: inability of students to get needed courses in community colleges, and inability of students to transfer between different state institutions. The Times-Herald reports that In order to meet these needs:

University of Phoenix officials are working on a strategic plan with nearby Solano Community College to assure its students have good access to the school, said Jo Hoffmeier, University of Phoenix vice president of community relations and product safety....The local University of Phoenix campus is also working to improve its alliances with California State University campuses nand University of California at Berkeley to assure access to as many students as possible, Hoffmeier said.

Thus, the University of Phoenix is working proactively with the public sector to maximize opportunities for students under changing conditions in higher education.   I believe that this type of public-private cooperation is going to be increasingly important in meeting the learning needs of future students. Strong support for this belief can be found in a recent USC doctoral dissertation by Lauren Cooper.   

Cooper’s  USC dissertation is entitled Market-state-based planning for nation-state style prosperity: Reinventing the higher education “promise” to create a “win/win/win” for California.  In it, she argues that higher education capacity discussions need to shift from a demand-driven model to a workforce-driven model.   Using primarily projections made by the Public Policy Institute of California for the number of college degree-holding workers required to satisfy industry needs in California in 2025, Cooper shows that there is likely to be a massive shortfall of such workers by 2025 if long-standing growth rates in the UC and CSU systems are maintained.  (In fact, the current budgetary mess in the state has led to shrinkage of both systems, so Cooper’s analyses can be considered “best case”.) Cooper’s projections show that to fill in the CSU portion of the 2025 shortfall, the system will need to open 12 new campuses prior to 2025 - an unimaginable outcome given the finances and political situation in the state.   Cooper concludes, therefore, that the public sector alone cannot meet future workforce needs:

As components of the higher education system, the UC, the CSU, community colleges, and private and for-profit universities will each need to play a significant role in the future success of the state....Reorienting the state’s current trajectory will require nontraditional thinking and innovative solutions to change the current course.

As Cooper notes, in much of the world, for-profit higher education is stepping in to meet capacity problems that cannot be met within government's budgets.   It is neither surprising - nor unreasonable - that we increasingly see a similar movement in the United States as the state is progressively less able to meet educational needs.  

In the situation described by the Times-Herald, it seems that the negative effects of state budget cuts have lead to the positive result that the for-profit University of Phoenix is working collaboratively with various components of the California public higher education system to help meet student needs.  The differing viewpoints held by the partners in these collaborations suggest that the interactions have the potential to be positive for all sides, especially if they lead to discussions of some of the critical questions for higher education.  Among these questions might be: what should be the goals of higher education in this changing world?; how can the cost of providing higher education be contained?; and, what are the most effective approaches to student learning?  

However, in order for these various players to produce a real “system” of higher education that meets the needs of the students and the workforce needs of the state, as suggested by Cooper, a number of things must happen.   Most important, and perhaps most difficult: transferability of course credits must be assured amongst the various institutions.  This is not unlike the problem being faced in Europe with the Bologna process.  Successful broad transferability requires a focus on learning outcome measures, rather than on inputs or student hours in the classroom.  As Europe is showing, it is possible for a very diverse set of institutions to agree on desired learning outcomes for various educational steps.  The focus now is on the difficult task of creating outcomes measures that are recognized by all parties.   The Bologna process, although primarily involving public institutions, does include a number of for-profit institutions.  Thus,  there is no reason that a similar process involving Cooper’s players could not succeed here in California (or other states).  This would enable the coupling the strengths and resources of the different sectors in order to meet the challenges of providing high quality education in times of constrained resources.  

Offshoring Executives, not Executive Jobs

The January 12,2007 Los Angeles Times has a fascinating article entitled “Cisco’s executive migration.” Cisco hopes to have 20% of its senior managers working at its Globalization Center in Bangalore by 2010.  They will be a “mixture of rising stars from San Jose and Bangalore and  talent plucked from acquisitions and competitors worldwide” - a very international mix.  IBM, it turns out, already  has about 150 executives living in emerging markets.  This includes their Global Procurement office, now located in Shenzhen, China, which moved last summer with its American vice president in tow.   

The author of the article, Rachel Konrad, says that all of this shows that “moving resources to far-flung parts of the world has evolved from cost arbitrage to strategic imperative”.  This conclusion is very much in keeping with the conclusions of Hagel and Brown that I discussed in What has offshoring got to do with higher education?

Anna Lee Saxon, dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley is quoted as saying,” People are finally realizing that the only way to create cultural capabilities, linguistic skills and personal social relationships is to move executives abroad.”  We in universities should know (but often seem not to) that an extended stay abroad  is the only way to accomplish the same goals with students.  Education in this age of globalization will certainly call for greatly increased emphasis on a period spent in another culture - at least if we want to turn out the kinds of graduates that Cisco and IBM are looking for.  See also my extended comments on time abroad in Modularity in university higher education: Education . 

Offshoring moves up the education ladder

The Los Angeles Times reported on March 6, 2006 that advanced education is providing less of a buffer against offshoring than had been supposed. The article quotes Alan Blinder, a Princeton economics professor and former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, as estimating that one-third of the total jobs in the US were susceptible to offshoring. Regarding the role of education in providing protection, he is quoted, “More education has been the right answer for the past decades, but I am not so convinced that it is the right course” for coping with the upheavals of globalization. (See related article by Blinder in Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006)