Higher education

Variations on a theme:

Calling for the disruption of liberal arts colleges—in order to save liberal education

Small liberal arts colleges are feeling the brunt of demographic changes and America’s declining faith in the higher education system overall, as evidenced by recent closures and mergers. That the situation is boiling over despite correlations between degree attainment and higher lifetime earnings shouldn’t just be chalked up to learners being short-sighted. Financial risk is indeed growing, and increased earnings 40 years post-graduation don’t pay next week’s student loan bills.

Education, Disrupted

Michelle Weise, the senior vice president of workforce strategies at Strada Education Network and the chief innovation officer for the Strada Institute for the Future of Work, has written that although 93% of CEOs surveyed by PwC recognized “the need to change their strategy for attracting and retaining talent,” a stunning 61% revealed that they hadn’t yet taken any steps to do so. Employees seem to agree. According to a recent survey by Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning and Degreed, nearly half of employees are disappointed in their employer’s learning and development programs.

But there are some notable exceptions to this prevailing trend. For instance, in July 2019, Amazon announced that it would “spend $700 million over six years on postsecondary job training for 100,000 of its soon-to-be 300,000 workers.” For now, Amazon says it intends to outsource that training to traditional colleges and universities. But once Amazon has begun to provide the bridge for that training, it’s not hard to imagine that it will be well positioned to create that training itself — without the “middle man” of colleges and universities — in the future.4 Although Amazon’s competitors will undoubtedly keep a close eye on its training moves, perhaps the education industry ought to keep an even closer eye, given that those moves may herald a total transformation in the landscape of learning, from college through retirement.

Could micro-credentials compete with traditional degrees?