Our educational industrial complex is broken, time to reform higher education and student loans

Our educational industrial complex is broken, and swift reform is needed. College costs continue to rise much faster than inflation, and too many students are plowing themselves into debt and wasting years of their lives pursuing pointless degrees. Upon leaving college, these students are often surprised to discover that their degrees have little value. Of course, most colleges are liberal indoctrination centers, where conservative voices are few and often drowned out.

It is time for the federal government – and state and local governments – to stop picking winners and losers. Just as it is unfair for the federal government to recognize the American Bar Association as the sole accreditor of law schools and allow it to erect unnecessary hurdles to keep people from pursuing law degrees; just as it is indefensible for governments to subsidize unreliable solar and wind projects that drive up electricity bills; just as it is illegitimate for state governments to license hair braiders and interior designers to lock competitors out of the field; just as it is improper for the federal government to grant immunity to credit reporting agencies in spite of their negligence and incompetence; just as it is wrong for governments to deny poor people due process and allow predatory towing companies to sell their cars when they cannot afford exorbitant towing fees; and just as it is improper for states to subsidize moviemaking; so it is wrong for the federal government to shovel money to colleges via student loans.

To begin to address these problems, the federal government should do four things: privatize student loans once again, sell off its portfolio of student debt, allow students to discharge college debt in bankruptcy, tie lending rules to the value of a degree and require colleges to repay half of the remaining value of discharged loans.

The first step is the federal government ending its own college loans, but it should also sell off its student loan portfolio, which is nominally worth more than $1.5 trillion. Unfortunately, more than 40 percent of student loans are considered to be “in distress.” Furthermore, according to one estimate, 40 percent of student loan borrowers may be in default in just three short years. If for no other reason, the federal government should sell off its student loan portfolio to stem its losses on these toxic assets.

In addition, Congress should pass legislation to once again allow former students to discharge college debt in bankruptcy if a borrower is unable to find a decent job years after leaving college. In the past, borrowers were allowed to do this, but bankruptcy laws were tightened after lobbying by the banks. One reason that conservatives should support allowing the use of bankruptcy to discharge crushing student debt is to allow more young people to move on with their lives. Conservatives are often dismayed that more young people are not moving out of their parents’ homes, marrying, buying a home, and having children – things which tend to make one more conservative.

One of the reasons for this situation is student debt. Unfortunately, bankruptcy for student debt is seen by some as merely a way of letting borrowers off the hook, but it should really be viewed as a way of holding lenders accountable. For years, government lenders have happily loaned money to unserious students and those who wish to pursue frivolous degrees.

Bankruptcy for student debt, plus privatization, would encourage lenders to be more prudent with their money.

Prudent regulation would tie lending practices to the value of a degree and job prospects in chosen fields. The fewer jobs available in a chose major, the riskier the loan.

Finally, colleges should be required to cover half of the outstanding loan balances when alums discharge debt in bankruptcy, thereby sharing the risk with lenders. Because colleges have been admitting unserious students, coddling and indoctrinating students, offering junk degrees, and cranking out graduates who are unprepared for the real world. Requiring colleges to reimburse banks for a portion of their losses would motivate colleges to stop trying to enroll anyone and everyone with a pulse. It should also lead to colleges cutting costs, eliminating pointless degrees, and focusing less effort on training social justice warriors and more on helping the next generation build the economy.

One way or another, our country needs less college debt, fewer college graduates with worthless degrees, and more trade school graduates, more apprentices, and more entrepreneurs. These straightforward reforms should help advance these goals while making a positive difference for students, parents, and taxpayers.

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Defending Higher Education

Higher ed gets a lot of criticism from supporters and reformers alike. Sometimes it’s necessary, though, to look at its benefits and note the strengths of colleges.

Steven Brint, distinguished professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California, Riverside, has given the public a reminder of why so many students value a college degree. He is an organizational sociologist who focuses on the sociology of higher education; in his most recent book, Two Cheers for Higher Education (Princeton University Press), he defends the university system against the concerns of the current zeitgeist.

1) Professor Brint, you seem to be cautiously optimistic about American Universities. How did you arrive at this conclusion, or am I wrong?

Yes, I am optimistic. Undoubtedly, American universities are plagued by many problems. The most notable are high cost, the very uneven quality of undergraduate education, and the fraught climate for speech on campus. But the critics who focus exclusively on these problems miss the big picture. Between 1980 and 2015, American universities contributed greatly both to our economy and our society.

They produced a huge number of technological innovations and even new industries such as biotechnology and nanotechnology. They trained hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, doctors, lawyers, and businesspeople. Enrollments nearly doubled at both the undergraduate and graduate level, providing mobility opportunities that otherwise would not have existed for many students born into low-income families. This does not sound like an institutional sector that is failing.

2) American universities have been attacked by some as promoting socialism, communism and all kinds of other isms—What is the truth here?

University faculty members tend to be on the liberal side of the political spectrum. There are many reasons why this is true. They tend to be more interested in solving puzzles, conducting research, and teaching than in making money. Other very intelligent people who are more interested in making money tend to gravitate to business, law, medicine, and engineering instead.

Universities are about making new discoveries and that may encourage a kind of elective affinity between professors and progressive social attitudes.

Social movements that advanced the cause of minorities and women have had a continuing influence in academe, perhaps to a greater degree than in some other American institutions. And, yes, there are some radical critics of American society who hold professorial positions. Some of these people are ideologically rigid. But ideologically rigid leftists are a small minority of the total faculty – surely under 5 percent.

To those of us in academe who pursue our work in a scientific and scholarly spirit, these people are extremely vexing and unappealing. But we should not overestimate their impact relative to other groups. They are a small minority within academe. The evidence is strong that right-wing authoritarianism is a much bigger problem in American society right now than left-wing authoritarianism. Right-wing authoritarianism has its main home in the small business community, among very religious people, and among less-educated white men. It seems likely, based on the evidence I have seen, that at least 20 percent of American adults could be classified as right-wing authoritarians, and probably more than that.

3) How high are the standards at American Universities overall? As compared to say the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and so on?

The answer to this question depends on what you mean by standards. This has been a golden age of research. University faculty at the top 200 universities have produced much more research over the last few decades than at any other time in American history. They dominate internationally in highly cited research. The level of sophistication in working with data is unmatched. So standards in research are much better than in the past. Something similar would be true of doctoral training and probably also training in the leading professional fields. All of this is heads and shoulders above what we saw in the past.

On the other hand, if the focus is on undergraduate education, the standards are not high enough. There’s been a dramatic drop in study time among undergraduate students since the 1960s. Reading lists have been pared down and grade inflation is rampant. I discuss these problems at length in my book. We will not make progress in undergraduate education unless more professors take seriously the findings of the now large literature on how students learn.

4) There seems to be a plethora of varying “majors” and “minors” that did not exist back in the 60s, 70s, 80s. Will students be able to get employment with these “frivolous” majors and minors?

As I show in Two Cheers, the largest growth in majors and minors has been in business, computer science, and health professions. Are these frivolous? You’d have to look more carefully at business majors on individual campuses. At some schools, business is a weak major. But at other colleges, business is among the most rigorous majors on campus. Only the top undergraduate students at UC Berkeley are able to be accepted into the Haas Business School, for example.

More generally, yes, there are undoubtedly some majors that sound frivolous to me. Recreation and leisure seems at first like a good example. Even so, I would want to look more carefully at what is taught in the required courses for these majors before I would feel comfortable categorizing them as frivolous. Kinesthesiology is certainly a reputable field and courses in that field make up a fair amount of the work in some recreation and leisure majors.

5) Let’s talk learning for learning’s sake—A veteran comes back from 20 years in the military and just wants to learn about the world: What advice would you give him or her?

The answer would have to be highly individualized. I believe in a liberal arts education as the best preparation for seeing the world in its full complexity. But some liberal arts courses are not very good. So it is a matter of finding professors who can make their subjects come alive. I would invest a lot of time in finding out which faculty members were the strongest teachers and I would take as many courses as I could from these master teachers. I was very fortunate to study with some of the greatest teachers in the social sciences in my era.

I would have had an even better experience if I had asked students and teaching assistants about who the best teachers were in the fields I studied. In some cases, the reading material required can carry the course in spite of mediocre performance by the teacher. I had a 17th– and 18th-century English literature course that I found deeply engaging because of the quality of the material we read (Dryden, Donne, Pope, Swift, and others). The relatively dull professor in charge of the course could not reduce the interest of the material.

6) Recently there was some news about Hollywood parents attempting to buy their children entrance into various prestigious universities. How will this impact higher education?

The category of “development admits” has been around for a long time, as Daniel Golden established in his 2006 book, The Price of Admission. The President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner may have been one of these development admits – meaning that he was admitted with lower qualifications because his family was wealthy and could help the college’s development efforts. Public universities tend to police these admissions violations pretty well, but privates have leeway. And a case can be made that a few developmental admits should be acceptable; private colleges, after all, require constant infusions of donations to maintain their excellence.

In the case of the Varsity Blues scandal, parents paid coaches to advocate for their children or found ways to allow their children to cheat on entrance examinations. That’s a more overt violation of rules than the implied quid pro quo found in the case of development admits. Obviously, none of what occurred in the Varsity Blues scandal is acceptable.

7) What were some of the main points that you wanted to make in your book?

American research universities continue to hold 29 of the top 50 ranks in the most recent Shanghai rankings of world universities. They also continue to hold the largest share of world publications and, notably, a very large share of the most highly cited publications.

Critics say that the United States is falling behind the rest of the world in human capital development because a higher proportion of young people have baccalaureate level degrees in 16 countries. But the European degree is a three-year degree, so the comparison is not entirely apt. In fact, enrollments at baccalaureate, masters, and doctoral levels have increased fairly steadily in the United States, with baccalaureates nearly doubling since 1980 and master’s degrees increasing by 60 percent.

Of course, not all colleges and universities are faring well and critics of American higher education make many valid points, but they miss the big picture: Institutionally, American colleges and universities have grown stronger both intellectually and financially, and, and, as I show, they are playing a prominent role in public life.

I argue that the success of the American system is due to high levels of investment by federal and private donors and individual families combined with the interplay of three propulsive logics of development.

First, with respect to investment: Compared to the state-dependent systems in most of the world, the U.S. system is distinctive with respect to the variety of revenue sources on which institutions can draw, including federal and state research funds, state subsidies, student tuition, and philanthropic support. By 2015, the federal government alone poured $65 billion into student financial aid and made hundreds of billions available in subsidized loans, and it disbursed more than $30 billion to universities for research and development. Donors provided billions of dollars more. It is hard to overestimate the importance of these multiple and comparatively abundant sources of revenue.

By “logics of development,” I mean guiding ideas joined to institutionalized practices. The first of these logics is the traditional one: the commitment to knowledge discovery and transmission in the disciplines (and at their interstices). I refer to this commitment as academic professionalism. It remains fundamental and provides a necessary autonomy for universities from the priorities of the state and the economy.

During the period I cover (1980-2015), I argue that two movements hit colleges and universities with great force. One was the movement to meet new market demands, and especially to use university research to advance economic development through the inventions of new technologies with commercial potential. The other was to use colleges and universities as instruments of social inclusion, providing opportunities to members of marginalized groups. These movements, in conjunction to the traditional aims of higher education, created a new dynamism because of the strength of partisan commitments to them, backed up by high levels of patronage.

I show that tensions arose at times between these three logics of development, as when faculty entrepreneurs seemed to flout their academic responsibilities in favor of building their enterprises or when the racial or gender backgrounds of candidates seemed to supersede their scholarly achievements as a basis for advancement.

But, I argue, accommodation was the norm. Deans of engineering, for example, found themselves promoting colleagues who made fundamental advances, but also encouraging those who worked with industry and sponsoring programs for minorities and women in engineering. Chairs of sociology departments found that they celebrated scholars who accumulated influence through the citation of their research, while at the same time seeking to diversify their faculty and graduate student bodies and adding new “self-supporting” master’s degree programs in subjects like applied social statistics.

The book also addresses the most serious problems facing American higher education and provides evidence-based recommendations for policy changes to address them. These include the problems of increasing cost, under-performance in undergraduate teaching, the growth of the adjunct labor force, and online competition. I am very much aware of the problems that festered during the period, and I examine them in detail drawing on my own and others’ research.

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How to futureproof your career in your 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond – and why a degree isn't the answer

It’s that time of year again. Ucas applications deadline. There are more and more students, acquiring more and more degrees, and more and more debt.

It’s obvious why. Graduates earn more. Not only that, they are much more likely to be protected from the ravages of automation than lower-skilled workers. To make a living - hell, to protect yourself - qualifications matter more than ever.

The relationship between education and employment is self-reinforcing. Employers need to make decent decisions about whom to hire. And what better mark of quality than a degree certificate from a university they can trust, an institution which has three or four years experience in training and marking an applicant whose CV companies might scan for three or four seconds?

But here’s the strange thing. This relationship is breaking down. Employers consistently say they can’t find the right employees. Graduates, they say, don’t have the right skills, soft and hard. Educational institutions are pumping out more and more students holding framed certificates, and yet those certificates mean less and less. 

Indeed as we live longer, and as the world of work is shattered irreversibly by digital technologies, the old self-reinforcing relationship between employment and education increasingly resembles a dance of death, a partnership in which failing companies and doomed workers pretend that qualifications matter more than skills; that education is a one-off for the young, not lifelong; that learning is monolithic not personalised; lengthy not bite-sized.

It is a worldview which ignores that fact that knowledge, once the preserve of the few, is now universally accessible and that what matters is not remembering it all but being able to access what you need when and where you need it.

The whirlwinds of change are sweeping through the world of work, and that has profound implications for both learning and, as employment is fundamental to self-worth, happiness too.

Today, when you interview for a job at the consultancy, you play a game whose ostensible object is to save a coral reef. But the real object is to evaluate you – how fast you respond, your teamwork.

“It doesn’t matter where you went to college,” says Susan Lund, a partner at the company who has written several reports on automation and employment. “Across the corporate world there’s this realisation that a degree was a pretty rough estimation of worth and talent,”

And when you begin to think about it, it’s obvious why. What was valuable yesterday is on the scrapheap today. David Solomon is CEO of Goldman Sachs.

“Fifteen to 20 years ago,” he explained last year, “we had 500 people making markets in stocks. Today we have three.” Consequently this has been what the FT called a “brutal summer” for bankers. Investment banks have culled tens of thousands of jobs.

And not just any jobs. The jobs that only a generation ago were the most sought after by top graduates for mega-salaries and status so high incumbents used to call themselves “Masters of the Universe”. Today, algorithms can do their jobs, and don’t need team-bonding outings to Spearmint Rhino. So what will all those ex-Masters do now?

For a new range of educational institutions and employers trying to move beyond the dance of death, the answer remains “learning”. Just not as we know it.

The new way to learn

Take, first of all, the information explosion. The number of internet users has almost doubled in five years, to more than four billion. As a result, 90pc of the data in the world has been created since 2016. Some 400 hours of YouTube footage is uploaded every minute.

As knowledge expands, the shelf-life of education decreases. Degrees decay. Courses whose specialist content once stayed fresh for a decade or longer, are now only relevant for a year or two, sometimes becoming outdated before students even begin paying off their debt.

As Yuval Harari puts it in his new book, 21 lessons for the 21st century, “the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information... Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all, to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.”

There are other ways to describe this approach. The New York Times journalist Neil Irwin, author of a new book on building careers inside companies which are successfully adapting today, calls them “glue people”. Emilie Wapnick, in a hugely successful Ted Talk, opted for the ugly term “multi-potentialite”.

They both paint a picture in which polymaths are increasingly vital, nurturing skills as they bounce from one job to another, even if those jobs can appear unrelated. Look at Rayna Patel [box]: Doctor, neuroscientist, government policy advisor, entrepreneur. “Your career should not be like a marriage but a series of hook-ups,” says Irwin.

This has huge consequences. It rubs at the binding loyalty between employer and employee that has been the bedrock of western economies and prosperity since Henry Ford offered his skilled workers benefits to keep them from fleeing to rival production lines. Freelancing is on the rise.

Yet the world is set up for steady pay cheques. Just try applying for a mortgage or renting a flat without one. Social safety nets and worker-benefits, from pensions to holidays, need reimagining too. Fortunately, many start-ups are responding to help freelancers, smoothing their irregular income to satisfy and reassure landlords, for example.

But perhaps technology responding to the new world of work will have its greatest effect on education itself. “Our polling shows that freelancers and gig workers think lifelong learning – not regulation or welfare – is the number one form of support that could improve their security,” says Alan Lockey, Head of the Future Work centre at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).

Its annual awards highlight the areas where tech is already encroaching on education and will force it to change: Catalyte uses AI to analyse whether job applicants will make good hires based on skills not background; Credly provides digital credentials that can be verified - no more framed certificates; EDUK is a subscription platform that provides quality online courses; Knack matches workers to jobs through games, rather than CVs.

The idea that universities have a lock on issuing the qualifications that matter is crumbling. Credentials are being verified and vouched for in new, better, more meritocratic ways. And financed too. StepEx funds qualifications through “income share agreements” (ISAs) - which take a cut of future earnings – with students like Jesse Connor [see box].

Unlike student loans they can be taken out beyond a first degree, allowing them to be turned to career-enhancing retraining. ISAs are an idea causing great excitement among venture capitalists, who see an echo of the way they fund new companies (taking a stake in the best, irrespective of background and profiting only if they succeed).

“It’s like equity, except in people,” sas Dan George, founder of Step-Ex. “We call it Angel Investment in individuals.” StepEx plans to expand lending by a factor of 40 next year.

This flowering of alternative education is in part a result of a new entrepreneurial spirit being embraced by millenials at school and starting to enter the workforce.

“Entrepreneurship is the new ambition,” says Matt Clifford, co-founder of Entrepreneur First (EF), which helps people become start-up “founders”. EF’s polling of 10,000 18-30 year-olds suggests nearly half see setting up their own company as the best way of fulfilling their career ambitions. The job-for-life, dutiful corporate suit mentality is dying.

“It is very, very hard for traditional education to adapt quickly enough to the world now,” says Clifford. “Public policy assumes higher education is the way you boost productivity. But the evidence is clear that you can’t simply increase [university] enrolment and expect that to do the job. If we really want to adapt we’ll need to look beyond the world of higher education and ask what skills are amenable to the boot camp model?”

The rise of the micro-credential

Boot camps - short, intense technical courses focusing on specific skills like coding for students pre-, post- or mid-career - have become extremely popular. “Everyone is going to need some post-secondary education, some boot-camp credential,” says Susan Lund.

The trends are clear: shorter degrees, often at a distance, and often “unbundled” into their constituent parts, each of which has value, and can be stacked together over many years to create a formal qualification.

“The phrase we use is a ‘micro credential’,” says Simon Nelson, CEO of FutureLearn, the social learning platform founded in 2013 by the Open University, which has since attracted almost 10m learners. “For example, rather than having to take a full MBA, people can take just the bit they need at that moment, like data science, then another next year, eventually stacking those credentials together.”

FutureLearn is launching a suite of such microcredentials next year – 12 weeks of study, 120/150 hours of study and assessments - which will be, Nelson says, “endorsed by industry so that it’s clear to learners that it will enhance their chances of getting work or progressing in work”.

Futurelearn is one of a host of providers around the world – others include Udacity, Coursera, edX – which provide “nanodegrees” or “Micromasters”. “In the next few years there is going to be a radical shift in attitudes among learners, students and employers to education,” says Nelson.

“That’s both because so many people are going to be uprooted in their careers, but also due to the digitisation of the education sector itself. Play forward 20 years we’ll find major shifts.”

One will be consolidation as degrees, or the institutions that provide them, are found to offer poor value. “Some degrees you pay 30k and earn 20k, if anything. It doesn’t make sense,” says Dan George. But as many traditional qualifications are devalued, others - from boot camps to micro-credentials - will move the other way.

This may also go some way to solving what Jon Yates, top advisor to Damian Hinds, until recently education secretary, calls the “esteem problem” around non-academic learning – things like apprenticeships and technical qualifications.

Some 50pc of students don’t do A-Levels, and yet such qualifications, Yates thinks, are written off as for the “disadvantaged, stupid and incapable”. In fact, as he points out, “technical education means being trained to be competent at a job”.

And in that, it mirrors what the most pioneering companies in the world are doing themselves. Google has had to retrain countless software engineers in new, machine-learning techniques. Last month Amazon announced plans to invest $700 million in retraining a third of its US workforce to do more technical tasks.

For optimists, all this leads to vastly improved social mobility, as the poorest can finance MBAs, and the most disadvantaged can learn their way out of precarious, bottom-rung jobs, all while staying in work. “We can’t just draw on the talent of the top 10pc who can afford [elite retraining, like MBAs],” says Dan George. “That’s wrong from a social justice aspect, but also for national need.”

Such widespread, workforce “upskilling” is viewed by some as the magic formula that not only increases productivity but also wages, while reducing inequality. That is the formula, as economist Carl Frey points out, that built The American Dream postwar.

“The most pervasive force,” behind this unparalleled era of expanded prosperity, he writes, “was the upskilling of the American workforce” driven by “enabling technological change and the expansion of education”.

From 1940-1970, he writes, skills outran demand. The results were that “a young male high school graduate could expect to find a secure job at a decent wage. The American economy was able to generate sufficient opportunity for blue-collar workers to attain a middle-class lifestyle on the basis of nothing more than their wages.”

Today, by contrast, “middle income jobs that have supported a broader middle class are disappearing and we see that those people have also lost in political clout and populists are capitalising.”

Some teachers, like Luke Pearce are themselves taking part in self-education. He took a free, two-month FutureLearn course on “Flip Learning”, which inverts traditional teaching by doing homework first - getting school children to plunge into available online resources, like YouTube videos - then analysing that information back in the classroom.

It is a method that uses short snippets of information, on-demand, with initial independence, and reflects the reality of how young people – the 14-24 year olds known as Gen Z – learn today: from each other, online, by copying and doing.

Influential digital entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly, in his book “What’s the Future?” notes that “69pc of [Gen Z] say they go to YouTube to learn just about everything and prefer it as a learning mechanism far beyond teachers or textbooks.”

 Education is lagging behind technology

Yet by and large education is still “lagging behind on [the impact] of technology,” says Niall Alcock, a former teacher who now runs the “We are in Beta” podcast for educational professionals. Unlike employees in other sectors, he says “teachers don’t sit around in the pub complaining that their jobs are being threatened by technology. Education will be the last sector to be disrupted.”

In part that is for good reason: classrooms are astonishingly complex places. “Being in a room with a group of teens, understanding what they had for breakfast, the arguments they’ve had, the weather, how late they stayed up playing Fortnite – there are so many things that add up to the outcome of a lesson,” says Alcock.

“At the moment, only teachers can understand that. “But,” he adds, “there’s lots to be done on capturing how they do that.”

This is the transformational analytical capability of technology, allowing teachers to better understand what they do uniquely well, and then distributing that knowledge widely.

It is a model perfectly illustrated, the venture capitalist and Cambridge University economist Bill Janeway says, by JFK. “In 1961 the US President enlisted [economist] James Tobin to help educate his administration about how the world worked, to inform policy.

"Now the Tobin Project, named for him, is a course open and available to Harvard students, teaching case-based American history. Over the last two years they’ve brought it on a pilot to schools from Palo Alto at the top, to inner cities at the bottom. It’s practical, problem-based, much more engaging than lists and facts. They haven’t dumbed down the content.

"And it is being welcomed by the teachers because it enhances what they do, rather than replaces them. Oh, and the kids love it.”

What to do if you are...

At school

Ask yourself if university is the right option for you. A degree is a product. Is it worth the price? As Simon Nelson says, “Silicon Valley is coming for education.” While top universities will thrive, others will crumble under competition from microcredentials, nano-degrees and boot-camps.

You will still need other elements that uni has traditionally fostered, like the self-starting discipline to go out, do research and get work done, as well as a network of friends and contacts. But unlike a degree, you don’t have to go to uni to get them.

A parent

Ask if your child’s school is making the most of digital resources, echoing the bite-sized, on-demand, learning-by-doing culture that young people prefer and have come to expect from how-to videos.

Be open to your children taking risks - say by trying to start their own business. That might look better on their CV than a run-of-the-mill degree, and foster skills that employers are looking for. Anyway, employers increasingly look beyond CVs and, even if your children do get a traditional degree, it is no passport to a safe steady job. There are none.

In your 20s

Avoid the squeezed middle. The most successful, dynamic places to work are likely to be the very big and the very small, with a few large, prestigious companies in most sectors at one end, and what Susan Lund calls “a golden age” for entrepreneurs and new artisanal workers at the other.

In your 30s

Trust your judgement. Even at mid-level, employees today must understand their company’s strategy to survive. But once you’ve made that effort, you are best placed to determine if your company is adequately responding to market pressures. Those at the top are typically most insulated from change.

Don’t be loyal. If your company or its leadership is failing, move.

In your 40s

Demand education. Your schooling is now more than 20 years old, and just as out of date. Employers have a duty to provide workplace learning. It is as essential a benefit as a pension or health insurance. Without it, redundancy beckons ever quicker.

But be focussed. Do you really need a full MBA? Settle on what you need and stack “segments” to complete a degree over time.

In your 50s and beyond

Remember that, in all likelihood, you still have almost 20 years left to work. That is ample time to change career. And if your children are reaching independence and the mortgage is nearly paid off, this may feel like the first time since you left school you can afford to take a risk.

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