Monday, June 01, 2020


Young Americans Don’t Need College During a Crisis

The American economy is deteriorating “with alarming speed,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said recently, signaling that the government’s response to COVID-19 put people in a difficult financial situation. Though Powell predicts this problem is temporary, a closer look at growing unemployment numbers shows that America might not bounce back quickly once the lockdowns end.

To young people in school or who have recently graduated, the current situation might seem like a minor obstacle. But to older siblings who suffered during the 2008 recession, a broken economy doesn’t sound like a minor problem at all. As a matter of fact, they might already be despairing over what they should do next.

As college students and recent grads watch unemployment numbers grow, they might wonder if the skills they learned in college will be enough to get a job.

Economic anxiety that would lead them into a master’s program to sharpen their skills, however, would be a mistake. Returning to school to avoid a bad economy might be tempting, but the lessons of the previous generation should turn them against another degree. Betting on a more prosperous future by getting deeper in the red doesn’t always pay off. And, in North Carolina like many other states, whether students can even return to campus isn’t clear yet. A year of online classes might not be worth the tuition payments.

Instead of signing up for another student loan, what should a student or recent graduate do?

Learn New Skills Without Breaking the Bank

If you take a critical look at what you’ve learned in college and feel that your set of skills won’t make you competitive enough to get a job, consider how you can get new skills online and avoid debt. 

LinkedIn, Google, and Hubspot, for example, have a mix of paid and free courses you can take that will make you more employable. From software development to basic digital tool training, those online classes offer students and recent grads a golden opportunity to stay relevant.

By earning valuable marketing certificates and a variety of important skills such as video and social media marketing, SEO, public relations, branding, Google and Facebook advertising, proficiency in Google Analytics, and content drafting, you will be much more competitive when the labor market warms up again.

Earn Money Online by Teaching English

Scammers will try to lure people with “make money from home” schemes that sound too good to be true. However, there are still plenty of legit ways young people can make money without leaving their homes.

Using programs like VIP Kid, DaDa, GoGoKid, and EnglishHunt, which allow college graduates to teach English online to foreign students, young Americans can teach homebound students in China, South Korea, and Brazil who want to improve their English. Doing so can also show future bosses that you’re a self-starter and can handle unfamiliar situations.

For young people without a degree, companies like Cambly, QKids, and Palfish give English speakers the chance to use their fluency to help others to develop their English speaking skills. While compensation might be less than what’s paid to college graduates, it might be an interesting way to put yourself to work.

Find Side Hustles That Don’t Require Special Skills

As more Americans rely on grocery delivery services, those who are not known to be particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus can take on delivery gigs by working for Instacart or Shipt.

While precautions should always be taken to avoid infection and the spread of viruses, the opportunity is there for those willing to help people in need. If you’re homebound because you’re done with school or taking classes online, this is the ideal side gig.

Other ways of making some cash while waiting for things to go back to normal include teaching tech-related skills to seniors.

While there aren’t many opportunities online to find students, you can join groups such as Nextdoor and market your classes to neighborhood seniors who might be willing to pay to learn new technologies such as Zoom.

You can also offer other skills on similar sites such as Handy or TaskRabbit, especially if you have experience in mowing the lawn, painting, or even house cleaning.

Take the Time to Re-evaluate Your Career Goals

In addition to taking on gigs and online courses that can help you improve your resume and keep you afloat during the pandemic, you could also use some of your extra free time to reconsider your career goals.

Oftentimes, we take steps toward a goal that might seem good at the beginning but doesn’t always take us where we thought we were headed.

When re-evaluating your past professional decisions, ask yourself whether you’re confident you would be able to make money or get a job in your desired field by simply relying on the skills you’ve built up to this moment. If the answer is “no,” it might be time to look into ditching passion-driven career goals for hard work, as Cal Newport explains in his book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You.

Explaining that passion only comes after you put in the hard work to become good at something, he debunks the idea that following our passion is what makes us stand out. “No one owes you a great career,” Newport wrote. Instead, “you need to earn it—and the process won’t be so easy.”

To get there, Newport argued, mindful professionals should “adopt the craftsman mindset” and ask themselves “what can I offer the world?” Answering that question might be the key to identifying exactly what it will take for you to become a valuable professional.

Conclusion

Whatever you do, remember that spending money in a crisis is a recipe for disaster.

Even if you have access to easy credit to continue with your education, nobody can guarantee you’ll get a job in a bloated and extremely competitive labor market. Instead of entering a new economic recovery phase without real-world working skills and less money, why not save some while forced to stay put?

At the end of the day, employers will feel much more compelled to hire people who have put their time to good use during the lockdown by working instead of simply waiting or getting deeper in the red for a degree that might not make a huge difference.

SOURCE 





Remember the MOOCs? After Near-Death, They’re Booming

Children and college students aren’t the only ones turning to online education during the coronavirus pandemic. Millions of adults have signed up for online classes in the last two months, too — a jolt that could signal a renaissance for big online learning networks that had struggled for years.

Coursera, in which Mr. Gupta and Dr. Davidson enrolled, added 10 million new users from mid-March to mid-May, seven times the pace of new sign-ups in the previous year. Enrollments at edX and Udacity, two smaller education sites, have jumped by similar multiples.

“Crises lead to accelerations, and this is best chance ever for online learning,” said Sebastian Thrun, a co-founder and chairman of Udacity.

Coursera, Udacity and edX sprang up nearly a decade ago as high-profile university experiments known as MOOCs, for massive open online courses. They were portrayed as tech-fueled insurgents destined to disrupt the antiquated ways of traditional higher education. But few people completed courses, grappling with the same challenges now facing students forced into distance learning because of the pandemic. Screen fatigue sets in, and attention strays.

But the online ventures adapted through trial and error, gathering lessons that could provide a road map for schools districts and universities pushed online. The instructional ingredients of success, the sites found, include short videos of six minutes or less, interspersed with interactive drills and tests; online forums where students share problems and suggestions; and online mentoring and tutoring.

“Active learning works, and social learning works,” said Anant Agarwal, founder and chief executive of edX. “And you have to understand that teaching online and learning online are skills of their own.”

The proclaimed mission of the MOOCs was to “democratize education.” The early courses attracted hundreds of thousands of students from around the world.

Udacity and Coursera were founded at Stanford University by high-profile professors in the hot field of artificial intelligence. EdX, created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University in 2012, is a nonprofit.

Coursera and Udacity soon attracted money from Silicon Valley’s leading venture firms. The courses were all free. It was the classic internet formula: lure a big audience, and figure out a business model later.

Executives eventually discovered that earning credentials for completing courses and paying fees drove completion rates far higher. Typically, 10 percent or fewer students complete free courses, while the completion rates for paid courses that grant certificates or degrees range from 40 percent to 90 percent.

A few top-tier universities, such as the University of Michigan and the Georgia Institute of Technology, offer some full degree programs through the online platforms. Dr. Davidson is taking Michigan’s public health course.

While those academic programs are available, the online schools have tilted, either cautiously or wholeheartedly, toward skills-focused courses that match student demand and hiring trends. “Our main goal is to solve learning, not the skills problem,” Mr. Agarwal said. “Though frankly, that’s where the money is.”

Udacity has made the most drastic transformation toward a skills factory. It has developed dozens of courses on its own and with corporate collaborators including Google, Amazon and Mercedes. Its course offerings are largely in digital skills like programming, data science and artificial intelligence, fields where companies say they need workers.

“Companies are better positioned to see where the jobs of tomorrow will be and prepare people for them than universities,” Mr. Thrun said.

Just a couple of years ago, Udacity’s survival was in doubt. When Mr. Thrun returned to oversee operations in 2018, it was a few months from running out of cash. Over the next two years, Mr. Thrun laid off about half the work force. “The worst period of my life,” he recalled.

Today, with 320 employees and 1,300 part-time project reviewers and mentors, Udacity’s fortunes have improved. It is tightly focused on its training business, for both individual students and for corporations that pay Udacity to upgrade the skills of their employees and to advise them on redeploying workers in digital operations.

The Udacity courses, which it calls nanodegrees, take most students four to six months to complete, if they put in 10 hours a week. The average cost is $1,200. The learning is based on projects, rapid feedback — including project reviews in two hours — and online mentoring.

David Hundley has taken several Udacity courses in data science and machine learning in the last two years. A business analyst at State Farm, he wanted to develop tech skills for a better job and brighter career prospects.

Today, Mr. Hundley, 30, is proficient in modern software tools like Python and TensorFlow and has a portfolio of projects on GitHub, where software developers display their work. In January, he landed a new job at the insurance company as a machine-learning engineer.

State Farm paid for a couple of the Udacity courses, and he paid for the others. “It was a hundred-percent worth it,” Mr. Hundley said. “Two years ago, I didn’t know anything about coding. Now, I’m a machine-learning engineer.”

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Australia: School closures are all pain and no gain

School closures have wiped valuable weeks from students’ learning, and disadvantaged students will be hardest hit.

This has happened because some state and territory governments — Victoria, Tasmania, the ACT, New South Wales, and Queensland — ignored the consistent expert medical advice to the National Cabinet that it was safe for schools to remain open, and decided instead to close schools for most students for almost a whole term.

Many children from disadvantaged backgrounds have been set even further back as a result. They tend to have less access to effective parental support, educational resources, and fast internet at home, so they were always going to be hurt disproportionately by government school closures.

According to our new research, the educational cost of school closures to disadvantaged students amounts to between 2 and 3 weeks of lost learning in numeracy, and between 1 and 2 weeks of lost learning in reading. This will exacerbate existing inequities.

It’s true parents were told students would not be turned away from school and children of essential workers could attend — albeit with mixed messages about safety. But this is still ultimately closing schools, because the small minority of children who still attend school learn in basically the same way as students learning from home, without normal face-to-face classes.

Most parents kept their children home — amid the naïve, unreasonable government expectation that parents could simultaneously work from home and supervise their children’s education — with serious economic consequences.

But is there evidence of a public health benefit, at least? A study of NSW schools by the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance found the Covid-19 transmission rate in schools was “extraordinarily low” and there were no cases of students infecting staff. So it appears there was little or no public health benefit of closing schools — all pain and no gain.

The South Australia, Western Australia, and Northern Territory governments should be commended for following the Commonwealth’s lead and only closing schools for one or two weeks, meaning their disadvantaged students would be just minimally affected.

But the other five governments should reflect on the unnecessary educational and economic damage inflicted. They made a decision based on politics — influenced by teacher unions — not evidence.

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