Education is not preparing students for a fast-changing world

Attention: Your acronym of the day is VUCA.

VUCA stands for “volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous,” a handy shortcut used by the military to describe these uncertain times, and a framework to shape its leadership programs.

But VUCA is an important signal for more than military educators. Change is coming at us with bewildering speed, driven by globalization, demographics, the corrosive effect of increasing inequality, and the seductive quicksilver of technologies ranging from artificial intelligence and blockchain to nanotechnology and quantum computing. We all must be preparing for the challenges of a VUCA world.

Sadly, as the world of work spins faster and faster, the world of education has actually slowed down. We have dreamed the American dream of upward mobility through education, but the numbers tell a different story. We placed an unimpressive 38th out of 71 countries on the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment, which measures math and science literacy and other key skills among 15-year-olds around the world. Of the 20 million currently enrolled American college students, only an estimated 57 percent are likely to graduate. In fact, six-year graduation rates are the current national standard for higher education, not four. Even for those who graduate, more than 40 percent will be underemployed, filling jobs not commensurate with a college education. With over 6 million jobs currently unfilled in American companies, and record-setting levels of student debt, something is woefully out of whack.

Proficiency-based learning emphasizes “21st-century skills” at the expense of content and knowledge. It doesn’t work.

These are global trends but perhaps most acute in the United States, where we have championed college education for all at the same time that we have not paid enough attention to the link between learning and earning. The false choice between vocational training and the lofty devotion to the life of the mind is particularly damaging to first-generation college students with no parental safety net or networks of their own. Career services remain the Siberia of most college campuses, visited rarely and woefully under-resourced.

Looking back again at our military analogy, there is much to be learned from the last 25 years of research on advances in military leadership development, especially the emphasis on professional development, continual improvement, applied knowledge, and the strategic shift from seeking one star leader — the perfect general — to building constellation leadership.

We need to do the same in education: inspire our students to be continuous, lifelong, and self-directed learners with the ability to build collaborative knowledge networks and assemble teams that augment their own skills and styles. The days are over when any front-loaded university education could provide sufficient fuel for a long career. These are times that call for new models of leadership and learning.

The VUCA future is evident in the shape of new coalitions between educational institutions, government, and the private sector, and the explosion of new pathways to knowledge and certification. Starbucks sends its baristas to study online at Arizona State University. Disney announces that the Magic Kingdom will now support its hourly employees with advanced educational options. Pluralsight and Khan Academy create networks of online experts offering just-in-time learning. AT&T partners with Udacity for computer science “nanomasters.” Degreed identifies skills gaps and matches mid-career professionals with the rich and growing array of learning opportunities available through certificate programs, MOOCs, articles, and podcasts.

Today’s students need to prepare themselves for job descriptions yet unwritten. In the VUCA environment, there is no robot-proof major. Instead, students need to steer a course between “Will” and “Watson,” between the humanities and social sciences (as represented by William Shakespeare) and computational thinking and STEM fields (as represented by IBM Watson). This is not merely our wishful cheerleading for literature and history. The skills they foster — critical thinking, clear communications, empathy, and self-awareness — are what employers consistently promote as essential characteristics for job candidates.

But the ultimate skill is the ability to learn how to learn. The goal of continuous, lifelong learning is implicit in everything that happens in education. We need to make it explicit and intentional and respected as the most important preparation for an uncertain world. That readiness for a lifetime of learning is the “mission accomplished” of education.

This approach raises a howl from those who rail against the “corporatization” of the university, a concern that we will tilt too far away from research and intellectual pursuits. Those battle lines are tired and anachronistic. Universities today are engines of economic opportunity, of knowledge entrepreneurship, and the irreplaceable wellspring of research and scholarship. Their institutional pride should also rest on their proven ability to assure bright futures for students from all backgrounds.

It’s time to look with fresh eyes at aligning American education with those values and a new appreciation for the VUCA imperatives. The future of work is the future of education.

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Bonanza Ending for Higher Education?

The party might be winding down for the outlandishly expensive boondoggle that higher education has become. This swindle is falling prey to the tight labor market:

Job recruiting site Glassdoor recently reported that companies like Google, Apple, IBM, Bank of America no longer require that applicants have a college degree.

Neither do companies like Costco, Whole Foods, Publix, Chipotle, Home Depot, Starbucks.

Students have been digging themselves ever deeper into debt to finance increasingly useless degrees. The rest of the country is going into debt with them:

Further fueling this college bubble has been an upward spiral of federal grants, aid, subsidized loans and tax credits. College Board data show that federal college aid shot up 93% between 2001 to last year, after adjusting for inflation. …

Over those same years, public college tuitions climbed 72%.

A few parasites are getting very rich at everyone else’s expense.

College administrator jobs have climbed much faster than student enrollment.

Tinseltown is probably the only place on earth where you could find people more absurdly overpaid than educrats.

Prominent Democrats call for free college for everyone at public expense. Meanwhile, college has become ever more a means of staving off adulthood at the cost of wasted years that could have been spent starting families and generating wealth rather than extending adolescence.

Some jobs truly require a college education; most do not. A large part of what is taught in college serves no constructive purpose. Much of it is pernicious.

College isn’t always a scam. Within traditional parameters, it is a critical component of society. It will return to those parameters when only people who have a sensible reason to be there go to college.

That happy day will come sooner if intelligence tests are allowed for job applicants. This would require overturning the Supreme Court’s Griggs v. Duke Power Co. ruling, which determined that intelligence tests are racist because they discriminate against racial groups that are less intelligent. Holding a college degree, which costs many thousands of dollars and wastes precious years of time, is used as a proxy for the inexpensive tests due to political correctness.

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Private education spending in Australia soars ahead of other countries

Because Australian families send 40% of their teenagers to private schools

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released on Tuesday night its annual education at a glance report, a major compendium of statistics measuring the state of education across the world.

The report found Australia is among the highest contributors to education spending in the world, at about 6% of gross domestic product.

But it found the proportion of public money spent on primary, high school and vocational education decreased significantly between 2005 and 2015.

By 2015 the share of private sources of non-tertiary education made up 19% of overall spending, the most of any advanced economy and double the OECD average of 8%.

At the same time, the government’s share of total expenditure on non-tertiary education declined from 73% to 66%. The report also found that in Australia, expenditure on non-tertiary education as a share of GDP decreased by 10% over the five year period between 2010 and 2015.

In Australia, private schools are funded through a mixture of parent fees, donations and per-student contributions from states and the Commonwealth.

Correna Haythorpe, the head of the Australian Education Union, said the report showed the “cost burden” of education funding was being shifted away from the government.

“This OECD report shows public expenditure on education in Australia is already well below the OECD average of 11% of public expenditure, and falling rapidly,” she said.

“The report shows that government policies have led to a significant shift over time in how education is funded. That shifts the cost burden from the government to the community.”

According to the report, global eduction funding has suffered as a result of the global financial crisis.

While public funding to education globally started to increase in 2010, it did so at a slower pace than GDP. Across OECD countries, total average expenditure on education at all levels decreased by 4.1% as a percentage of GDP.

“The effects of the global economic crisis that began in 2008 are currently reflected in the adjustments of public budgets and, therefore, in the expenditure on educational institutions across all levels of education,” the report stated.

In the university sector, private funding before public transfers – money given to the private sector through tuition or student subsidies, for example – accounts for 37% of all expenditure. Only the UK has a higher proportion of private university funding.

After public transfers, private expenditure accounts for 62% of the expenditure on tertiary education compared to the OECD average of 31%.

The AEU said it was concerned about findings on teacher workload.

The report found that in 2017 the net teaching time for Australian primary teachers per year was 865 hours, compared to the OECD average of 778 hours. Upper secondary teachers taught 797 hours, it found, compared to the OECD average of 655.

“Australian teachers are teaching larger classes and working significantly more hours than the OECD average, which is a clear indication of resource shortages,” Haythorpe said.

“When schools can provide extra staff, they can address larger classes and provide extra support for students who need it.”

The report also found gender differences in the labour market remained “significant” in Australia.

In the last decade, tertiary attainment of 25-34 year-olds in Australia had “increased significantly”, reaching 52% in 2017.

That increase has been especially pronounced among women. Between 2007 and 2017, the share of 25-34 year-old women with tertiary education increased from 46% to 59%, above the OECD average of 50%. In 2016, half of the new entrants to doctoral programs were women.

In the same period the share of tertiary attainment among young men increased from 35% to 45%.

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