In The Ecosystem Economy, McKinsey’s Venkat Atluri and Miklos Dietz paint a picture of the future of education that will see the ways in which we learn transformed. No longer will education be an expensive thing we do at the start of our lives, they believe that it will instead tap into a range of remote learning opportunities to broaden the reach considerably.
“With the power to offer more immersive and personalized online, remote learning options, the largest and most prestigious colleges and universities will be able to reach a much larger audience of students,” they explain.
These learning opportunities will sit alongside a much wider range of ways in which people can gain practical skills, with digital providers offering both degree and practical courses alike. All of this will be personalized to the unique strengths and weaknesses of the individual, as well as the needs of the labor market so that skills can be updated throughout one’s life.
Widening access
It’s a situation that reflects the changing nature of our (working) lives, with a demand to learn throughout a career in which we’re likely to have various careers and have to adapt to changes in the workplace introduced by technological, economic, and social disruption.
The need to widen access to university was emphasized in IE University’s Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño’s latest book Philosophy Inc., in which he argues that universities often distort the notion of meritocracy, both by selecting a small proportion of the (qualified) applicants they receive, and also by giving preference to children of alumni and other friends of the university.
“It becomes a vicious cycle, as you say that you only accept applicants who belong to affluent layers of society who have access to a very good education and are better prepared to pass the admissions exams,” he told me.
Distorting signals
The situation is not helped by the signaling effect that is so prominent in how we perceive knowledge. Iñiguez de Onzoño highlights how we have greater access to knowledge today than ever before, with many high-quality university lectures available on YouTube or via the various MOOC platforms.
Economist Bryan Caplan has long argued that the wage premium still enjoyed by university graduates is less to do with the knowledge we obtain while at university than the signal that is produced by graduating, especially from prestigious schools.
This is epitomized by the so-called “sheepskin effect”, which describes the monetary advantage that individuals who successfully complete a formal education program, and receive a diploma or degree, hold over those who dropped out of the same program, despite having completed a comparable number of courses.
This signaling can even affect the cut-throat world of MBAs, with research suggesting that it accounts for around 25% of the salary premium enjoyed by MBA students. When one considers that a similar proportion is made up of the value placed on the networks and connections students make while doing their MBA and it’s easy to see how distorting and undemocratic the current system can be.
Unequal access
There are also continuing concerns that university is the preserve of those from well-off families. Indeed, research from Stanford suggests that access to college for students from low-income families is disproportionately low because of many factors, including psychological and behavioral friction.
While the study doesn’t tackle the various systemic issues at play, they do explore a couple of interventions designed to overcome psychological and behavioral barriers: a self-affirmation intervention and a behavioral ladder intervention.
The results illustrate the efficacy of combining “wise” interventions to address discrete barriers, the importance of tailoring and timing intervention content to key points of friction, and the potential of mobile technology to facilitate both objectives.
Creating wider access not only has benefits for the individuals concerned but also for nations as a whole, as research from Sweden’s Umeå University shows a clear link between access to education and national happiness.
The study found that policies such as delaying the streaming of children by ability or lowering the cost of private education all serve to reduce any gap in happiness between the richest and poorest in society. This is largely because education coincides with happiness, so the more educated we are, the happier we tend to be.
Unfortunately, in many countries, there is a clear correlation between wealth and educational achievement, with children from wealthier backgrounds outperforming those from working-class backgrounds. This creates a clear happiness gap before children even reach adulthood that is difficult to close for the remainder of our lives.
Skills-based recruitment
Research highlights that when labor markets are tight, it’s common for employers to look to one’s credentials to help separate candidates. As the labor market loosens, however, there is a growing call for recruitment to be based more on skills than on credentials.
Indeed, companies such as PwC, EY, and Grant Thornton have dropped any degree requirements from their application forms. It’s a tenor that is shared by a recent survey from Salesforce, which found that 87% of recruiters think that skills-based hiring is more important than degrees or even industry-specific qualifications.
This shift is underlined by research from Cardiff University, which suggests that so-called ‘job readiness’ is a bigger factor than one’s credentials. The finding emerged from analyzing over 21 million job adverts placed in the UK.
Far from academic credentials proving important, the analysis found that they were required in just 18% of job adverts. Instead, adverts favored social qualifications, specific skills, and various cognitive abilities, such as time management, which the researchers believe signify the candidate’s job readiness.
For such a shift to truly take hold, however, we are likely to need a better way of proving and sharing the skills we have. Salesforce is urging the U.K. government to work with businesses to develop a national online digital skills platform. Lessons might be learned from the skills passport that military veterans in the U.S. contribute to and take with them into civilian life.
With college enrollment trending downward on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s increasingly clear that there is a desire for change among students and employers. The challenge is whether the university sector is going to be agile enough to respond to it.
