A college degree is generally considered a ticket to a great job and a secure future. However, in recent years the job market has not been kind to graduates. Rapid changes in technology and uncertainty about AI’s influence on the economy have made it more difficult for companies to know what their new employees need to know to be successful.
I have argued in the past that this uncertainty actually makes college degrees more useful than ever, but higher education is not doing a good job of helping students navigate this uncertainty. Unfortunately, universities are not going to solve this problem by hiring more career counselors. Instead, they will have to do the hard work of restructuring their teaching mission for the 21st century.street century.
It turns out that there is a simple (albeit labor-intensive) way for higher education to make graduates (and continuing education students) more prepared for the future: focus on teaching students “lasting skills” that will help them in the future; link evaluations to results; and competency tracking instead of courses.
I believe so deeply that this change must be made, that I left my role as a university professor and administrator after 27 years to work for Minerva Project, a company that built Minerva University, a private university, from the ground up using this approach and is now bringing it to schools around the world interested in reform.
This is what this looks like:
1. Focus on lasting skills
Most college graduates credit their degree programs with helping them become better students, communicators, and thinkers, regardless of their major. In fact, liberal arts graduates may have difficulty finding employment initially, but are quite successful in the long run.
These degree programs provide value because they ultimately teach lasting skills. A skill is durable when it can be usefully applied in many different environments. Someone who learns to use a particular computer programming language has a potentially valuable skill. But, if the industry changes the standard of the language used, or if AI can do much of the coding that businesses need, then this skill loses value. Someone who learns the more enduring skill of characterizing a problem and mapping the path to a solution can continue to play a role even if much of the work to implement that solution can be automated.
Universities are dedicated to teaching these lasting skills. Students learn key competencies such as characterizing a problem, engaging in systems thinking, and communicating that problem and its solution to others. Unfortunately, this teaching is done unsystematically, in a way that can make it difficult for some students to truly achieve proficiency in these deep skills and make it difficult for graduates to articulate what they have learned.
The solution is for institutions to align with a framework that characterizes the core set of skills they offer. This framework benefits employers, teachers and students. Employers get a clear statement of what graduates have learned. Teachers gain a common language to talk about these skills, so they can explicitly mention them to students in classes. Students then better understand the skills they are learning. That allows them to be strategic in selecting classes that will help them solidify key skills and gives them a vocabulary to talk to employers about what they will bring to the job.
However, for this approach to be successful, teachers must provide students with authentic reviews and students need some type of record to keep track of their experience.
2. Authentic evaluation
It is not enough to talk about the skills that are (somehow) taught in higher education. Students need evidence of their progress to gain proficiency in these enduring skills. Unfortunately, when students take a test or complete an assignment, the most visible result of that work is a grade. A professor (or teaching assistant) can write comments on the work, but the student tends to focus on whether they got an A.
Authentic assessment occurs when each task relates directly to the outcomes the course is designed to develop. Students must be aware of the relationship between these tasks and outcomes. More importantly, tasks must be evaluated using a measure (a rubric) that relates the student’s work to the skill being practiced. This way, the feedback students receive on their work focuses on what the test or assignment says about their current proficiency rather than the number or letter at the top of the page.
While this won’t eliminate grades entirely, it does provide potential employers with a way to emphasize skills they believe indicate success, which is a recipe for shifting students’ focus from grades to competencies.
While it may seem obvious that authentic assessment is crucial to a good education, most college professors are not trained as educators, so their assignments (and grading bases) are often disconnected from the desired learning outcomes for students. Universities should provide more support to professors to improve the quality of their assignments and grading rubrics.
Authentic assessments shift the focus of a student’s work from earning a grade to developing competencies. That approach can motivate students to strive to improve. As a result, students do not try to game the system to get a good grade. Instead, they look for opportunities to expand their skills. This approach also protects against academic misconduct. After all, what’s the point of cheating on an assignment if the sole purpose of the assignment is to help you improve and understand your skills?
3. A skills tracker, not a transcript
Part of what obscures the value of a degree to students and employers is that the primary record a student gains from their time in college is a transcript. Transcripts are just lists of courses (whose names do not provide much information about their content) and grades (which provide a blunt assessment of student performance). In fact, few people ever look at a graduate’s transcript, because the entries on it don’t say much about what that person can do.
The alternative is to build a record of student performance around the institutional framework of enduring skills that accumulates evidence of the many tasks that students have undertaken to teach and assess these skills. This tracker provides students with a current snapshot of what they do (and don’t do) well. The record itself links to past assignments.
This tracker allows students to look back at previous work to see the increasing complexity of their thinking. Anyone who has looked in horror at a paper they wrote in their first year of college can recognize the improvements in their communication skills and complexity of thought. This record systematizes that experience. It also allows students to clearly articulate their skills to employers. Additionally, throughout a career, maintaining a competency tracker can signal to someone that it is time to obtain more education to stay one step ahead of economic and technological changes.
Higher education must make these changes. . . now to prepare students for the future. It is up to all of us who care about colleges and universities to pressure them to do so.