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“These Phones Rock!” Voice & Data Solutions Designed for You
Patrick Methvin, the head of postsecondary-success programs at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has said “it’s difficult to imagine a fall 2020 where there aren’t some closures” of colleges. Parents and students are already demanding refunds for shortened semesters in the dorm while colleges navigate their response. Moody’s downgraded its outlook for higher education from “stable” to “negative.” “Over 30% of public universities and nearly 30% of private universities were already running operating deficits,” said Michael Osborn, a vice president who monitors universities at Moody’s. Could the traditional campus experience start to get the same kind of pressure to shift to online that besieged retail? Forecasts project 15,000 retail stores closing in 2020— many of which will never reopen. How many colleges will count the 2019-2020 school year as their last? And what happens to course credits and degrees earned by students of the institutions that fail—will the investment they already made in their education become collateral damage from the virus too? Is The Four-Year Degree An Outdated Model? These pressures may build to the point that students and their parents finally push back against the expensive traditional model of a four-year degree. But employers rely on degrees to certify that a certain level of credible learning has taken place—without this trusted packaging, students have few ways to prove what they’ve done. A more agile approach to certification could not only give students more flexibility than a traditional degree, but also help employers meet rapidly evolving resource needs. Jobs that didn’t exist a decade ago—leveraging artificial intelligence, robotics, and other technologies— are projected to be in high demand, and conventional universities are already struggling to keep their curriculum current with trends in the future of work. Jess Munro, who worked on Stanford d.school research, Uncharted Territory: A Guide to Reimagining Higher Education, explains, “We have seen that ‘when’ and ‘where’ learning happens is shifting, bringing into question some of the fundamental assumptions that underpin the traditional four-year degree model. We could envision a departure from the four-year model in favor of lifetime learning, allowing students to ‘loop’ in and out of the college experience at their own pace and on their own time.” Yet, we haven’t had a way to efficiently and reliably authenticate more modular learning or “micro- credentials”. In a world in which over half the PhDs awarded are from fraudulent degree mills, employers can struggle to confirm the veracity of university degrees, much less verify learning that takes place in smaller chunks.
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The Business Review | September 2020
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