Companies Do Not Care About Learning & Universities Do Not Care About Performance: Why This Matters NOW
One of the best things about building CASEWORX has been that it’s given me insights into all types of learning environments. What started as an academic teaching project around 2013 has allowed me to criss-cross the country, sitting in the most elite MBA classrooms, observing blue-collar employees training in the field, working with almost 100% immigrant students on asynchronous learning platforms, and beyond. I’ve seen a lot of hope, determination, and hard work in all of these environments. Honestly, you can see the American Dream in action. But I’ve also seen a lot of frustration from educators, students, administrators, and families who also sacrifice in the pursuit of higher education, much of it around the feeling that something isn’t translating between their academic pursuits and the real world…
I’ve also absorbed a lot of fantastic critiques about What’s Wrong With Our Education System® from anyone who’s attacked the topic seriously. I’ve read Ryan Craig’s great book on building alternatives to traditional universities. I devoured Patty Mccord’s now-iconic presentation on Netflix’s talent development strategy. I try to keep up with my Bryan Alexander. We studied under bleeding-edge educators and entrepreneurs at the Penn Graduate School of Education and Village Capital, colliding with instructional designers, professors, founders, investors, and anyone else you’d want to meet in the space. But maybe I’m just slow, because the real divide between learning at school vs. learning at work didn’t show itself to me until this fall…
Tucked away on the periphery of the DevLearn Conference in Las Vegas this past October was a small event held by Kineo USA. The all-day conference brought together psychology professors, L&D leaders from the International Fire Chiefs Association to Facebook, and instructional designers, all of whom are working to build better education systems in an increasingly fractured world. It was really this experience that crystallized the disconnect for me.
Companies Do Not Care About Learning. Universities Do Not Care About Performance.
That’s really it, right there. Obviously, it’s not that there aren’t people inside of companies who are deeply committed to learning, or that there aren’t professors who value the application of learning (i.e., performance) out in the world. But the institutional values between the two spaces miss each other, quite badly at times, and so therefore do the incentives to excel in them. The reason why this is so is probably pretty obvious, given our familiarity with both worlds, but the fact that Workplace Ed and Higher Ed have such misaligned missions is an issue that’s becoming more urgent in the face of rising education costs, technological disruption, and yawning skills gaps. The result is adults who’ve spent (and re-spent) tens of thousands of dollars on education necessary to stay competitive in the workforce, and employers who still can’t use them once they get there.
This is not breaking news (like I said, I’m slow). 5% of Americans think that high school graduates are ready to work. And even though over 90% of Americans think post-secondary education is important, only 13% strongly agree that college graduates are work-ready. Having spent over a decade in a university classroom myself, I can confidently say that Work and School value different competencies, and even when they agree on a skill — say, “critical thinking” — they both define it in such a way that there’s actually little overlap. Being “successful” at school requires different skills than being a great employee. This is a truism for most people, but for decades it didn’t really matter too much. A good student can be hammered into a decent employee over time. You’ve seen it happen hundreds of times; it may have happened to you. But the era of this sloppy skills transfer is ending, largely due to globalization (for all the flak he catches, I think Tom Friedman’s had it right about successful mediocrity for some time). So why is it such an urgent problem now?
Well, the above graph can shed some light. Since the new century, we’ve seen education costs skyrocket against declining earning power (trust us, the graph doesn’t get better after 2011…). In other words, a certification that is considered by most as a prerequisite to a good career got a lot harder to acquire, while losing over a sixth of the influence than it had before 2000. It’s kind of like if the measles vaccines became 15% less effective while costing you around $140 instead of its normal $80. One might feel…gypped. This has fed directly into the second most important factor, that of changing expectations. In the mid-1970s, about 68% percent of college freshmen thought “getting a job” was a very important reason to get a degree. After the Great Recession, that number approaches 90% (this is also one of the major reasons why the humanities are currently in an enrollment crisis). The greater investment and stakes connected to acquiring post-secondary education are forcing students to demand a more direct path to a successful career, which is not something your garden variety land grant university ever had as a top priority (regardless of what they may say).
But in a three-sided marketplace, it’s a lot easier to change one side than the other two. Universities need to adapt more effectively to this new reality, mainly because learners and employers already have. Families have taken on more debt to stay educated, and working adults are re-skilling more rapidly to stay abreast of technological change. Companies — led by tech giants like Google and Apple— are beginning to look past college degrees in hiring to focus on demonstrated skills, and are shepherding young talent well before college. It’s hard to say Higher Ed, outside of innovative outliers like SNHU and ASU, are addressing these gaps as aggressively.
Now, any university president with proper PR training will roll out their bevy of online courses and flexible degrees in the face of such criticism. And to be fair, a normal university has many more stakeholders to satisfy than a student or even a large company. But institutions of higher learning need to move faster than they currently are, especially for the universities who provide a path of upward mobility for traditionally underserved students (state schools like my Cal State LA come to mind). And it has less to do with what happens inside a classroom than outside of it. Schools need to place students more meaningfully inside of companies, because the most valuable type of learning that happens there is experiential and centered around real-world problems. In this context, things like school credit or stipends are just not as important, while exposure to core job requirements and “outcomes ownership” are far more valuable. This is really hard for a lot of lifelong educators to hear (aka, folks who have academically excelled their entire lives), but being good at school is not all that important, and it has always been a messy indicator of future success. These New Millennial pressures have simply exposed this truth for more people to see. Universities should start taking heed, before employers and students start making it a two-sided marketplace.
The good news is that there a lot of innovations afoot, from curriculum design to financing, that Higher Ed can more aggressively embrace. Here’s just a sampling below:
- Externships: As opposed to internships that run entire academic periods, and often end up as glorified copying and time-marking assignments. Externships are often much shorter, revolving around a specific project or problem. Externships can allow students to build a definable skill set from a specific set of activities.
- Income Share Agreements: ISAs are a new way to finance training, where an institution starts taking a percentage of a new employee’s wages to repay their education costs, but only after they’ve hit a certain salary threshold. A system that’s quite popular with, say, coding bootcamps, can be extended more into traditional education. (please note that there’s a healthy debate going on over ISAs).
- Renaissance of Trade Skills: Vocational training has been relegated to the basement of American education for over half a century. But we’re getting a lot smarter about introducing it back into “normal” curricula and removing its unwarranted stigma. This area is a strong opportunity for community colleges and state schools to show a hard link between school training and the work world.
- Taking Soft Skills Seriously: If you talk to L&D professionals, their main problem is not that a freshly minted MBA can’t build an Excel model, but that they can’t have normal freaking conversation with a colleague or run a diverse team. Schools can start curating initiatives that are already doing this well (like Empatico), and route their students there. They don’t have to build the entire thing themselves.
- Explicit vs. Tacit Knowledge: Schools would do well to better identify the types of knowledge they’re imparting. Explicit knowledge (e.g., learning Ruby on Rails) can be distributed much more efficiently than universities usually do it. Tacit knowledge (e.g., leadership skills) are harder to transfer, and can take advantage of a university’s infrastructure. Schools should outsources the former (giving clear referrals and credit), and lean into the latter.
This is just scratching the service, but it points to opportunities where Higher Ed can get more in-line with their marketplace colleagues, who are putting a premium on performance and job readiness. Because in the real world, performance is what really matters. But in any relationship, it’s never one side completely at fault. Next month, we’ll look at what the corporate world can do to better to better equip the workers in their offices.
Justin Wolske runs CASEWORX, serves as EIR at GRID110, and teaches at the School of Television, Film & Digital Media at Cal State LA. He has collaborated with Jason Gore and Saturn Leadership to develop C.U.B.E. for Conflict, which addresses difficult conversations in the workplace.
