This Is Not Higher Ed’s Armageddon. This Is Its Cambrian Explosion.
Having a foot in both traditional education and edtech has its advantages. One of them is to experience firsthand the very asymmetrical responses to what COVID has done to learning in 2020, especially in Higher Education.¹ In the traditional world, there’s a deep, almost existential dread. Even if educators can avoid working in classroom-cum-petri-dish environments, there exists the long-tail destruction that this virus will wreak across university income statements. The average age of a tenured professor is well over 50, so imagine how long it will take for ominous news to start emerging from our nation’s best party schools (best bet: early September). So this is, naturally, creating chaos. As of this writing, thousands of students and educators don’t even know if they’ll be allowed back on campus in less than a month. My adjunct faculty union at Cal State LA is prepping its members on how to file for unemployment and grievances over canceled courses simultaneously. Private institutions are watching foreign students — held back due to American xenophobia and virus concerns — withhold their desperately needed international tuitions. Public institutions are seeing their budgets slashed due to massive declines in state tax coffers. The virus has metastasized.
On the edtech side, there’s anxiety, of course, over a lost spring and stalled funding rounds. But there’s also the sharp glint of opportunity. Founders are seeing big upticks in trials across district, campus, and workplace. Online course platforms are absorbing a surge of visitors eager to keep pace during the disruption, to see how to make endless Zoom sessions bearable, or to learn new skills in a crumbling job market. “Maybe this is the thing that will bring down the red tape and year long sales cycles,” education innovators whisper to each other. The fragrant smell of spring wafts in the air among the particulates...
And yes, both sides are right. For an economically imperiled adjunct, a physically vulnerable dean, or even a DEI trainer whose company is downsizing, the threat is real and personal. For education entrepreneurs, they sense a (panicked) appetite to try things that have not been tried before. But we’d like to offer Big Ed a comforting thought: this really, truly, honestly is an opportunity. Like, we promise. Traditional HigherEd is an easy target for criticism, from its administrative bloat to its fossilized faculty to its degrees that are rapidly increasing in expense while declining in value. But a lot of that is the function of a pretty basic observation: Higher Education is asked to do too much in our society. Universities have become gatekeepers to upward mobility through rigorous standards, but are also supposed to spread that opportunity out to as many people as possible. They are our entrypoint into modern adult society, relying an industrial pedagogical models perfected in the 1800s. They are the stewards of our classics and culture, and supposed to do the advanced research that will take us into the future. They are supposed to prepare our youth for the workforce, but are also supposed to be too high-minded to get dragged into such a transactional relationship with society. Higher Education in America is not to big too fail — that will become apparent for many, very soon — but it is to big to succeed.
Most importantly, HigherEd no longer knows the answer to the first question that every entrepreneur must ask herself: What problem am I solving?
UNIVERSITIES SHOULD DIVEST THEMSELVES OF “HOW TO” KNOWLEDGE
COVID is a chance to reset, because destruction is inevitable. Most schools will not go under, but a serious number could and will; more importantly, the fissures that this pandemic widens will accelerate the systemic issues that are plaguing the way we educate people to participate in society, exacerbating chronic inequalities. There is no shortage of advice on what universities should do going forward. Our argument is that HigherEd should start by identifying the types of learning that happen in the world, and focus on the ones which they solve best. As we’ve written before, there are essentially three types of knowledge transfer:
- Explicit or Codified Knowledge: knowledge that is easy to transfer through documentation, archiving, or IT measures
- Implicit or Tacit Knowledge: knowledge that is difficult to transfer or communicate, and rooted in context, experience, practice, and values
- Embedded or Systemic Knowledge: knowledge that is “locked” in practices, structures, initiatives, or cultures
Let’s look at it through, say, the process of becoming a good salesperson. The knowledge required to “get up to speed” in Salesforce — where she’ll spend a big part of her day — is largely explicit. There’s no shortage of tutorials, manuals, and webinars to get proficient in a widely available software. The skill of closing a long-cycle sale, however, is not. To get a temperamental client to a buy a large SaaS suite of tools takes technical knowledge of the product, patience, salesmanship…it’s not easy to get good at complex sales and it’s great to have a mentor to help. That’s implicit knowledge; it isn’t buried in Jira, Slack, or some obscure email. Now, if the company has developed a method to manage their sales cycles, that knowledge becomes embedded: the CRM, the documentation, the sales seminars have all been bent to serve this system or culture of selling. Anything you do that is at all sophisticated requires all of these types of knowledge transfer.
Our argument is this: HigherEd needs to get out of the explicit knowledge business. In the 21st century, there are simply too many ways to deliver this knowledge cheaper, faster, freer, and better. There’s no good justification for a college freshman to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get the periodic table of elements down, or get their grammar to a minimum proficiency, or even learn the fundamentals of Python. The problem is that so many universities are addicted to explicit knowledge transfer. They have writing centers so students can hammer out a readable essay. They have remedial programs so students on the bubble can get into the 101 course. They employ hundreds of staff and adjuncts. They did this over time to provide more access to more people, but this explicit knowledge infrastructure (combined with “quality of life” amenities) bloats the university and is a disservice to the student who is paying hundreds of dollars per credit to practice subject-predicate agreement.
This is not a new idea, and the counterarguments are well-worn. K-12 is not sending prepared students. Removing more remedial courses is a disservice to students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. But it’s not a service to pile debt onto a disadvantaged student so he can reach basic reading proficiency, when there are other obvious solutions. And K-12 — which is even more disconnected from it it takes to get ahead in the modern world than HigherEd— will never take on the improvements required to produce college readiness when they know that universities have an aligned incentive to bail them out anyways, keeping their own numbers and bloat sustained.
The American post-secondary education system — still the best in the world — should focus on delivering implicit knowledge while they continue to be repositories of embedded knowledge. If I acquire most of my how to knowledge via a community college, an internship, or Coursera, I can spend 2–3 years honing my when/why to knowledge, while contributing to the we own knowledge of my alma mater. There are a bevy reasons why this makes sense:
- It’s cheaper: we’ve gone over this, but if more persuading is needed, find someone taking a 100-course at a decent state school, and compare that per-credit cost against its community college or MOOC equivalent. Then replay that scenario about 5–10 times over two years.
- It makes college shorter: many degrees should not take four years, and knocking easily transferred knowledge out of the way elsewhere makes the most impactful parts of a poly sci or a history degree even more intensive and valuable.
- It shores up the value of the college degree: one of the most annoying things about the rising cost of education, is that the ROI did not keep pace. Degrees are holding less value, so one way to protect that value is to make it less expensive. Doing explicit knowledge transfer elsewhere does that.
- College can focus on the problem areas it actually attacks: I always tell people that I learned everything UCLA film school had to teach me in one year. The other four years were about learning to become worth a damn behind a camera, a function of implicit and embedded knowledge. You need the late night dorm arguments and beers with the professor not when you’re learning about a subject, but when you’re learning to become good at it.
- Employers care about implicit knowledge anyway: If you spend as much time talking to workplace educators as we do, one thing becomes really obvious: knowing some program or workflow doesn’t snag you a career-path job. Communication, teamwork, and problem-solving skills do. That’s mostly implicit knowledge, and companies will happily give Excel workshops if they’ve got graduates who can do the tougher stuff. Universities should value this insight more.
- It’s the best way to attack Higher Ed bloat: politicians, parents, and academics love to point the finger at each other about why college is so expensive, and they all share in the blame. But the main reason is that universities got too big with non-teaching personnel. Dozens of assistant deans and provosts and vice-this-and-that piled into an institution that is now a young person’s educator, doctor, mental health therapist, and social director. You can chart a direct line from when this started to happen in the 1980s to today, along with the commensurate income needed to sustain the leviathans. Universities must stop trying to be this all-in-one train track to adulthood. Because they don’t do most of it very well.
Today, the savviest of 18-year-olds takes her prerequisites at the nearby community college while getting a part-time job, maybe gets excited by technology and sales. She aces her pres, maybe learns a coding language via Udacity, and skates into one of the many very good public university business programs — that easily takes her credits — for her last two years. She spends her university time focused on project-heavy coursework while landing a few competitive internships and externships where she can see what it’s like to actually do sales in the competitive world of SaaS. She LinkedIns the hell out of those opportunities and compiles a sick network of working professionals without ever stepping foot into the coffin-like Career Office on campus. Even in a pandemic-driven malaise, she graduates with substantial headway into the next phase of her life with close to zero debt. She also made a bunch of friends and went to some raging keggers.²
HIGHER ED’S CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION
Post-secondary education in this country has changed, radically. What used to be rarefied preparation for the ruling class is now a required obstacle course for most American Dreams. As a result, the institutions grew larger and more amorphous, trying to have a hand in just about everything related to adult learning. Given its central nature to occupational success, Americans have increasingly come to link their time on campus to their future work, and have begun to expect a strong correlation between school and job (to the horror of many faculty!).
If the above holds true, then HigherEd should be focused on developing the executive functions that are so valuable at work, not on assuring proficiency to be on campus in the first place, or trafficking in explicit “how to” knowledge. Because, honestly, they suck at it, and there is such a diverse array of programs, platforms, software, and tools that are cheaper, more equitable, and more just to the young adults who need them.
This is what we mean by HigherEd’s Cambrian Explosion (if you don’t know what that is, time for some explicit knowledge transfer!). Moving away for four years and emerging the other end a fully formed adult is not the only way to do it…it’s not even the best way today. If we are going to bring HigherEd accessibility back to earth and its value back from the grave, we need to start with what it does naturally well, and decouple the rest so young people can use other solutions. That’s mostly around explicit knowledge transfer, and there’s already a thriving ecosystem that gets shadowed by 4-year institutions. We’re not being naive; we know this will be very painful for college campuses who’ve grown to be these anchors of culture, identity, and employment for a region. But for the sake of people trying to use higher education to advance their lives, we need to encourage the explosion of cheap, fast, and scalable solutions that will address the first steps of post-secondary learning.
This is what COVID can do for our system, because the reckoning is here. Online learning, innovation, radical change…these are no longer “nice to haves.” That asteroid is headed straight for the new rock climbing center in the student union. Does HigherEd really want to rebuild it afterwards or double down on what it’s actually good at?
¹ We’ll focus on HigherEd for this. On one hand, it’s where our domain expertise is. On the other, we fully understand that K-12 is an utter s**tshow in the United States right now, driven by almost kamikaze-like political desperation. We honestly can’t even right now.
² “But what if she learns she doesn’t like sales??” you retort. “You just had an 18-year-old treat college like one long career track that she doesn’t actually want!” OK…but she also learned communication skills, emotional intelligence, project management, etc. Those things tend to transfer well to product development, HR, starting her own company, teaching,…
