Life’s different for today’s students — let’s help them succeed with high quality learning
By Debra Humphreys
Lumina Foundation is committed to increasing the number of individuals with high-quality credentials beyond high school. This is the second in a series on what it will take to assure that the pathways to those credentials are designed to assure the quality of the educational experience and equitable access to the real benefits of high-quality credentials.
College degrees or other credentials beyond high school are critical for success in today’s workplace, but there’s a difference between knowing that and helping more people achieve it. For starters, let’s recognize that today’s students lead busy, complicated lives.
Because of their challenging life circumstances, too many college students who pursue credentials end up not gaining the knowledge needed for success in today’s workplace. Some of them never reach the finish line either because of finances or because they simply do not see themselves gaining the skills they need along the way. They aren’t motivated to keep at it because their educational experiences do not engage them. Those experiences do not speak to the students’ own lives and aspirations.
Others are graduating but still lack the confidence and capacity to compete and succeed in today’s global job market. Until this reality changes, skepticism among the general public about the value of learning beyond high school, which has surfaced in some recent polls, will continue to grow.
Despite the doubt in some quarters, many young people realize the stakes. More than 85 percent of incoming college students say that “getting a better job is a critical factor in their decision to enroll in college.”
Despite that confidence, however, only about a third of current college students are confident they will graduate with the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in the job market.
In this environment, changing the national narrative means recognizing how the college experience, students, and the nature of work itself have changed. And, then, we must align our policies and practices with these changes.
Today’s students are older. They have children of their own, and many face profound economic obstacles to pursuing learning opportunities beyond high school. Some are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated. Some are active duty military or veterans.
We must build a learning-based infrastructure that works for these students. That’s a system that would prioritize high-quality, relevant learning experiences and students’ demonstrated achievement of competencies through those experiences — instead of just the earning of artificial “credits” through attendance in traditional classroom settings.
The first order of business is to design all educational pathways to be rich in more experiential learning opportunities but also flexible enough to work for today’s students. Did you know that 70 percent of today’s college students are already in the workforce while also pursuing new credentials? This means they face all kinds of challenges in terms of balancing work and learning. Can we design more so-called “high-impact educational practices” to actually integrate with students’ working lives?
Two examples from a recent Cal State Dominguez Hills conference show the answer is “yes.” At Cal State Long Beach, opportunities to do meaningful research with faculty have been restructured to enable students to actually get paid for work in the labs and with faculty, while also earning credit for work in linked courses that build directly on their research experiences.
Texas A&M International University has created an initial year-long first-year experience that employs upper division students as peer mentors to help first year students succeed. These peer mentors are paid for their time and learn professional success skills while also contributing to improving the institution’s overall student success rates.
For all these students, we must smooth the path to credentials while we also assure that what they are learning is actually aligned to the changing nature of work.
Globalization and technology are exerting a growing and profound impact on the workplace. We’ve seen in economic research like that conducted by Frank Levy and Richard Murnane and many others that human work is shifting toward several broad kinds of tasks — those activities that cannot easily be done by machines — even very smart ones.
The good jobs of the future will require graduates to be adept at working in diverse settings and to have the ability to relate both to machines and to other people. They will require people to solve complex problems for which there may be no simple solutions. Good middle-class jobs will require the ability to work with new information — acquiring it, assessing its value, and communicating it to others.
The workplace increasingly demands those skills, and the more we design experiential and active learning approaches, the more successful tomorrow’s graduates will be in that workplace. Retooling our education system, and our expectations about the teaching and learning approaches appropriate for today’s students, will take a similar commitment to change and to solving complex problems.
We can do it — we just have to be as good at adapting to change as we expect our students to be.
Debra Humphreys, Ph.D., is vice president of strategic engagement for Lumina Foundation, leading the foundation’s stakeholder engagement and strategic communications work, while also providing direction for Lumina’s work on postsecondary education quality.
