Let Them Eat Cake: Workforce Development in the Academy

Those of us who are committed to higher education need to face some hard truths. Many Americans have lost faith in the value of higher education. According to the Deloitte Center for Higher Education Excellence, the percentage of Americans that express high confidence in the value of higher education fell from 57% to 36%. Only 47% of Americans believe a four-year degree is worth pursuing without school loans. The percentage drops to 22% if students must secure school loans. Simultaneously, interest in trade schools is rising. Seventy-six percent of those graduating from trade schools believe their education was worth the cost. Both trade school enrollment and apprenticeships are increasing at a time when college enrollment is declining.

Students who are choosing to enroll in two and four-year institutions are doing so for different reasons. They want schools that can show them how they will get a job after they finish their degrees. They want to know that they will be able to finish their degrees on their timelines and while juggling work and family responsibilities. While taking courses, they want to see how those courses relate to their professional objectives.

The truth is that the centuries-old model of education that has shaped higher education curriculum – a model carried over from K-12 schools – no longer works. It will reinforce the reasons why many are questioning the value proposition of a degree because of two key pillars of higher education: disciplinary silos and future-oriented ambiguity.

The siloed nature of academic disciplines is a challenge. The academy is built upon academic expertise from how academic units are formed to how professional identities are judged and how majors are declared. Yet, as Dewey laments, “Classification is not a matter of child experience; things do not come to the individual pigeonholed. The vital ties of affection, the connecting bonds of activity hold together the variety of his (sic) personal experiences” (The Child and the Curriculum, p. 184). There are opportunities to mitigate the silos through experiential education and other means.

The second pillar, however, is the factor that poses the greatest threat to higher education: future-oriented ambiguity. Within our academic programs, we prepare students by teaching them the knowledge, skills, and theories that we feel are foundational for subject areas related to careers or generally for lives well lived. It’s up to the students to connect the dots after they graduate or for the companies that hire them to train them for specific jobs. Dewey has a lot to say about this as well. In “Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal” (1893), he contends, “Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life. . . An activity which does not have worth enough to be carried on for its own sake cannot be very effective as a preparation for something else” (p.660).

When I taught curriculum classes to master’s and doctoral students, I would share an analogy. Imagine you are a kindergarten student sitting in circle time. As your teacher, I will come to you and tell you that we are going to make a cake. Imagine the excitement about making a cake. I then tell you, “Boys and Girls, this year, you get to take the salt and mix it with the flour! In first grade, you get to add the baking powder! By the time you get to fifth grade, you will be able to start with the wet ingredients – eggs and milk! Boys and girls, in 13 years, you will have a cake!” How excited would you be as a five-year-old sitting in circle time? Yet this is what we do – both in K-12 education and in higher education. We offer siloed ingredients in abstract form with promises that at some time in the future they will be of value.

You could argue that developmentally, college-age students have reached Piaget’s formal operational stage where they can reason about complex concepts and can handle abstract notions of what they need in the future. I’d counter that argument with the following – simply because they can does not mean they should. Trade schools do not make them live in an abstract world where what they are learning MIGHT be useful later.

Four years is too long. Two years is too long. Students need to see how what they are learning relates to what they hope to do. Better yet, what they are learning should help them do what they want to do right now. Faculty at NJCU began embedding micro-credentials into their courses for their students. Completing these would increase their earning potential in real time. This would let them work fewer hours while they completed their degrees, so this became a student success and retention initiative. Bonus. Further, universities need to recognize that what students are doing is worthy of credit. Prior-learning credits are under-utilized in most institutions. At NJCU, we began to give credit for students passing the language fluency tests, using their native languages as assets worthy of college credit. Colleges can also work with industry to see how their training can translate into skills and proficiencies that mirror the competencies in courses and crosswalk this work for credit within a strong partnership – bridging non-credit training of employees and internships for current students.

What if those kindergarteners made that cake instead of being limited to two ingredients? What if, in that first year, they learned something about that cake as they made it – perhaps something about what happens if you don’t let it cool before you try to put icing on it. What if the students made another cake in first grade and asked even deeper questions about it as they made it, and again in second grade, and again in third? Would it be possible to learn something new each year if they made a new cake annually? Might a pastry chef or two emerge from that group of students in the process?

This entry really reminds me of why I named this blog “Re-pitching the Tent.” We have a lot of work to do – not just in terms of the organizational structure and how we lead, but in the very curricular DNA of the academy. Don’t be scared. It’s pretty exciting to consider where all of this is going.