Future of Learning Top Reads for week of Aug 17 2020
“40% Of College Freshmen Likely Won’t Attend This Fall,” by Brandon Busteed, in Forbes
“If 40% of college freshmen and 28% of returning students suggest they may opt out of this fall, what does this tell us? On one hand, it could say students and parents value the in-person, traditional college experience so much that they will wait until it is fully available. On the other hand, it suggests they are contemplating a number of potential alternatives – ranging from fully online universities to community colleges, gap years, and ‘Go Pro Early’ opportunities. […]
“In all cases, it has awakened a new and lasting era of education consumers who are carefully evaluating every component of the college value proposition. There was solid evidence this trend began long before Covid-19 with concerns about college affordability and the work readiness of graduates weighing heavily on college decisions. In simple terms, students and parents are going to see and take advantage of more choices – even after the pandemic abates.”
Why does this matter to the future of learning?
Normally I would say that what’s true for higher ed is similarly true for K12 independent schools. In the case of COVID-19, some independent schools have seen enrollment grow and others have seen it shrink. That variability is likely to persist according to:
How local governments create conditions for suppressing (or enabling) CV19 community transmission.
How local public schools and lower cost private schools do virtual learning in the 2020-21 school year.
One way or the other, families have choices. Expect them to scrutinize them more closely than ever.
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“Conspiracies Killing College!!!” by Ryan Craig, in The Gap Letter
“As Paul Lingenfelter, former President of the State Higher Education Executive Officers has noted, ‘Our fundamental problem is that we don’t have very good ways of measuring our fundamental product.’ Or as the late Stan Jones of Complete College America said, ‘We know they enroll, but we don’t know what happens to them.’
”The obvious answer is a national student unit record system. The human capital equivalent of a national patient identifier, a student unit record system would track every postsecondary learning experience that the federal government has helped to fund – either directly in the form of federal grants and loans, or indirectly in the form of learning delivered at institutions that receive any public funding (i.e., all of them). Just as healthcare professionals should be able to immediately access all relevant patient data, a student unit record would be the single source of truth for student outcomes. Amy Laitinen of New America says ‘it will really help schools understand the trajectory of students, what works, and what doesn’t — and then they can reallocate the resources towards what works.’ And then by connecting a student unit record system to employment data, we could get return on investment information for courses, programs, and institutions. Without a student unit record system, we can’t possibly figure out how public investments in higher education are working, or signal students where their own investments may be at risk.”
Why does this matter to the future of learning?
Let’s remember: what gets measured gets optimized for.
Measure grades and time to degree completion and schools will have an incentive to optimize for those outputs. (Not to be confused with outcomes.)
“Single source of truth” is a high bar. What should we measure to get to the “truth” of a student’s learning?
And are there other verbs besides “measure” that we should be using?
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