It's Time to Ditch 4
Years of Costly College for Directed Apprenticeships
June 2, 2016
Short, intense directed
apprenticeships that teach students how to learn on their own to mastery are
the future of higher education.
So it turns out sitting in a
chair for four years doesn't deliver mastery in anything but the acquisition of
staggering student-loan debt. Practical (i.e. useful)
mastery requires not just hours of practice but directed
deep learning via doing of the sort you only get in an
apprenticeship.
The failure of our model of
largely passive learning and rote practice is explained by Daniel Coyle in his
book The Talent Code (sent
to me by Ron G.), which upends the notion that talent is a genetic gift. It
isn't--in his words, it's grown by deep practice,
the ignition of motivation and master
coaching.
Using these techniques, student
reach levels of accomplishment in months that surpass those of students who
spent years in hyper-costly conventional education programs. The
potential to radically improve our higher education system while reducing the
cost of that education by 90% is the topic of my books Get a Job, Build a Real Career
and Defy a Bewildering Economy and The Nearly Free University and
the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education.
Let's start by admitting our
system of higher education is unsustainable and broken: a complete failure by
any reasonable, objective standard. Tuition has soared
$1,100% while the output of the system (the economic/educational value of a
college degree) has declined precipitously.
A recent major study, Academically Adrift: Limited
Learning on College Campuses, concluded that "American
higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion
of students."
'Academically Adrift': The News
Gets Worse and Worse (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
These two charts are the acme
of unsustainability: college tuition has skyrocketed, along with federally
funded student loan debt.
The typical graduate of a
short, intense directed apprenticeship says "I learned more in a month
here than I did in four years of college." This
is a statement of fact, and it is the result of the methods deployed in
structured on-the-job training.
It is a fact that passively
listening to a lecture does not generate the sort of mastery that creates
economic value or the sort of deep understanding that is the goal of a classic
liberal arts education.
It's also a fact that rote
practice also doesn't lead to mastery, and often kills the very passion for a
subject that in more productive programs jumpstarts mastery.
Our higher educational system
has failed so badly that many students are incapable of writing/communicating
effectively. In a world of rapidly changing technologies across every
field and an emerging economy that places an ever-higher premium on
collaboration and clear communication across multiple time zones and languages,
the ability to write clearly is absolutely essential.
To "graduate"
students with poor writing skills is completely unforgivable. Yet in the
current system, if a student logs the requisite number of credits, a diploma is
duly issued, regardless of how little he/she actually learned.
Here's a six-month program that
could replace four years of hyper-costly, ineffective university.
1. Teach the students how to
learn on their own, for the rest of their lives. This could take as little as a
few hours or days. Once a student learns how to pursue deep learning and deep
practice on their own, they don't need years of classrooms--they just need the
guidance of someone experienced in the field, i.e. a structured apprenticeship.
2. One semester in a wide
variety of on-the-job experiences. Once students are given real experience in a
variety of fields and industries, it's likely some spark of ignition will occur
and they'll find the motivation to pursue real mastery instead of a worthless
credential.
3. Directed apprenticeships
plus online lectures/workshops by the best lecturers viewed before or after the
students' real work. The key to learning deeply and learning fast is to push
right up against the current level of competence, where failure occurs and can
be addressed one piece at a time.
Interestingly, Coyle notes
that the most successful incubators of talent around the world are generally in
makeshift or decrepit buildings, not fancy new gleaming buildings of the sort
that dot American college campuses. Surrounded by luxury, who feels any hunger
to learn anything voraciously?
The entire "campus
experience" should be jettisoned, not just as an overly expensive
infrastructure but as a detriment to fast, deep learning that is the foundation
of mastery.
It isn't that hard to teach
students how to improve their writing/communications skills very quickly, and
give them a taste of the classic liberal arts education so many people claim is
the goal of $120,000 four-year programs that fail to generate a deep
understanding of anything remotely leading to mastery.
Give them a single sentence
by Melville, Austin, et al. and have them compose a sentence that is like the
original in cadence, structure and meaning in one minute flat. Go, go, go. Then
break down each phrase and each component and work through each one to improve
their first efforts, step by step. Repeat the process, always under intense
time pressure.
Then take them out into the
real world to report a journalistic story by interviewing people, checking
facts, confirming quotes from sources, question the received wisdom around the
topic and compose the story in journalistic style. Once again, break down their
efforts line by line in comparison with a professional journalists' story on
the same topic.
Then, in the second class...
more doing the work at a breakneck pace, more being pushed beyond their current
level of expertise, more corrections of errors and weaknesses, step by step, in
a pressure-cooker of deadlines.
I can pretty much guarantee
the students in such a directed apprenticeship will learn more about writing in
a week than they would in a year of conventional coursework.
Short, intense directed
apprenticeships that teach students how to learn on their own to mastery are
the future of higher education. We can continue to squander
trillions of dollars on an ineffective system until it finally collapses under
its own weight, or we can admit the current contraption is unsustainable and a
failure, and move on to a better, cheaper system.
A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All is now available as an Audible audio book.
A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All is now available as an Audible audio book.
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