shutterstock_363589958

Is college the right, or only, path to a good-paying job?

High demand for skilled labor challenges old notions of preparing for a career. Lumina Foundation CEO Jamie Merisotis weighs in on alternative pathways.
-

For more than a decade, the question has been raised in blaring headline after blaring headline: Are College Degrees Becoming Obsolete? Given the current enrollment numbers, it doesn’t seem as though American colleges and universities are going to disappear overnight. But consider these two facts: one) university enrollment has been declining for eight years, and two) traditional higher education is being challenged by work-training programs that arm students with very specific skills that businesses say they need.

It is clear colleges and universities will be facing some major headwinds unless they rethink their roles in preparing students for the workforce, according to one respected expert on higher education.

Jaimie Merisotis
Merisotis at the 2017 Milken Institute Global Conference. Photo  – Jonathan Barenboim

“There’s a rising demand for talent, and colleges and universities are a major engine of talent production in this country. I continue to argue that they will be for the foreseeable future, but their position is much more precarious than it was a few years ago,” according to Jamie Merisotis, the President and CEO of the Lumina Foundation, a foundation whose mission is to make post-high school learning opportunities available to all. His book, America Needs Talent, is now out in an updated, second edition.

“What we’ve seen is an ecosystem emerging here of post-secondary learning where colleges and universities are a key element, but not the sole element. Workplace-based learning, direct-to-consumer programs, etc. All of those things are sort of part of this emerging ecosystem,” explains Merisotis. I had the chance to talk with him about the big question: ‘how is higher education going to position itself as relevant in that universe?’

“The system has got to respond to that,” Merisotis says, “or else we will create an entirely new system that largely leaves higher education in the dust, and that would be bad.” He believes that because of its origins, higher education continues to see itself as largely a “temporal” entity. “The way most people think about higher education is first you go to college then you go to work. That’s sort of the mindset. And the college and universities are part of that mindset.”

Image via America Needs Talent website.

“But what we now know—and WorkingNation has been really, really good at pointing out—is that in this new economy, in this knowledge-based economy, working and learning have to be tightly connected, and it’s an ongoing process. By and large, the system of higher education still sees itself as educating and then somebody else is dealing with the rest of it. And that’s deeply problematic from the consumer perspective,” he argues.

“What the consumer wants to know is, do I know more than I did before? Do I have a credential that demonstrates that I know more because that’s what I need in order for my employer or my future employers to be able to recognize that so that I can advance personally? And I think higher education is increasingly going to run into headwinds in this temporal model if it’s not careful.”

Merisotis is not a fan of the phrase “lifelong learning,” but he believes that what you learn at work allows you to learn new things outside of work. “Lifelong learning to me is a concept that works really well for educators, but it doesn’t work really well for anybody else. That doesn’t sound very attractive to people like, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got to learn my whole life?’ My visual is, it’s like a ratchet. You keep ratcheting up. You’re working, and you’re learning. By learning more, you get to work in a different way.“

This fall, there are an estimated 19.9 million students enrolled in two- and four-year schools. That’s down from the peak enrollment of 21 million in 2010. Merisotis says the decline is partly attributable to the growing sophistication and growing development of the alternative post-high school ecosystem. Another pressure on higher education is soaring tuitions.

“The price is unsupportable for a growing proportion of the population. The indicators of the price pressures are things like very high debt levels, and the shift of students, particularly higher-income students, from private institutions to public universities,” Merisotis tells me. “There’s a sort of broader market-effect that you can see of people saying, ‘is this really worth it?’”

Merisotis is clear that we shouldn’t be sending the message that you don’t need to go to college because, for most people, it still the principal pathway to achieving the level of education that will land you a good-paying job. “Your ability to be a part of the middle class is increasingly going to require you to have a post-secondary credential. I think the new version of the American Dream needs to be that you’ve got to develop your talent over the course of your lifetime. That college is a means, not an end. And that learning process right now is largely going to take place in college and universities.”

Over time, he says, that will shift. It has to. According to Merisotis, the right message to students is that your success will be tied to your ability to understand deeply and learn more. “We’ve got to aim them towards this idea that your success is going to be tied, not to this one-shot opportunity to get a college degree, but to your ability to live and work in a context where you are working and learning in parallel processes.”

Merisotis says that message should be shared with workers of all ages. There are many workers in low-wage, low-skill jobs who want to find a better job. The problem is that they may not know how to advance to the next level. “They are employed, but they’re clearly just sort of treading water or slowly sinking. That’s one of the reasons why I think there is a direct-to-consumer model that’s emerging here that’s more appealing. If you’re somebody who’s our age and who still has a useful work life ahead of them, and they can learn online, there’s a lot of motivation to that.”

RELATED STORY: Credential Engine – More than 300K credentials exist in the U.S.

Some traditional higher education institutions see the value of filling that need, offering online courses to a broader base of students, not just those enrolled and attending classes on campus. edX is a collaboration of Harvard and MIT founded in 2012. It offers high-quality courses from more than 130 partnering universities and institutions to learners everywhere. Importantly, it also offers professional credentials, micro-masters degrees, and now micro-bachelor’s degrees.

“You can see some innovation in the higher-end, more elite schools, but is it enough? I don’t think it is,” Merisotis tells me. “I think that those are still more of the exceptions than the rule, but I think you’re starting to see an accelerated pace of it.”

Join the Conversation: How should parents and educators promote alternative career pathways to a new generation of learners? Tell us your ideas on our Facebook page.

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.