What Colleges Must Do to Stay Relevant

Flickr: J. Gre­sham

For many Amer­i­cans, going to col­lege has been the next nat­ur­al step after grad­u­at­ing from high school. A col­lege degree has served not just as a sta­tus sym­bol, but also proof that grad­u­ates have mas­tered a sub­ject and can put the knowl­edge they've acquired in school to prac­tice.

But the value of a col­lege degree is being ques­tioned by those who won­der if there's a bet­ter alter­na­tive. With free, high-quality edu­ca­tion avail­able online, and a grow­ing new move­ment around non­tra­di­tion­al ways of earn­ing cred­it for exper­tise through dig­i­tal badges (a dig­i­tal port­fo­lio of sorts that includes cred­it for online cours­es, tra­di­tion­al col­lege cours­es, and work­place achieve­ments), col­leges must find new ways of stay­ing rel­e­vant.

Dis­till­ing a recent New York Times inter­view with Richard DeMil­lo, direc­tor of the Cen­ter for 21st Cen­tu­ry Uni­ver­si­ties at Geor­gia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy and author of Abelard to Apple: The Fate of Amer­i­can Col­leges and Uni­ver­si­ties, a few imper­a­tives are becom­ing clear.

• INFOR­MA­TION IS PRICE­LESS. With MIT's Open­Course­Ware – the uni­ver­si­ty's class­es offered online for free – as well as a long list of other qual­i­ty free edu­ca­tion­al resources, the pub­lic per­cep­tion of what holds value in edu­ca­tion has changed. Facts and how-to's are freely avail­able to any­one with Inter­net access. So why pay upwards of $40,000 a year in tuition? "Open­Course­Ware was an impor­tant sign­post that ham­mered home the point that the con­tent of a uni­ver­si­ty course was being rapid­ly com­modi­tized by technology," DeMil­lo said in the inter­view with New York Times reporter Tamar Lewin. "If you [col­lege pro­fes­sor] think your value is in 13 weeks of lec­tures, then exams, it's true that that's prob­a­bly not going to be as valu­able in the future."

• GO STRAIGHT TO THE SOURCE. When faced with a huge drop in enroll­ment in the com­put­er sci­ence pro­gram at Geor­gia Tech after the dot-com bust, DeMil­lo had to find a way to lure stu­dents back at a time when every­one believed tech jobs would be out­sourced to other coun­tries.  Rather than con­fer with the insu­lar aca­d­e­m­ic com­mu­ni­ty, DeMil­lo looked out to the real world for advice. He spoke to dozens of video game com­pa­nies about what they were look­ing for in com­put­er sci­ence grads. "They said they need­ed peo­ple who not only know the tech­nol­o­gy but were skilled in the art of sto­ry­telling, the nar­ra­tive arc," he told the Times. Armed with this knowl­edge, he recon­fig­ured the com­put­er sci­ence depart­ment to allow stu­dents to choose two "inter­dis­ci­pli­nary threads," like com­put­ing and media. The les­son? "What engi­neers are good at is out-of-the-box solu­tions, pro­to­typ­ing, and not wait­ing for a big sys­tem change to make an improvement."............

What Colleges Must Do to Stay Relevant
http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/11/what-colleges-must-do-to-stay-relevant/