As a follow-up to yesterday’s post (esp. point #3), I wanted to highlight a few interesting excerpts from David Brooks’ Op-Ed yesterday, Testing the Teachers, which talks about the state of US universities and some significant trends — namely, that:

• “Colleges are charging more money, but it’s not clear how much actual benefit they are providing.”
• “Colleges today are certainly less demanding. In 1961, students spent an average of 24 hours a week studying. Today’s students spend a little more than half that time — a trend not explained by changing demographics.”
• “This is an unstable situation. At some point, parents are going to decide that $160,000 is too high a price if all you get is an empty credential and a fancy car-window sticker.”
• “One part of the solution is found in three little words: value-added assessments. Colleges have to test more to find out how they’re doing.”
• With these assessments, some institutions could say: “’We may not be prestigious or as expensive as X, but here students actually learn.’”

This last point is key — and it may be online offerings, not just less well-known universities, who will be able to market off this tagline.

Just back from the Education Innovation conference at Arizona State, and there were a few recurring themes about where US education — at both the K12 and post-secondary levels — is heading, three of which I’ve highlighted here:

1) Technology to drive personalization and adaptive learning.

Historically, individualized instruction has been provided by effective teachers, who have the skills to tailor how they teach a topic to different students based on the students’ needs, learning styles, etc.

A slew of new companies — from big district or university-wide data systems to individual iPad apps — are attempting to significantly augment (or provide for the first time, in the case of students taught by ineffective teachers) personalized learning by capturing and analyzing real-time student actions (e.g. their clicks of a mouse in an exercise), and then providing them specifically tailored online instruction.  TBD on which ones will ultimately succeed (see #2 below).

2) Too many edu technologies are being developed without understanding the real needs in K-12.

Educators expressed concern that too many technologists and product developers were working without enough understanding of (a) their products’ consumers, e.g. teachers, students, etc.; or (b) the latest research of what drives student achievement.  Given the dynamics of selling into the K-12 universe, understanding the multitude of constituents’ needs and motivations — from district administrators to principals to teachers to parents to students — is key and not a trivial undertaking.  Even those going direct-to-consumer via web-based or app models need to understand this.

3) The future of universities.

As I’ve posted about previously, there are an increasing number of online sources where students can gain practical vocational skills (vs. credentialing) at a fraction of the cost of what a university charges.

As a result, this creates an attractive alternative for (a) students who are better served by these targeted and inexpensive options and (b) employers who care less about the name of the institution on a prospective employee’s resume and more about their actual skills.

When I’ve hired engineers and designers, whether they were straight out of college or not, it was relatively straightforward to assess their abilities by looking at their code samples and/or portfolio — where their degree was from (or even if they had one), was irrelevant.  This is generally true across functions (not just engineering) as people move farther away from graduation dates and their undergrad or grad degrees are trumped by their professional experiences.  But increasingly I think it will be true for those in the early stages of their careers, especially in functional areas like software engineering where employers will be directly dictating desired educational outcomes and are indifferent as to where the student has developed the skills to achieve those outcomes.