The Future Of Education: 3 Ways We Can Reinvent Higher Education To Lower The Barrier Of Entry To…

Less than 7% of people around the world today hold a bachelor’s degree. The reason for this is that higher education around the world is…

Less than 7% of people around the world today hold a bachelor’s degree. The reason for this is that higher education around the world is simply too expensive.

The barriers of getting into and graduating from college are also inordinate. It costs significantly more than people can afford, whether they’re youngsters who are college-aged or working adults.

In the United States, a four-year bachelor’s degree costs in excess of $100,000. And that’s primarily only tuition costs. When added to the cost of living and staying on campus or nearby, and including the costs of day-to-day expenses, this number increases further.

What that means for people around the world is that higher education is designed in such a way that only privileged people can afford to send their children to college or attend college themselves.

Apart from being expensive, colleges around the world have built barriers of exclusivity in such a way that students have to reach out and break them in order to get accepted to a particular college, instead of people around the globe having ready access to education.

Ask any aspiring student who is thinking of getting a degree about the tediousness and the effort they need to put in to get accepted to a college, and they’ll tell you how excruciating the entire process is.

This shouldn’t be the case. Colleges should be the ones reaching out to more students and should be able to reach & teach students across the world, irrespective of their financial status and country of origin.

According to American higher education executive Adrian K. Haugabrook, there are 3 ways we can change & reimagine the way higher education is structured and how universities and their policies can be redesigned to benefit people around the world.

Time

Adrian argues that colleges need to restructure how courses are assessed and graded. Usually, courses are presented in such a way that you need to finish ‘x’ number of hours in order to get enough credits and complete a particular course. And this cost of time increases the cost of tuition considerably.

His solution is to eradicate the need of spending that much time for a credit & spending it on what a student only needs, based on an assessment of his skill & experience.

He says,

“So the first is time. Time goes hand in hand with cost, and this is how it typically goes. College courses and degrees are typically assessed based on credit hours. And each credit costs money. So therefore, in this scenario, time, therefore cost, is fixed, and learning is variable.

This really makes it problematic to drive down cost, and it particularly becomes problematic if you’re trying to balance school, work and other family obligations, as well as other obligations and responsibilities. But if we are to change that scenario, and therefore make learning the constant and time variable, then we break the tyranny of time.

I mean, really, isn’t that what school is about? It’s about learning and gaining mastery, versus logging in a particular number of hours.

So what could we do? We should make and give academic credit for life experiences. Why sit through an entire business management course for a semester, when you can have a university evaluator assess you based on your experience?

So this is what this would look like.

Let’s take a student, Brandice. Brandice is an automotive technician at a car service center. Now let’s take three of the certifications that she received and is required for her to do her work: electrical systems; manual drive, train and axles; and engine performance. Now you take those and you couple with the fact that Brandice is actually managing a team of technicians on the floor. You assess all of that, and she finds out that she’s just a few credits shy of a college degree, a degree in automotive engineering or engineering management. And then on top of that, during that assessment, she find out that she has a pathway to receive the remainder of those credits for her degree in less than five months.

A few of us are doing this. But here’s what I hope for. My hope is that time becomes even more variable.

If we’re able to do this, and do this at scale, we could dramatically decrease the time to complete a degree, therefore drive down cost.”

Place

Secondly, Adrian further highlights how we can reimagine ‘place’ so that students get access to education not just exclusively on campus but also in their local communities. He suggests that rethinking ‘place’ and making education and that sense of ‘belonging’ available to students by integrating local communities and local businesses and business owners is a big step in reaching students in surroundings that they’re familiar with.

His solution is:

“Second … place. We have to completely re-envision and reimagine how we think [about] and we see place.

We know that physical college campuses are expensive to maintain, and we have to understand that we should look at learning options in a variety of different ways. But there’s also another cost that we need to lower … and it’s the cost of belonging — whether it’s because there is not a university nearby for you to learn, be it online or offline, or because there are emotional or cultural walls that disconnect the learner from that learning location.

Cameron, as a student, should be able to take classes in a community center or in his church. He should be able to seek career advising and support from local business owners and businesses.

We should be able to take his work and his volunteer experiences and turn those intro credits, all in a community that he trusts. And then therefore, we are making that community a thriving, vital part of a learning ecosystem, for him and for many others.

If we can do this, this means that we absolutely have to believe that learning can take place anywhere. And if we do, then we decrease the cost of place.”

Teaching

Thirdly, teaching.

Perhaps, the most important aspect of college is being tutored by knowledgeable and helpful teachers. However, Adrian argues that by strategically leveraging technology, that ‘magic’ and ‘personal’ experience of being taught by a brilliant teacher can be made available even in a course that’s taught ‘online’.

“Finally, teaching, what about teaching? Well, teaching is at the heart of learning. Teaching is the inspiration and the connection. It is the spark that connects the learner to the information.

So there’s nothing that we want to do to mess with that magic. But we do know that teaching is one of the higher costs of education. So what do we do? We should take the most inspirational and engaging teachers, and all that teaching charm that comes with it, and make bigger classrooms for them, scaling and expanding their reach. So most classes are 20 to 30 students, or in some cases, a couple of hundred. But in online, you can reach thousands all around the world.

Now, there are folks who are skeptical about online, particularly large online classrooms, and they posit that smaller classrooms are better.

But I would argue what smaller classrooms are really providing is personalization. As so with personalization, this is what I want to see. I want to see a student, regardless of where they are, regardless of their location, have a single source, be it their mobile phone or their laptop, where they have access to instruction, in real time or in their time.

I want a faculty member to be able to anticipate a particular need for a student, outreach to that student, provide a connection for that student with a prepackaged academic toolkit that was prepared by a virtual or automated resource or service, and provide that human intervention for that student just at the right time.

That’s what chatbots and predictive analytics and AI can provide a university: insights into when is it the right time to provide that human intervention that helps that student to become unstuck, and to provide that personal support the student may need.”

Universities need to rethink their policies and this has to happen soon. We need to eradicate the old ways of thinking when it comes to higher education and embrace the new.

If we are to progress as a society and from a collective perspective, we need more than only 7% of the global population owning bachelor’s or master’s degrees. And higher education needs to be accessible to any youngster or adult in the palm of their hands, irrespective of their financial status.

Which is why we need to see a collective effort, not just from universities but also from companies and governments across the world, to help in driving down costs significantly and leveraging technology to educate more of the world’s population.

“I would like to see universities, companies and governments invest deeply in a higher education superhighway that allows for the fluidity and the transferability of experiences from place to place, from workplace to the classroom … beyond borders and beyond boundaries. And in this case … skills and competencies become the currency for a global workforce.”, says Adrian Haugabrook

In his TED Talk, Adrian K. Haugabrook, who is working on changing the way higher education is designed in the US, lays out the roadmap of how colleges and universities across the globe can restructure and redesign themselves in order to reach more people and see more of the world’s population graduate from college eradicating the barriers currently preventing that from happening.

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