A college degree is usually thought of as a ticket to a great job and a secure future. Yet, the job market over the past few years has not been kind to graduates. Rapid changes in technology and uncertainty about the influence of AI on the economy have made it harder for companies to know what their new employees need to know to be successful.
I have argued in the past that this uncertainty actually makes college degrees more useful than ever, but higher education is doing a poor job of helping students navigate this uncertainty. Sadly, universities aren’t going to fix this problem by hiring more career counselors. Instead, they’re going to have to do the hard work of restructuring their teaching mission for the 21st century.
As it turns out, there is a straightforward (if labor-intensive) way for higher ed to make graduates (and continuing education students) more future-proof: focusing on teaching students “durable skills,” that will see them through the future; tying assessments to outcomes; and tracking competencies rather than courses.
I believe so deeply that this change must be made, that I have left my role as a university professor and administrator after 27 years to work for Minerva Project, a company that built Minerva University, a private university, from the ground up using this approach and now brings it to schools around the world interested in reform.
Here’s what this looks like:
1. Focus on durable skills
Most college graduates credit their degree programs with helping them to become better learners, communicators, and thinkers regardless of their major. Indeed, liberal arts degree holders may struggle to get jobs initially, but they are quite successful in the long run.
These degree programs provide value, because they ultimately teach durable skills. A skill is durable when it can be applied usefully in many different settings. Someone who learns to use a particular computer programming language has a potentially valuable skill. But, if the industry changes the standard for the language being used, or if AI can do a lot of the coding that companies need, then this skill loses value. Someone who learns the more durable skill of characterizing a problem and framing the path to a solution can continue to play a role even if much of the work to implement that solution can be automated.
Universities are in the business of teaching these durable skills. Students learn key competencies like characterizing a problem, engaging in systems thinking, and communicating that problem and solution to others. Unfortunately, this teaching is done unsystematically in a way that can make it hard for some students to truly achieve competence in these deep skills and makes it difficult for graduates to articulate what they have learned.
The solution is for institutions to align on a framework to characterize the core set of skills they deliver. This framework benefits employers, faculty, and students. Employers get a clear statement of what graduates have learned. Faculty get a common language for talking about these skills so that they can call them out explicitly to students in classes. Students then have a better understanding of the skills they are learning. That enables them to be strategic about selecting classes that will help them to solidify key abilities and provides them with a vocabulary for talking to employers about what they will bring to their work.
In order for this approach to be successful, though, faculty need to provide students with authentic assessments and students need some kind of record to track their expertise.
2. Authentic assessment
Just talking about the skills that are (somehow) being taught in higher education is not enough. Students need evidence of their progress toward gaining competence in these durable skills. Unfortunately, when students take an exam or do an assignment, the most visible result of that work is a grade. A professor (or teaching assistant) may write comments on the work, but the student tends to focus on whether they got an A.
Authentic assessment happens when each assignment is related directly to outcomes that the course is designed to develop. Students should be aware of the relationship between these assignments and the outcomes. More importantly, assignments need to be evaluated by using a measure (a rubric) that relates the student’s work to the skill being practiced. In this way, the feedback students get on their work is focused on what the exam or assignment says about their current proficiency rather than on the number or letter at the top of the page.
While this won’t get rid of grades altogether, it does provide prospective employers with a way to emphasize the skills they believe signal success, which is a recipe for changing the focus of students from grades to competency.
While it might seem obvious that authentic assessment is crucial to good education, most college faculty are not trained as educators, and so their assignments (and bases for grading) are often disconnected from the desired learning outcomes for students. Universities need to provide more support for faculty to improve the quality of their assignments and grading rubrics.
Authentic assessments change the focus of a student’s work from achieving a grade to developing competence. That focus can motivate students to put in the effort to improve. As a result, students are not trying to game the system to get a good grade. Instead, they are looking for opportunities to expand their skills. This approach also provides a guard against academic misconduct. After all, what is the point of cheating on an assignment if the sole purpose of the work is to help you get better and understand your skills?
3. A competency tracker, not a transcript
Part of what obscures the value of a degree for students and employers is that the primary record a student gets of their time in college is a transcript. Transcripts are just lists of courses (whose names don’t provide much information about their content) and grades (that provide a blunt assessment of how students performed). Indeed, few people ever look at a graduate’s transcript, because the entries on it don’t say much about what that person can do.
The alternative is to build a record of student performance around the institution’s framework for durable skills that accumulates the evidence from the many assignments students have done that teach and assess these skills. This tracker provides students with a current snapshot of what they do (and do not) do well. The record itself links back to past assignments.
This tracker enables students to look back at past work to see the growing complexity of their thinking. Anyone who has looked back with some horror at a paper they wrote in their first year of college can recognize the improvements in their communication ability and complexity of thought. This record systematizes that experience. It also enables students to clearly articulate their skills to employers. In addition, over the course of a career, maintaining a competence tracker can signal to someone that it is time to get some more education to stay a step ahead of economic and technological changes.
Higher education must make these changes . . . now in order to equip students for the future. It is up to all of us who care about colleges and universities to push them to do so.