Does U.S. Education Need a Learning Revolution?
In a recent talk at IgniteNYC, entrepreneur Michael Karnjanaprakorn challenges the notion that paying for a traditional four-year college degree is necessary for knowledge attainment and career success. He’s certainly not the only one to recently voice doubt about the state of higher learning in the United States. Numerous editorial voices have weighed in during recent months on the evidence presented by the Pew Research Center’s 2011 study done in conjunction with the Chronicle of Higher Education citing steep tuition costs and fewer job opportunities for all Americans due to current economic conditions. Karnkanaprakorn’s main argument is that higher education today fails to provide sufficient opportunities for students to “learn” and instead is a model where costs increasingly outweigh the benefits. But is his counter-suggestion really that much better for students?
The model proposed by Karnjanaprakorn and deployed via his start-up SkillShare relies on community-based, special interest courses that hone in on specific skill sets, including courses in “How to Make Anyone Fall in Love with You,” “Malaysian Cooking,” and “How to Get a Job at a Start-Up.” Definitely good life skills to have, but outside of filling your lonely days and nights or getting a job at Next Big Internet Thing, LLC (or at least catering their IPO celebration), this “learning-focused” system still lacks the specialized skill focus that careers in healthcare, IT, and the modern service industry require. Recruiting the qualified instructors to teach how to attain career-specific skills, providing equipment and materials to allow realistic settings in which to practice and learn, and gaining state or corporate licensure to even instruct students on how to gain the qualifications to practice certain trades is not free. According to Nate Johnson’s 2009 study of how much education costs for a school, this is just the beginning – operational costs, the cost of student attrition, and dozens of other factors make it clear that offering a place to learn is more complex than Karnjanaprakorn’s analysis conveys.
Modern job opportunities focus around specific technical knowledge that is continually evolving along with the technologies driving modern industries like healthcare and IT. Assuming the learning resources – or “education” – that need to be put behind these, offering a college-equivalent education for free from community-based resources is a nice thought but for all but a handful of career paths, doesn’t seem immediately realistic or very beneficial long-term.
Maybe Huffington Post contributor Paul Heroux sums it up best in his June 27 article, “Is College Worth It?”: “At the end of the day, you get out of college what you put into it.” Focusing on courses with more “real world” applications, shortening degree attainment duration, and crunching tuition margins are solutions that many career colleges are already offering or investigating based on popular demand. A continually evolving educational philosophy and system are unquestionably necessary given the current economic landscape. However, instead of a philosophy of “disrupting industries,” as Karnjanaprakorn suggests, improving the cost-benefit ratio of higher education today can still happen within, rather than outside of, the current system.
Tags: education reform, harvard, IgniteNYC, Michael Karnjanaprakorn
This entry was posted on Monday, July 11th, 2011 at 10:19 am and is filed under CUnet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
