Today I stumbled across a thought-provoking post from Kyle Saunders of Colorado State University. In it he proposes that changes in the job market, driven in part but not completely by AI, are creating a choice for institutions between offering the traditional four year on campus model that Saunders calls Elite Mentorship, and an accelerated competency focused degree which he labels a Credential Factory. These two paths create graduates with very different experiences and skill sets.
Disclaimer — part one: Although I don’t currently work in higher ed, I spent more than two decades working in the sector after growing up a faculty kid at a public regional. I have four degrees, a bachelors and three masters. My last masters was employability driven and I completed it in 16 months, not quite a speedrun (to borrow Saunders’s term) but focused on efficiency rather than the experience.
Saunders points out that many employers don’t seem to be making a distinction between the two sorts of college experiences and treat the resulting credentials as equivalent. In doing so they undermine what he calls the formation layer, that experience of being guided over an intellectual hurdle during a faculty office hour or talking through a complex question in a class discussion or late at night in a residence hall lounge. It is this formation layer and wanting to be a part of creating it for others that drew many people , myself included, into higher education as a career. What happens when those paying the bills, either governments, parents, or employers (in the form of better paying and more secure jobs for college graduates) don’t actually value the formation layer. Instead, they value the sorting, taking the fact that you gained admission to and then completed a degree at ________ University as evidence of something. If the formation layer is truly important, we as a society would put a lot more effort into measuring it.
For all the think pieces about trust and value/ return on investment, maybe this is a key to understanding higher education’s current challenge. Perhaps for a long time, only a small proportion of stakeholders have prioritized the formation layer. but colleges have been able to “bundle” this with the things stakeholders care about like employable skills in the same way that general education requirements bundle low demand subjects like art and philosophy with higher demand majors. Now, just as subjects like foreign languages are shed from the curriculum in the name of efficiency, intellectually transformative experiences are dropped in favor of skills that can be quickly developed and demonstrated, in the name of efficiency.
Disclaimer — part two: I was a music and French major and then a music and French graduate student. It hurts every time I read about a music or foreign language department being sacrificed, and that seems to happen quite regularly these days.
Where does this leave room for intellectual transformation? Counterintuitively, AI may be a great opportunity. Now that your LLM of choice can create a perfectly serviceable email or presentation slide deck, the differentiator of the well educated is the ability to do deep and thoughtful analysis, the sort of thing the formation layer helps you learn to do. If we can measure that (admittedly no easy task) and convince employers that it’s worth hiring for (a perhaps even less easy task), there may be a way to put at least some of the bundle back together.
