Higher Education: The New Frontier

Higher education is under enormous pressure to change. Not next year, not tomorrow. Right now.  It’s happening right in front of our eyes.  A new frontier is opening up for practitioners and youth advocates to create and shape.

Competency-based models. Financial aid. Online courses.  We are going to see a very different understanding of what a college is a few years from now.  We need to make sure that the interests of our young people, the most vulnerable and the most in need of higher-wage skills, are put front and center in these discussions.   

What is your organization’s policy position on the following? Are you finding new opportunities? We’d love to hear about them.

Financial Aid: The Student Loans Fairness Act recently introduced to Congress raises the question – why should students pay interest rates that are higher than banks?  This is an important first step for all students and especially for low-income students. 

We still have to do a lot of work to get Congress and the U.S. Department of Education to create more flexibility so that part-time students can have equal access to financial aid. It takes real perseverance to keep studying a few courses at a time while working and/or caring for family. We need to make sure our students aren’t penalized by out-of-date assumptions of what it means to be a college student.  Let’s look for opportunity to attach the concept of flexibility/part-time students to Pell Grants. 

Competency Education: Thanks to early leadership from Lumina, policymakers and a handful of colleges are embracing competency education.  There are a number of big changes that will come with a competency-based higher education model:

1. Colleges will have to be clear about the competencies that they want students to have.  This is easier to do for a career-based model, whether it is a nursing credential or pre-law.  It’s the folks in liberal arts that will have to work hard to be clear what that really means and how to assess those skills.  If K-12 can do it, they certainly can do it. 
2. Skills developed elsewhere can be “credentialed” in a competency-based college. This is an idea behind Kellogg’s New Options for Youth’s long-term investments. If a student can demonstrate computer science skills learned through an online course at a community center or learned to apply statistics in a continuous improvement initiative at work they may be able to “get credit” at a competency-based college, saving time, money, or both. 
3. Competencies can become a common language between employers and education. Imagine if an employer was specific about the skills they needed rather than using a B.A. as a proxy for a certain level of skills and maturity.  It opens up the door to a whole new set of organizational partnerships. 
4. Challenging the transferability of credits, (which is, in my mind, one of the worst things that colleges do to students) will hopefully be resolved through the clarifying competency education.  Students may be able to challenge colleges, asking that they clearly show what the competencies are that are required in a course, rather than just dismissing courses gained at other colleges. 

Community-based organizations should keep an eye on this development as it may open up new opportunities and roles. 

Accountability:  There has been an increasing call for higher education to have greater accountability for completion.  The landscape is changing with online and competency education.  Calls for more public information on college completion, especially disaggregated by data, will put more power in the hands of students.  As the demographics of our nation changes, we can imagine headlines that say Best 10 Colleges for Hispanic Students based on completion rates. 

Developmental Education:  We can hope that with the Common Core and K-12 competency education that the alignment between K-12/higher education would be streamlined such that students wouldn’t have to take developmental education.  My guess is that we are going to see increased blurring between higher education and K-12, where the set of skills between 10^th grade and the first year of college can be offered at either institution. 

Higher education policymakers, colleges, and community colleges are talking about these issues right now. It’s a new opportunity to integrate the concepts of eduployment. So take the time to meet with them or build the new relationships so that you can make sure that vulnerable youth can be successful in this new frontier. 

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bartworldv6/with/4329382331/