Wednesday, June 14, 2023 - On the Marymount University campus, Michael speaks with University President Irma Becerra about the university's decision to incorporate the liberal arts in the context of high-demand programs that result in jobs, while Jeff fields a panel discussion on how to keep higher ed current and how best to prepare students for their futures. This episode is made possible with support from Dell Technologies and Google ChromeOS.
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Irma Becerra:
Even though we're closing the philosophy major or the math major, those courses are still being taught as part of the core curriculum. They support, for example, programming in business ethics or engineering. Yeah, so the misrepresentation that we were killing the liberal arts or ending the liberal arts or that Marymount would end up being a vocational school, there's nothing further from the truth.
Michael Horn:
That was Irma Becerra, president of Marymount University, which is where we were for our latest stop on the Future U Campus Tour.
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Michael Horn:
I'm Michael Horn.
Jeff Selingo:
And I'm Jeff Selingo.
Michael Horn:
Jeff, it's always so great to be on a college campus, actually meet students and faculty and get to spend time face-to-face with the president.
Jeff Selingo:
Yes, Michael. In this case, being at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia felt timely because they've gone through a wave of publicity, mostly negative, we should say, around their decision to stop offering certain traditional college majors. It was interesting to talk to the president and academic administrators about how they think that liberal arts content can actually be offered in the context of in-demand majors that are focused on the job market.
Michael Horn:
It was interesting, Jeff, to hear them openly question whether there's another model that's possible for colleges, that goes against the grain of what they call the Harvard model, the way colleges and universities have traditionally organized themselves in departments and so on.
Jeff Selingo:
With that as a backdrop, here are excerpts from our conversation at Marymount University, our latest stop on the Future U Campus Tour.
Michael Horn:
Welcome everyone, a huge thank you to Marymount University for hosting us on this beautiful today day today. President Becerra, Irma, if I may, welcome to Future U. It's great to have you.
We are thrilled to be in front of a great live audience. I want to start this conversation off with where the controversy has been lately. Marymount University has been in a lot of headlines recently. I'm not sure you're used to all the New York Times and all that publicity. They do say that all publicity is good publicity. But I know from having talked with you beforehand that you feel like there's also been a lot of misinformation out there. The narrative has maybe been simplistic, that Marymount University effectively just voted to eliminate the liberal arts has been the headlines. I'd love to hear the story from your perspective of what's gone on from your perspective and frame us as we start the conversation today.
Irma Becerra:
Yes, thank you for this question. Some of the information that has been published really is nothing further from the truth. Marymount University is a university that from its inception has been focused on career preparation, but underpinned by the liberal arts. In 1950, the first sisters that started Marymount University, the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, they had this innovative idea to prepare women for work that was innovative in 1950.
Look now, we are so much of an important part of the workforce, but we've continued that mission except that we are co-ed since the seventies. We continue to offer our students a liberal arts core, but very focused in career preparation. Our top programs are nursing, for example, which is consistently ranked number one among all the privates in Virginia. Cybersecurity, we of course offer business, psychology. We have new programs in engineering, mechanical and biomedical, computer science. Again, we are not a vocational, like what they call vo-tech, which is essentially technical preparation without the liberal arts. We're also not a liberal arts college, but we actually blend both quite well and our students pick to come to Marymount for that reason.
Michael Horn:
The cuts that people talked about, how would you characterize them if they're not cutting the liberal arts?
Irma Becerra:
Yes.
Basically how this came about is the provost organized a group of faculty, so this was completely faculty led, that look at programs that had been under-enrolled for the last 10 years. Some of these programs had no students, maybe five students. We didn't think that this, not only that there's certain costs associated with it, and of course we have to be mindful about that. But the main reason was the student experience. When you have such a small cohort of students, you cannot engage students in meaningful debate or do a reverse flipped classroom type of teaching or case studies, none of the new pedagogical techniques. We looked at the student experience and then we said, "Well, I don't think these programs are serving students well because students are not selecting them, essentially." It was not intentional. It's not something that the president did or the provost did.
Students have not selected these programs for years and we felt it was the right thing to do. Now, the decision to discontinue the programs did not affect the students because we have what is called a teach out. That means that students that are currently in the program will see their education until they graduate. We just not accepting any new programs into those majors. Essentially, the programs that were closed, yes, some of them may be considered in the liberal arts, but we still going to teach those courses. Even though we're closing the philosophy major or the math major, those courses are still being taught as part of the core curriculum. They support, for example, programming in ethics, or business ethics, or engineering. Yeah, so the misrepresentation that we were killing the liberal arts, or ending the liberal arts, or that Marymount would end up being a vocational school, there's nothing further from the truth.
Michael Horn:
This distinction, I think, is an important one because it gets lost often that the majors aren't equated with the liberal arts, that the liberal arts can be embedded in the career paths and others that you're helping prepare students for. One of the important points that you raised with us also beforehand is that there are other universities in the state of Virginia that focus... The liberal arts is their bread and butter. That's where they start. That's never been Marymount's full lineage, if you will, as you just explained over the 70 plus years. Jeff and I often use Northeastern President Joseph Aoun line that "Higher ed in America often looks diverse but not terribly differentiated." That if more institutions were differentiated and clear about their mission and purpose, then actually that would be better for students and the colleges themselves. I'm curious your view on the importance of differentiation and having choice and in the higher ed landscape, but of course you can't just be different. You have to be different in a way that's in demand from the students. How do you think about that?
Irma Becerra:
For some reason, all the universities tend to follow what we call the Harvard model. I think it's important that we are differentiated and clearly students that come to Marymount, they vote with their feet and they pick the programs that they're here to study, cybersecurity or forensic and legal psychology. We have many programs that are thriving and again, many of them reflect the needs of the community, but also the needs of the nation. I think this effort on differentiating and serving the type of student that comes to Marymount, we are a very diverse university and we attract students from every state in the United States and 70 different countries. We are now a Hispanic serving institution, with over 25% of our students being Hispanic descent and about 16% African-Americans, so 14% of students that are international. The type of student that comes to Marymount is seeking for that type of career preparation where they will be able to land that great job in four years or less, and that's what we are committed to do in terms of serving our students.
Michael Horn:
Let's double click on another part of this equation, because much of what you've described at this point is demand driven from the student side, students voting with their feet as you said, and not signing up for certain programs. Then you making a very principled decision about "This isn't a good education experience to keep offering something where there's so few students." But what about from the employer side? What are you hearing and seeing them demand right now and how are you shifting to meet their demands? How is that changing the nature of higher education?
Irma Becerra:
I want to share with you that during the pandemic here we are at Marymount, we decided to use this extraordinary time that we were facing to do a little bit of self-reflection. We reflected on our academic structure, which by the way was also Harvard model of schools and department. It was really interesting because we had some departments that had one chair and one other faculty member, and we reflected, I remember a provost and I thinking, "Well, this hierarchy here, it feels like a way of [inaudible 00:11:01] is not the type of architecture that enables the interdisciplinarity or where programs can build on strengths that really come from different areas of expertise." We also know that the big challenges that humanity is facing typically are not just siloed within one area of expertise. We decided to follow this idea of having an interdisciplinary approach.
The provosts, with a team of faculty members, they restructured from 26 departments and three schools, they restructured into four colleges and 10 interdisciplinary schools with no departments. Yeah, this is not the Harvard model, but we felt that it worked well, and we didn't do this in a vacuum. We actually consulted with a number of executives that spanned from healthcare, Cigna, KPMG Consulting, Circle as a engineering firm. Interesting, when we asked them, "What are you looking for in your graduates or that you're recruiting or in our graduates," and they spoke about interdisciplinarity, they said, "We want engineers that can communicate. We want clinicians that can understand business." I just want to share with you my experience. I'm an engineer and I never took a course in public speaking, so I had to learn this on the job, if I may.
We didn't even learn how to do a PowerPoint. Way back when engineers, our training was not about communicating. A lot of our efforts right now is we want engineers that come out of Marymount to actually be able to communicate and communicate well. Therefore, I think this interdisciplinary structure that we have developed for our academic affairs is going to allow us to do that and avoid the siloed mentality that is frequent in universities. I often say that universities oftentimes are a collection of colleges and not an integrated university. We are really trying to create a structure that will allow the for that in integration of thought and integration of strength.
Michael Horn:
Then obviously, faculty get to collaborate with each other more and probably make more important groundbreaking pieces for the community, as well. On the notion of community, it strikes me that there's one other element that's worth focusing on here. So many colleges right now that are struggling happen to be in rural or remote places where there just aren't a lot of employers, and jobs, and resources, and opportunities for their students in many ways, sometimes in fact that college is really the only game or employer in town in some cases. You all, here, are obviously in a very different environment, northern Virginia is rich with opportunities. You just mentioned several employers in that last answer. There's governmental jobs at hire, there's government contractors, there's nursing, cybersecurity, there's a lot of industries here and there are also a lot of colleges here. As you think about that question around differentiation and where you're going to make your mark relative to all of the opportunities in this wonderful community, how do you think about focus and choosing what to do and perhaps what not to do?
Irma Becerra:
When I arrived here in 2018, one of the things I was thrilled, of course, about our formidable location and also the incredible partners that we have here. We have partnerships, as you may imagine with Netflix. I mentioned Circle, federal government. We have a lot of students from federal government, but also now our newcomer, Amazon. But by the same token, it's a hyper-competitive environment. We are in the midst of really phenomenal institutions. It is important for us to differentiate how is Marymount education different than other competitors in our region? I'll tell you a few things, we are differentiated because we have a very personal personalized approach to education. Students that come to Marymount get a lot of opportunities in having that interaction with professors. They're not a number here. We are focused on the development of the whole person. Actually, many of our alums credit their success to having been a student at Marymount.
I think I mentioned earlier that we have a focus on preparing students with the careers of the 21st century. We are nimble and we want to be the first to create new degrees. During the pandemic, we created a new certificate in criminal justice focused on ethics because we thought that that was important for as we educate the future police force. Then we also develop a new certificate in palliative care in healthcare, as we all are aging and we want to better address the issue of the aging American population. We also are known for being the university of choice for Division III athletics. I was sharing with you that we have had a great year where many of our athletic teams have won and have gone to NCAA competition. We are very proud of the fact that these students are not only successful in the course or in the court, but in the classroom. Athletics is a very important part of the curriculum that enables our graduates to be really successful in life.
Michael Horn:
Irma, thank you for helping set the narrative for this conversation and for joining us on Future U today. We'll be right back with the panel.
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Jeff Selingo:
Welcome back to Future U, and to continue our conversation today about the workforce needs, the future of small colleges and higher education, and how we integrate the workforce higher education in our community together, we've gathered a panel that represents different perspectives on these subjects today. Please help me in welcoming Hesham El-Rewini, Provost and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs at Marymount. Diane Murphy, who is Director of the School of Technology and Innovation here at Marymount. Nico Mariel, who is a rising senior, who is an economics major, a minor in international business, and also new president of the student government here at Marymount. Jeffrey Lancaster, who a senior higher education strategist with Dell Technologies. Welcome to all of you. It's great to have you.
Diane, I want to start with you because as we've talked about the future of higher education on Future U over the last six or seven years, one of the interesting things that we found is that so many colleges out there are trying to be everything to everybody. In fact, it's something that Irma said to Michael earlier about the Harvard model. Everybody wants to be Harvard. It's interesting to me on how some institutions are really trying to zoom in on the needs of the community. You were telling me earlier that when Marymount started its graduate certificate program in cybersecurity back in 2008, I believe, there were just a handful of such programs around the country. Now, today that program is expanded, it's undergraduate, it's graduate, it's doctoral, and it enrolls more than 450 students today.
I think that many of the college leaders who are with us today, but also listening to the podcast, they probably think, "Well, how am I ever going to compete on cutting edge tech programs from where I sit? The big universities are going to be able to do that. We can't really do that." Even here in Virginia, you have the likes of Virginia Tech right in your backyard. What are some of the major takeaways from your playbook that helped you grow the cybersecurity program here into what it is today that maybe other universities could learn from to say, "Hey, we could do something like that, too,"?
Diane Murphy:
The important things I think are three things. One, I think is situational awareness. The second one is relationships. The third one, as Irma referenced, is really innovation and agility. Again, as she said, we're after the people who want to have a good career. What is a good career? Particularly if you think about undergraduate students, when you're looking at "What will your career be in five years?" It is not just a matter of a talking to a business and saying, "What talent are you looking for?" It's a matter of envisioning the talent that will be required in the future.
Jeff Selingo:
But let me just pause there for a second, because things are changing so quickly right now, even in the field of cybersecurity. But now we obviously have AI and technology in all different fields, but not only technology, healthcare, finance, everything's being impacted by what's happening in technology and elsewhere in the world. How can a place like Marymount keep up with that?
Diane Murphy:
Again, it's a matter of being aware of the environment we're in. I think we're lucky here in the DC area, where there is such a mass of people, whether it's government, government contractors, whether it's large companies like Capital One. Again, the nice thing about this era is that technology also helps us communicate. If you read all the feeds that come in every week, you begin to understand where the pain points are of the industry, where they're going. Again, it's attending many of the professional conferences. I was speaking at RSA last week, and again, it's that awareness of what's going on around you and being amenable to accepting the fact that maybe what you're doing isn't state of the art and how do you move it to that point.
Jeff Selingo:
Well, and I also think it probably helps by leaning into your location. Michael asked Irma about that before, in terms of leaning into the location here in DC, obviously cybersecurity playing a big role here for the federal government in particular. That also helps that you have your ear to the ground in that. Sham, We heard earlier about the plans here at Marymount for the liberal arts and more broadly about their future in American higher ed. But you've told me that the liberal arts could be taught in different ways, especially at smaller universities. Again, we don't always have to follow that Harvard model. What do you mean by that? How can they?
Hesham El-Rewini:
Since the recession of 2008, less and less students have become interested in obtaining degrees in humanities and liberal arts in general. For example, at the national level, according to [inaudible 00:23:41], the number of degrees awarded in 2022 compared to the number of degrees awarded in 2012, in 10 years period, the decline was almost 35%. Then here in Virginia, according to [inaudible 00:24:01], in the same period of time, number of English degrees declined by 39%, history degrees, 35%, philosophy and religious studies, 35%. There is no indication that that trend will end, so what we do now? There are two inputs here. Input number one is what employers want and what we as educators think what students should learn. What employers want, I think they would like a mix of skills, some of it liberal arts, some of it even within the same discipline they want you to know multiple disciplines non liberal arts.
That's what employers want. But what we want is we believe that liberal arts is and will continue to be a foundational component, important component of education. This is where students will learn critical thinking, problem solving, empathy, open-mindedness, lifelong learning, all the good things that we would like the students to learn. Historically, we offered liberal arts in two ways. The core, a very strong core, and also some measures for disciplines taught in the core. Our students really appreciated the core, but for some reason they did not select to measure in these areas. Well, we will continue to offer the strong core, and this is what I think every university should do. In addition, we would like to highlight better and further integration of liberal arts in other disciplines. For example, is AI. Diane started a program, an undergraduate in AI. Philosophy faculty can teach within the program the ethics of AI. We can team up faculty from philosophy, from computer science, from psychology to work together in cognitive science.
Jeff Selingo:
You mentioned AI and what employers want. Jeffrey, I want to bring you into this conversation because there is so much discussion right now around generative AI and what it means for the future of work. Will AI [inaudible 00:26:34] jobs, which are the popular headlines, maybe. We don't quite know that yet, but it's clear it's going to change work. What is the best way to train people for what's next in technology? Because when I talk to many college leaders, they see it as another STEM major. They see, "Okay, we're going to start an AI program just like we started cybersecurity, just like we started computer science, and it'll just be another STEM major." Is that the right way to think about it, given how much technology is changing?
Jeffrey Lancaster:
The short answer is no. The longer answer is I want to add something to the conversation around what colleges and universities teach. Yes, there are skills, and I think skills are a big part of the conversation, more important than skills is the ability to learn. What employers are looking for are employees and people who can contribute to the business, who can adapt to the ever-changing world. As things move more quickly, they can keep up with that. If you wait for the course to come around to learn the thing, you're already behind. The fact of the matter is, I've been thinking a lot lately about human computer collaboration as a skill. I drove down from the Philadelphia area yesterday and there was a computer telling me where to go. I was following my Waze and I did exactly what it said to do, but if it had decided to take me in a path that I knew wasn't right or I said, "That's not the way that I want to go," that's now my job as the human to override that or to augment what this machine has told me.
I think that's a really good premise for how we're going to interact with generative AI as well. There's a spectrum of needs when people start talking about generative AI. Yes, ethicists, so AI ethicist is going to be a job that if institutions haven't started those programs yet, they will. You actually see some of the NSF funding that's coming out for some of the AI centers are focused around ethics, and are focused around policy, and are focused around these things that we know we have to start to make decisions on. That's one end of the spectrum, and that's going to be, I think, a bit of a resurgence for the humanities. You're going to have philosophers and humanists and people questioning, "What does it mean to be an author in a world where I can maybe ask good generative AI to do some of the work for me?"
Now, that doesn't mean that I don't still need to be able to add my own voice or to be able to augment what I get back from that algorithm. That's going to be one end of the spectrum. There's the other end of the spectrum where you want continued development on these tools, and that's fundamentally what they are. The tools are not good or bad, they're just tools. It's how do we decide to use them? The way a chemist is going to use generative AI to maybe find new drug targets or new molecules that are going to change the path by which medicine can proceed or change materials chemistry or material science. I say that because I'm a chemist, but it's not so different than what maybe a nuclear physicist is going to need. It's not so different than what maybe a structural engineer is going to need.
Then you look at something like economics and the questions that we're going to ask of generative AI are going to be different in each of those disciplines. What institutions are starting to teach are the skills necessary for the digital citizenry of the future. This is going to be what do students need in order to be able to participate in society, there's an element of digital literacy. There's an element of additional areas of expertise and where those things intersect. To say generative AI is only a STEM discipline, you don't need to understand how the tool works in order to be able to use it. Yet, if you want to make that tool better, it certainly helps if you understand how it works. There is a range, I think, of where that tool is going to fit into different people's lives.
Now, what we don't want, and this is what I think a lot of the conversation is around, we don't want people to take that technology for granted. You don't want people to be using it unaware of the impact that it's having. You don't want people to be using it in a way that is unquestioning. You want people to say, "Let me take this output, let me take what this tool is giving me and now interrogate it." That's what institutions are giving students is the ability to interrogate that output that they get. Because without that, then you're just following the instructions of the machine, and you have no critical response to the output that you're getting back.
Jeff Selingo:
Nico, I want to bring you into the conversation, because we've been talking about what I would call the infrastructure, the plumbing of higher education here, the programs, the disciplines, the departments and so forth. But what's interesting, and we've talked a lot about this on the Future U podcast, is that higher ed has lost 1.3 million students in enrollment during the pandemic, basically since 2019 to today. Because many of them really don't find a lot of relevance in what they're studying. They don't have a real sense of purpose for why they're in college. Could you talk a little bit about your own undergraduate experience here at Marymount and what has given you that sense of purpose to remain in school? What do you think higher ed needs to improve overall? Maybe not just Marymount, maybe everything's great here, but overall, what do you think higher ed needs to improve on when it comes to serving students so that they have that sense of purpose that they want to pursue programs in whether it's cybersecurity or economics or international business, whatever it might be?
Nico Mariel:
Just a little bit about my experience and my family experience, my mom, she studies psychology in Mexico and in Mexico, college is different. Whenever you go to Mexico, you start studying what you want the first year. It's not like here you're studying basics. In high school, I already studied those basics. I came to the university, I studied those basics, but it was not what I was passionate about. Now, in my third year, I'm beginning to study more about economics, and that's what I'm passionate about and I'm feeling great.
Jeff Selingo:
But what you're saying is many students just don't get to that third year or that second year to connect with what they're passionate about?
Nico Mariel:
Yeah. A lot of students just come freshman year, they don't like what they're getting taught, and then they just leave.
Jeff Selingo:
They're gone. Yeah, in terms of the degree itself, we're starting to see many companies say, "You know what? We're having trouble hiring people, and so we're going to make degrees optional." We're seeing this even in states, just up the road in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Utah. They've eliminated the degree requirements for many of their jobs. Do you think in 5, 10, 15 years that you'll see many of these people showing up at a place like Marymount or elsewhere wanting to get a degree, needing a degree? In other words, do you think that this is a short term reaction to the job market and eventually, not only will employers, but those students or learners, those employees will need to come back to get some sort of degree? Let me ask Nico, do you think you could have skipped college and gone right into the workforce without a degree?
Nico Mariel:
In my case, I really value what universities give to the person. I've just matured so much and I hope other people could admire that. College also builds your social network. That's something very hard that you can't just learn by yourself in the street or just by working. Of course, you could do that. I could say my grandfather, he came from Spain, he didn't have middle school, and he was just natural. You would've thought he studied public speaking or public relations. He could sell you a pen. Like that pen, he could sell it for $20 saying just because the King of [inaudible 00:34:39] wrote on it. Of course, he had that. Well, that's in my blood. I have that. But I could potentially do that, but not right now. But yeah, I feel college is necessary and it's just going to allow you to continue learning about life, continue learning a little bit about different aspects.
Jeff Selingo:
Well, I think what's what's going to happen is 10, 15 years after you're gone, you won't remember what you learned in Econ 101, but you are going to remember the people, and those social connections that you build. Jeffrey, we often talk about higher ed in a silo, but yet it's connected. It's connected at the front end to a K-12 system. It's connected at the backend to employers and other further education, and the entire thing is connected to a community. From where you sit, a seat that is really around ensuring that we have the talent in the future coming out of higher ed, what really needs to happen in your opinion, to create this robust pipeline that is diverse and that is able to be agile given the changing needs of the workforce?
Jeffrey Lancaster:
Two thoughts come to mind to start with. The first one is that a pipeline is the wrong analogy, because I think a lot about who students are who are coming to higher education. Although a percentage of that is still your traditional 17 to 18 year old who's coming out of high school and they're going into higher ed, more and more what we're seeing is you've got people who the workforce might have left them behind. They're going back to re-skill and they're going back to change industry. You've got people, as has been mentioned, who are coming from industry who still have their job, who are looking to upskill while they're in industry. You've got veterans who are coming and looking for their education, but they're in their late twenties or thirties.
Or later you've got people who are later in life who say, "You know what? I got nothing else to do. I'm going to go back to college," or "I'm going to go to college maybe for the first time." I think one of the things that we have to do is we have to recognize student is no longer a monolithic term that describes who the customer of higher education is. That's the first thing. A pipeline implies you're taking kids who've gone through K12-
Jeff Selingo:
It's very linear, right?
Jeffrey Lancaster:
Straight into higher ed and on. I think of it, there's this Tesla pump that's really interesting that he invented where it's all about swirls inside of it. I think if we think about higher education as being kind of more pervasive as the thing which people can always come to in order to learn or relearn, then it changes the dynamic of that question a little bit. So many institutions, I know you've talked about this in other episodes, but this idea of looking at the demographics of that maybe 15 to 18 year old set and saying, "Well, there's this impending cliff, doom is on the horizon."
The way that institutions are looking to sustain themselves when being asked to continue to grow is to say, "Okay, we have to look for other markets and other groups that we can grow with." The first is let's open up and expand our definition of who the student is and that the needs that a student has at 17, 18 is going to be different than what the student needs if they're in their mid-thirties, or late sixties, or depending where they are in their life, they might have dependents. The 17 or 18 year old might also have dependents. They might be first generation, they might be part-time, they might be dual and enrolled at multiple institutions. One of the things we know is that many, many students have these non-traditional characteristics.
The second thing that comes to mind to answer your question is we've talked a lot about where do we look to know what's coming? I think one of the places that we have to look is industry, and not just going to industry and saying, "Hey, what are you hiring for today?" But "Hey, industry, what are you hiring for in two years, three years, five years out?" Because by the time the student's coming in now, so even if you're lucky enough to get a program approved after nine months, which is fantastic and unheard of, by the time you market it, you get your first students enrolled in that program, maybe you get some transfers already, but it's a couple of year lag time. As agile as we want to talk about higher education being, there's still this delay inherent in what it means to get a degree. That degree is a representation of time. That time, by the time the student came in thinking they were going to study one thing and they get out, the world is going to be very, very different.
Only by talking with industry and saying, "Give us your horizon. What are the things that we need to be training students for now? What are the skills that they need? How are they then going to be set up well for the future?" This gets to what Nico was saying around, well, the more tied to industry it is, the more closely you can get case studies and you can get ongoing research and you can get hands-on experience, whether it's in cybersecurity, or macroeconomics, or banking, or chemistry. Again, whatever that is, what are the things that are going to set students up to succeed at the end of their time as opposed to necessarily thinking about what's important today because it's going to be different.
Jeff Selingo:
Well, it's also an interesting concept about time because in higher ed, we have this credit hour based system. We have so many credits per the degree. I think one of the things that Michael Horn has talked a lot about is this idea of mastery based learning. We talked about prior assessment, other things that maybe could reduce that time, which by the way, gets to something you said, Nico, about affordability. Because people, especially if we think of learners swirling around, they're going to be coming into these programs at the age of 38, 48, 28, whatever, with a lot more experiences than even an 18-year-old. Maybe they don't need as much time to get that degree.
Jeffrey Lancaster:
Well, and the real difficulty on the industry side that I've seen, as much as I'd love to say a recruiter wants to look at your portfolio and a recruiter wants to really understand all of the micro-credentials that you've earned, and how they've stacked, and what that means you can do. The fact of the matter is that degree is an easy button for everybody involved. Because that degree represents the investment of time. It's an assumed set of skills. It's something which is very easy for somebody who's hiring to say, "Oh, they have one of those. Okay, great. I'm going to assume that that means that they can do the job," whether or not they can ultimately remains to be seen. I think there is something that has to go into that equation, which is transparency around how you demonstrate the accumulation of those skills. Because the way that we demonstrate them right now requires too much of the person reviewing it to make it easy on them to adopt. Because of that, we haven't seen the adoption of micro-credentials, and skills, and certificates as much as you hope we would.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, all the issues that we talk every week on Future U. So many great things from this panel, thank you so much. I think we've talked a lot today about what is the major? We've always thought about the major in higher ed as being aligned with the disciplines and with the department, but you can learn the liberal arts, for example, without having an English department, without having a philosophy department, for example. We talked about how do we connect the human needs to what's happening in AI and in technology and helping students develop those navigational skills in some ways. Nico talked a lot about the relevancy of what we're doing. Diane, you talked a lot about what we need in terms of understanding what's happening around the bend, both in the K-12 system, but also in terms of the workforce.
So many good nuggets today. Please join me in thanking this great panel for some of their great thoughts today, and really appreciate your time today. Thank you all. Believe it or not, our hour has passed here today, so thank you again for joining us. Thank you especially to Dell Technologies and Google Chrome OS for their generous support of this tour, and especially to Marymount University for being such gracious hosts for this tour. Be sure to subscribe to Future U on whatever of your favorite podcast platforms that you use, and of course, tell your friends and colleagues about the podcast. With that, thank you and have a good day.
