“However, if a single mother wants a faster track to employment and signs up for a six-month ‘micro-pathway’ at a local community college to become, for example, a junior data analyst or fiber optics specialist, she will likely have to pay out of pocket.”
My great grandfather (seven times over) was the son of an indentured servant, who managed to land a spot at Harvard in 1669. Aptly named John Wise, he parlayed his degree into a storied career as an influential minister and launched his family into generations of prominent standing.
This is my ancestral college success story. Many of us have one. Together, these stories launched the brand of the four-year college degree as the best ticket to the American Dream. Millions of immigrants have followed John’s father to the United States to escape class-constrained countries.
The degree model that transported my colonial forefather to the upper middle class has not changed much. Over the past 100 years, we have opened the gates of admission to women and, gradually, students of color, but we have never truly adapted the four-year degree to serve “new majority learners,” the 62% of American adults who do not have a degree, or the nearly 40% of college students who enter the gauntlet and give up before they earn the credential they are told is essential to getting what is commonly described as a good job.
Recently, aspiration has given way to resentment. Universities have come under attack, not only from the politicians labeling them as woke factories but also from unfulfilled or would-be graduates who are saddled with debt and working in fields or jobs that do not require a degree. The last decade has seen a substantial decline in college enrollment, down by almost 12% between 2010 to 2022. While the latest numbers show a slight recovery, the growth areas signal that more learners are searching for workarounds and shortcuts in an age in which the average technical skill is said to last five years and artificial intelligence provides wide (if not deep) expertise in the palm of one’s hand.
Short term certificate programs are growing in popularity. Some students use them to augment their degrees, but a growing number of learners want “just-in-time” learning to earn a credential in less than a year and enter fields such as healthcare, advanced manufacturing, technology, and financial services, where skilled workers can be in short supply and degrees are de-emphasized. And community colleges are responding, designing “micro-pathways” in concert with their regional employers to meet shifting demands in cybersecurity, data networking, semiconductor production, and behavioral health. Apprenticeships are also growing in popularity—and in fields beyond the trades, though from a tiny starting point.
These programs, however, have been suppressed by our “college for all” mindset and the funding structure in the United States since the G.I. Bill of the 1940s and the Higher Education Act of the 1960s.
The system is set up to advocate for, to fund, and to evaluate degree programs that cater to the needs of a traditional 18-year-old student, with a two-to-four-year block of time to engage in adultification. If a teenager heads off to university for the typical coming of age experience, states and the federal government subsidize their education (or fund it completely for lower income families). However, if a single mother wants a faster track to employment and signs up for a six-month “micro-pathway” at a local community college to become, for example, a junior data analyst or fiber optics specialist, she will likely have to pay out of pocket.
Congressman Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat, recently summed up the disparity at the kickoff of a new Commission on the American Workforce from the Bipartisan Policy Center. “If you go to college to study for four years, you can get a Pell Grant,“ he said, “if you go to college to get a good job, you can’t. That’s just silly.”
Congress has been considering two pieces of legislation that would open up funding to the expanding reality of what learners want out of college. One has been dubbed “short term Pell,” and the other is a reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. The former legislation has been held up for years because of fears that bad actors could sell worthless certificates to unsuspecting learners. As State University of New York Chancellor John B King worried aloud at the same Commission event, “The idea that we could do short term Pell without good guard rails is terrifying.”
It can be done with guardrails, and we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. How do we balance what has become two missions for colleges and universities? One is to maintain a world leadership position in research and intellectual exploration. The other is to meet more pressing demands of consumers and employers to broker fast changing talent gaps around the country.
The balancing act is challenged by the funding model that mainly supports full degrees. A non-elite college is closing every week. Many learners are left searching throughout their 20s and 30s for career preparation that comes with shorter-term funding. We need to expand the definition of college. The half-life of skills has changed since John Wise’s day.
Kathleen deLaski is founder and board chair of the Education Design Lab and author of Who Needs College Anymore?: Imagining a Future Where Degrees Won’t Matter, which was released with Harvard Education Press this year.
