College should be for everyone

I seem to be hearing that “college isn’t for everyone” more frequently these days. Being in a university setting these days, that is would seem to be a troubling development. What’s behind it? I think it relates to an outdated mission.

Universities, motivated by the understandable desire to be more useful, have been morphing into job prep factories for decades now. I’d say that task is pretty much complete. The choice prospective students face now is whether it is worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars (in the US at least) to get this job preparation. The answer is yes for a smaller and smaller swathe of the population. Indeed, college is not for everyone in this context. If universities stay in the job prep mode, they will not only lose students due to demographics, they will lose a higher percentage of this shrinking pool. Double whammy! But the pressure from big donors and sponsors and trying the keep the bottom line numbers looking good will make it very challenging to move off this approach, even though it is doomed.

What might be a more practical future-oriented mission? Y’all knew I was going to slip some After Capitalism in here. As any organization thinks about mission, it has to have a sense of where its context is going. We’ve seen a post-work future ahead in the long-term. So, job prep is misaligned. You may not buy the whole post-work enchilada, but the declining need and emphasis on jobs is pretty clear if you look hard enough.

What we have talked a lot about in our exploration of the After Capitalism future is what we are doing to do with our time if our machine friends are doing most of the work. Without recapping all of that, I think we can all agree that LEARNING would be a super duper logical thing to do with our time. Currently, universities have been gutting programs focused on learning for the sake of learning – because that is impractical in our current need-a-job context. But as we look to the future …. right?

College can be for everyone who wants to learn. The major shift then is what do people need or want to learn as we move to a post-work After Capitalism future. Now, we have a mission and purpose that opens up the possibilities to an expanded rather than shrinking role. Sure, we are way ahead of the game here, but the earlier we start, the more options and flexibility we have. — Andy Hines