Ep. 111: Stackable and Alternative Credentials Go Mainstream

Doug Lederman: With college enrollments declining and doubts about the value of degrees rising, some people think the emergence of shorter-term and alternative credentials could pose a threat to higher education. But might they also be a possible salvation for traditional institutions? Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Key, Inside Higher Ed’s news and analysis podcast. I’m your host, Doug Lederman, editor and co-founder of Inside Higher Ed. Thanks for listening in today. The headline of a recent article carried an implicit threat. Could the rise of micro-credentials mean the end of universities? That’s certainly a possibility. There are many more ways for Americans to receive education and training than there used to be, and a slew of corporate and nonprofit providers offering certificates, certifications and other credentials that can either supplement or compete with traditional degrees. The big question is whether colleges and universities themselves will adapt their curriculums and their delivery models to sustain their historical advantage as the primary path for learners seeking career advancement and better futures. That question was the theme of a panel I moderated last week at the ASU+GSV Summit, an annual massive gathering of education technology CEOs, investors, educators and others that makes me want to climb into a dark cave for a few days when it’s over. Today’s episode features excerpts from that panel discussion involving a number of thoughtful higher ed leaders. On stage with me were Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, President Marlene Tromp of Boise State University in Idaho, Ann Kirschner, interim president of Hunter College of the City University of New York, and Maria Anguiano, executive vice president for learning enterprise at Arizona State University. The group was overall pretty bullish about higher education’s ability to adapt to the changing expectations of learners, but also clear-eyed about the fate of colleges that don’t, declining relevancy, and in some cases, extinction.

Doug Lederman: Before we listen in on the conversation, we’ll hear from the sponsor of this week’s episode, Strada Education Foundation. This episode is sponsored by Strada Education Foundation. Learn more about the State Opportunity Index, which gives states a set of priority measures and action steps that support a stronger connection between education and opportunity. The first ever State Opportunity Index report measures how states are doing in five priority areas: clear outcomes, quality coaching, affordability, work-based learning and employer alignment. Visit stradaeducation.org/opportunityindex.

Doug Lederman: Now, on to today’s episode, which starts with my brief introduction to the panel. It is not uncommon at meetings like this for a lot of people to believe that the shift to skills-based hiring, which is a relatively recent conversation, and the growing demand for what Ryan Craig called faster and cheaper alternatives will undermine higher education’s share of the education and training ecosystem. We’ve heard that before, and we’re starting to see some impact on institutions. I don’t know exactly what proportion of all post-high school credentials are now offered by accredited higher education institutions. I would posit that it’s a significant majority, less than it was 10 or 20 years ago, but still pretty significant. And I guess what I’d like to ask each of these people to weigh in on, which maybe will give us a little bit of a sense of where they come at this conversation from, is whether that percentage will be lower in 10 years, if you have a proportion of what you think, how much lower it might be, and why or why not. Ted, start with you.

Ted Mitchell: Great to be with all of you. Good to see so many friends of longstanding. I should say old friends, but that just is about me, not you. Ten years from now, any institution of higher education that is not in the credential business or the stackable credential business is out of business. And it’s their own fault.

Doug Lederman: Anything else? Okay, that’s a good start.

Ted Mitchell: Can I do two more sentences? So one of the things that we’re doing at ACE is we’re redoing the Carnegie classifications of higher education institutions. And you know that there are about 38 classifications. Most Americans can name two, R1, R2. And we’re hoping to change that because the classifications were built in 1960, and they represent exactly what American higher education was in 1960. So we’re going to modernize it. We’re well underway. One of the things that we’re finding is that you can actually no longer classify institutions, traditional institutions of higher education, according to whether they offer associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees. If you do a pie chart and you take every institution and you put them on that pie chart and you array those degrees, it doesn’t equal 100%. It doesn’t equal 100% because we’ve got this little yellow sliver that’s credentials. And it’s growing. It’s growing while we’re doing the reclassifications. And so traditional institutions of higher education are getting into the credential business. They are serious about getting into the credential business. Many of my colleagues here are already serious about being in the credential business. And I think it is an area of great growth for our institutions, not only internally using the capacity we have, but externally as well, joining forces with private organizations, others in the independent sphere, who can create credentials that we can use within our programs to elevate the prospects of students. And if you look at the latest data from the Clearinghouse, it’s the only portion of the ecosystem that’s growing, are the nondegree credentials.

Marlene Tromp: We have a program, and I’m going to talk just a little bit about it because I think it illustrates something about this credentialing model. I asked the question: how do we touch rural students who are place bound? Because 80% of the country is rural. And we have for a long time, except at the land grants that are in rural communities, expected people to flow like water to a drain to the place where the university is. And obviously, with online, we’re thinking differently, right? That’s been going on for quite a long time now. But I said, how do we actually create community like we have on a college campus out in these places that are far-flung? And what we did is we created cohort models where we actually bring faculty face-to-face with the students at least twice a semester. So they meet each other, they meet the faculty, but they’re mostly working online. So there’s this human component that engages them. But we also made it a structure where it was totally stackable credentials so people could step in and step out as their jobs, as their lives required it. And we’ve had staggering success with people who thought that college would never be an option for them because we changed our structure. We went out into those rural communities and said, what do you need? And they said, well, we can’t be in school during the harvest or we can’t be in school when this is going on or that is going on and we need some flexibility. And so we just built it for them. And so we’ve had almost 100% success rate in those programs out in those rural communities all over Idaho.

Doug Lederman: Ann Kirschner.

Ann Kirschner: I guess I have a slightly different take, and that is to agree that universities will be in that business. But the question is, what role will they play? And I know maybe we’ll talk a little bit about some of the obstacles to that, but I come from the land of no. And the land of no says, no change. We do degrees. That’s what we do. So don’t talk to me about this other newfangled stuff, because that’s just not what we do. And so when I look 10 years out, I say, will most colleges have the smart strategy of developing these kinds of programs themselves? Or will the more nimble players be intermediaries or companies that begin to develop those credentials and partner with universities? And then universities have the challenge of how to integrate those credentials into their programs. So I don’t actually feel particularly sanguine about the ability of many institutions to take that role and run with it, but they will be forced to because that’s the place that students are going to be going.

Maria Anguiano: From ASU, I come from the land of yes and. And so, you know, most people that have tried to get a credential out there have not been successful. So the status quo is insufficient. And so absolutely there needs to be more options, more pathways. And that doesn’t mean that the degree goes away. That’s clearly very important to us as ASU. It means what we’re doing is we’re trying, at least at ASU, trying to create additional modalities, additional pathways, additional credentials for people to go on their learning journey because ultimately it’s a journey. Nothing is one credential. Like, how many of you learned one thing and that’s it, and that’s all you needed for your career, right? Like, we’ve been learning for everyone in this room is one credential and then another certification, et cetera, et cetera. You keep learning. And so, this idea of micro-credentials to me is a step in a very long learning journey.

Doug Lederman: I think if we were to take the revision of the Carnegie classifications and divide the institutions up into yes, yes and, maybe, no and hell no, I think hell no would probably be the biggest proportion.

Ted Mitchell: I think you’ve just rewritten the classifications. I gotta go. This is really brilliant.

Doug Lederman: So, the reason I asked about the proportion, it was very purposeful. I think the big question for me of the next decade and 15 to 20 years, probably because that’s how things unfold, although AI may alter that to some extent. We will definitely see universities experiment and mostly under pressure from alternatives and others, and increase different kinds of credentials they offer and the number. I guess to me, the question is: does this collective set of 3,000, pick your number, institutions own that space, or how much ground market share of all credentials offered do they cede? And that’s really, again, I don’t think it’s answerable, but that’s really what I was trying to get at: whether a decrease in the proportion offered by institutions. My suspicion, if it’s a bigger pool, a bunch of institutions may be fine, and that’ll be okay for the institutions. I think any movement in this direction is going to be better for learners. And that’s what matters most. Shifting gears a bit. What are the impediments to this sort of experimentation by institutions? Ann, I’ll start with you.

Ann Kirschner: I may be somewhat unusual in that I have worked and been a part of public, private, for-profit and tech intermediary companies. And what I have learned from that strange set of experiences is that the single most important thing is leadership. Leadership, leadership, leadership. So leadership establishes culture. A culture of innovation is what moves institutions forward. And so the biggest impediment is a lack of leadership and a culture that is allergic to innovation rather than embracing it. If you have a faculty that breaks out in hives when you introduce some new, newfangled idea, you are going to have a lot of trouble moving that institution. So I don’t want to blame it on faculty. Instead, I’ll go to the top and I’ll say that it’s all about leadership. And I have to say that I inhabit both the land of yes because I’m affiliated with Arizona State, as well as the land of no. So I’ve seen it all different ways.

Doug Lederman: Maria, from the land of yes and.

Maria Anguiano: Right, from ASU’s perspective, I think the impediments is just having enough funding to really get them done. I will say our faculty and our schools are actually very proactively suggesting that we do this. Our Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College actually has started a whole stack of teaching credentials, micro-credentials for community educators and teachers. And our engineering school is busy building a whole stack of semiconductor micro-credentials. So, you know, the impediment for us is like, how can I fund them enough to keep doing this work?

Doug Lederman: Marlene.

Marlene Tromp: Yeah, I want to jump off of what Maria is saying because I want to name two impediments. We’ve got to figure out how to get more robustly into the K-12 space because we have people who are afraid to do math, science and poetry. Those are the things people are really afraid of, math, science and poetry. And there’s not a huge demand for us to create more poets, but there’s a huge cultural demand and structural demand in the country to create more mathematicians and scientists. And people are terrified of these things. And so we’ve got to figure out how to help get people excited about these fields of study. And that’s an impediment. So we’ve built a semiconductor and cybersecurity for all program that we drive all the way down into middle school because we think that’s going to help students get those credentials when they come up to university. They’re going to be less afraid. And the other impediment that I see is federal student loan process, which as we know right now is making everyone cringe and suffer. If we can’t figure out how to be more flexible in getting funding to students so that they can study in a way that makes sense for them, it’s not the university of 50 years ago where you’re going to be 18 and come from a privileged family and go to school, or even you’re going to use the GI Bill. We need to figure out better ways to get students the support and funding to get through school because it benefits all of us for those students to get educated.

Ted Mitchell: Short-term Pell, the ability of students to use Pell Grants for shorter-term opportunities, 100% behind it. Congress has decided that Harvard and Stanford need to pay for it. Bad idea. But we’ll get there. I worked in the federal government in the Obama administration. And so if there’s the world of yes and the world of no, I come from the world of, what was that again? Because they don’t even ask the question, right? So we’ll get there with things like Pell Grants. And this is sort of counterintuitive, but I think that a lot of what we’re talking about is going to happen first in the largest institutions in the country. It’s going to happen at Arizona State. It’s going to happen in CUNY. It’s going to happen at the University of Texas. It’s not going to happen at the small colleges because that’s where there is more resistance to new ideas, more sense of threat of people taking jobs, et cetera. Here, bigger is better, partly because, and I’ll say it in my own terms, you can hide the new stuff longer in big institutions. So the University of Texas is partnered with Coursera to offer Google certificates for credit in the undergraduate curriculum. Let me go back through that. University of Texas, Coursera, Google undergraduate transcript. University of Texas can do that in part because it is so large and because they can do experiments at scale that can convince other people who may be of smaller scale to do that. That’s the kind of thing that I’m talking about when I’m talking about universities being a part of the stackable credential movement. And let’s remember, we’ve been doing stackable credentials for as long as there have been universities. We call them transfer. Let’s just agree that if that’s an example of how well we do this, we’re going to fail. So we need to rethink this, but we can’t rethink it. A lot of faculty is like, oh God, we’d never do that. Well, they do. They do it all the time. We stack credentials. Somebody who gets a BA at Penn State and goes on to get a PhD at the University of Illinois. That’s what? A stackable credential. This is not out of the realm of human possibility. We just have to normalize the discussion.

Maria Anguiano: If I may, I think one of the other issues is that we’re not thinking about these things as creatively as we can. We still are like anchoring on the degree. And so at ASU, we are looking at the underlying asset, right? So this micro-credential is both being applied for degree-seeking students, for pathway students in high school, for career upskillers. And it’s the same course adapted differently across many populations across a lifetime. And so when you think about a learning asset in that creative way, it actually you’re able to leverage, I think, a lot more.

Doug Lederman: Ted, you brought up transfer of credit. And to me, one of the things that that exemplifies is the sort of fundamental flaw in our ecosystem, which is really the fact that we don’t have a system of higher education that allows interoperability between institutions. To me, the big question is: who is responsible for enabling interoperability among this set of largely 3,000 free agent institutions? And there are some systems within it, and some of those do a decent job, but not all of them in terms of even within their systems, but certainly not across systems. Right now, we are in a very wild west situation, and I think the explosion of credentials or the expansion of credentials is on balance a good thing, but until we are able to figure out which ones have value and how they connect and all that. So, how do you think about that space and where there’s promise to try to stitch things together better?

Marlene Tromp: If we see ourselves as institutions of higher education who are fighting each other for a shrinking population of students instead of figuring out how to collaborate with each other so that we can each do really great things, and actually it’s not about the shrinking population of traditional age students, there are so many people out there who are learners. And if we aren’t thinking about it in ways where we’re collaborating with each other and we’re figuring out how to better serve those populations and we’re thinking about things like, look, I don’t care where somebody goes to school, whether it’s Boise State or someplace else, but we’ve got to help them get in, help them get through. It’s our well-being as a world depends on these people bringing their talents to bear on the challenges that we face. And so if we’re not figuring out how to collaborate, if we’re just thinking that we’re going to protect our piece of the puzzle and that we’re fighting other people off, we’re not going to get there. So, it’s a huge paradigm shift for higher education. And that’s why some of the national collaborations that have emerged have been critical. And some of the international collaborations, we’re collaborating with several universities in the U.S. and several in Japan to advance the semiconductor industry because that’s what’s better for the world and that’s what’s better for our students. It’s actually driving research. We’ve got to think about all these things in this way.

Ted Mitchell: So, it’s a great question, Doug. And I think the first question we have to ask is whether we want to engage in answering the question ourselves as a field or whether we would like to cede that responsibility to a government. So, I was talking to a colleague from the University of Mexico about this issue, and on the one hand, he’s got a very simple life. He just convinces the minister that he should do something, and that happens across all the colleges and universities in Mexico. That’s not where we started. I would argue that’s not where we want to end up. But then, that says if we’re not going to cede that responsibility, we have to accept it. And we announced this morning that we’re building a global data consortium, which will allow institutions not to share data, to share the signals of their data across institutions over time. So let’s take this transfer question, for example. So faculty’s in charge of the transfer thing. We could talk about shared governance for the next 16 minutes and 35 seconds. I could talk about shared governance for at least that long. But how do you actually tell whether Ted’s math course is going to prepare somebody to take Doug’s math course? You find out how the person did in Doug’s math course. You don’t fuss with the syllabus and you don’t ask how many problem sets are done. You look at what happens next. We don’t have the ability to do that with the data that we have in America today. So we’re going to try to put together this data consortium that will enable people to answer those questions. So the question of transfer then isn’t should we or shouldn’t we? It’s what does transferring that credit do for a student’s trajectory? Does it stop them cold? Well, then you shouldn’t accept it. Does it progress them in a reasonable way? Answer. So I do think that a lot of this comes down to the ability of institutions to stop thinking about being competitive in everything, start thinking about learning from each other, start thinking about the embedded skills in a lot of the things that we’re teaching, and to develop the ability to make those decisions for ourselves rather than the danger of ceding it to the feds.

Ann Kirschner: I want to give an unsolicited commercial for your announcement this morning, Ted, because I thought the whole idea of the data consortium was just brilliant and so essential. Without this notion, we’re sort of like a bunch of car manufacturers and there’s been no highway act. We cannot get anywhere because there’s nowhere to drive. In a perfect world, it would be the Department of Education, I believe, that would create that sort of interoperable system. But I think there are intermediaries that are aiming at it, and I think that your data consortium is a huge step in the right direction.

Maria Anguiano: I don’t believe in they should. I believe in like we need to get something done. So it’s really working together, as Marlene mentioned, that we can accomplish these things, whether it’s consortiums, other alliances, creating our own potential data networks where the student, I think the important thing here, though, is learner agency and a learner being able to take their credentials to wherever they go.

Doug Lederman: This episode is sponsored by Strada Education Foundation. Learn more about the State Opportunity Index, which gives states a set of priority measures and action steps that support a stronger connection between education and opportunity. The first ever State Opportunity Index report measures how states are doing in five priority areas: clear outcomes, quality coaching, affordability, work-based learning and employer alignment. Visit stradaeducation.org/opportunityindex.

Doug Lederman: Marlene, you talked about the possibility of expanding beyond the population of 18- to 22-year-olds. How successful do you think the collection of traditional institutions are being at doing that? We obviously see lots of activity. If I’m a working learner, I think I’m thinking real hard about whether going to a traditional institution is going to be the best path for me. And I think it seems like that’s a lot of learners are asking that question because we’re not seeing huge increases in those numbers. So, what are the things that make it difficult for institutions to innovate, to remake their products, as it were, and the way they deliver them to serve a different set of students?

Ann Kirschner: I’m thinking about the taxi driver who took me from the airport to the hotel who had three children, and the first one he’s putting through law school. Do you know how much law school costs? He’s telling me. And the second one, the second one is in college. The third one is taking credentials one by one. And here’s where I think there’s a huge danger to higher education, which is it’s too expensive, it’s too hard. And let’s face it, 2024 is probably the worst year higher education has ever had, ever. Would you agree with that? I mean, seriously, between we already had the issues of affordability and concern about debt and rising tuition costs, etc. We already had declining public confidence in the value of the degree. And now we have new issues about whether everybody should be fired if they have diversity in their title. And we have a situation about understanding free speech and academic freedom in a way that no one has written the rule book for. So this is a terrible year. So I think this is a moment to reboot and to think about universities in the most expansive ways. And the credentials are a piece of it, but I think they’re only a piece of it. And so I think we are facing headwinds that we haven’t had before. And it’s imperative that we get back on the highway and start making people feel that their children will be well educated and well served by affordable degrees and credentials. Is that a sermon? I’m sorry.

Marlene Tromp: One of the things I really have been thinking about is the ways in which what people see in the media about college campuses tells a story about who we are in such a way that some people think I don’t belong there. And it’s not that we’re not thinking this already. We are thinking how do we tell our story. Everybody is because there’s this huge push to marketing that universities didn’t have to do before. So I’m not saying that we’re not thinking about it, but we need to think collectively about what the global story we tell is about higher education. And we know that what our public institutions, what our legislatures are talking about, is workforce development, and that’s the thing they care about. And our faculty care about people developing their minds. And those things aren’t necessarily incompatible at all. But we’ve got to think about how we talk about this, and we have to work collaboratively and collectively and then think about how we communicate that message to that population of students who is avoiding us because they don’t want to be walking between people that are protesting and counterprotesting each other to the point that they’re afraid to go to class. Now, that doesn’t mean we should suppress those protests. This is a big part of the question in the conversation, but how do we teach people to treat each other on a college campus in a way that actually makes them feel like you can think whatever you want and be here? You can have whatever set of ideas that you want. You’re still going to have to deal with these concepts, this data. You’re going to have to be conversant in it. But I’m really thinking about the ways in which we have the stories that have been told about us repel people and make them afraid.

Ted Mitchell: Sign me up for reboot for exactly these reasons. And I think, since we were talking really about the population of adult learners, I think that everything is wrong with the policies and approaches to adult learners that prejudices institutions against serving adult learners. We talked about Pell Grants for shorter-term programs. There’s a clock on Pell on how long you can use it. You can get six years’ worth of Pell. Doesn’t necessarily comport with what people are doing. There’s this impediment to transfers, and most people, most adults, have a transcript that looks like a menu, and there’s nobody there to help them with that. We’ve been providing transcripted services for military learners for 60 years, giving credit for their military experience in college credit terms. And they get that, but it’s like pushing a rope to get institutions to regard that as worthwhile credit. If that’s what we’re doing to our military, just think about the average 32-year-old who had a kid and is now coming back to school. It’s not working. None of the systems are in place to help them. But let’s go to the campuses of today. We’ve also lost track of the 18- to 22-year-olds. So this is a group that has grown up in the most segregated school system since the end of Reconstruction. This is a group of people who’ve grown up in more segregated neighborhoods since the 1910s. These are people who are involved in social media that narrows their peer group even farther. They have no muscle about how to talk to people who are different than them. They have zero muscle. And so even at the 18- to 22-year-old stage, we got to go back and talk about what do people need to learn to be able to learn? And we’re not there yet. And so I think forget stackable credentials for a moment and let’s just talk about the basics of what a degree or a college experience should be. At a minimum, it should help people learn how to act in a democratic society. And we’re not even doing that.

Doug Lederman: Maria, I don’t know if you have something to add.

Maria Anguiano: Well, I would just add, I think, that go back to the idea of having multiple options, right? At ASU, we have, we’re going to reach 100,000 online learners. We have 75,000 over that amount at our campuses. We have hybrid options, and we have half a million people just taking different pathways and credentials. And I hear a lot, well, that particular option doesn’t work for everyone. And it’s like, yeah, that’s why we created that specific option for the one student, right? And so the more options that we have, the more likely it is that somebody can find their own path in.

Doug Lederman: Want to just sort of maybe close with: what do you see on the landscape that is encouraging, shoots of green that make you confident, to the extent you are, that this industry can adapt enough? There will be carnage, there will be damage, per Ted’s original comment. What will make the collective succeed, if it does, on this front?

Marlene Tromp: The fact that we’re in a crisis right now is probably the most profoundly beneficial thing that we have ever had. So it’s an incredible crisis, but it’s so real, nobody’s saying, well, we don’t need to worry about that here. So it’s challenging people to actually think about this. And I’ll tell you what, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t faculty who don’t think, gosh, I really wish that I could just go teach my Victorian literature class, says the Victorianist. But they all, they also really care about the students and their well-being and their growth. And they care about them being able to talk to each other and share ideas and face ideas that they don’t agree with and actually learn from them and to engage with each other and to grow. And we can appeal to that desire to help our students. And that can be the lever that we use to give people the doorway to say, how do we make higher ed better? And I think actually there are enough people who care about that that when you ask the question like that, it starts to change what’s happening. And I think we’re in a moment where we can do that.

Ann Kirschner: Echoing that, I think I don’t want to give COVID more credit than it’s due, but I think that along with COVID, there’s been a humanizing of our institutions that I didn’t expect coming out of it. I really thought that COVID was going to anonymize everything and everything was going to be online. I think that there is a far greater understanding among faculty of the lives that students live. And they understand that those are complicated and very vexed, particularly for low-income first-generation students of color. At the same time, students have been recognizing themselves the mental health needs and the self-care needs that they have. And so the thing that makes me feel like this isn’t just a flash in the pan is that I hear students and faculty talking to each other and listening to each other in ways that they haven’t in my experience. And I think that that’s going to help more of these potential obstinate Victorianists say, you know, it might be better if I offered my classes in the evenings so that people could take them after work.

Marlene Tromp: We have two Victorianists.

Ann Kirschner: I was just going to say, all I really want to do now is talk about George Eliot and Middlemarch, but I guess I can’t guess I can’t do that.

Ted Mitchell: I love what you said about the crisis. So COVID was a punch in one direction, and AI was a punch, is going to be a punch in the other direction. And then this conversation about developing the muscles to hear different perspectives. I’ve already given you two directions, so maybe that’s the kick in the pants. But I think it all adds up to an existential moment for the future of colleges and universities. And if we do it right, we grow and we thrive. And if we do it wrong, you can guess what happens.

Maria Anguiano: I’ll go back to something you said about, you know, with innovation, and there’s thousands of people here potentially trying to replace institutions. And I think that’s actually a good thing because it creates the type of competition and creativity that we need both in the higher ed industry and hopefully working them together to really innovate. So I think the pressure to compete is critical. But I think the other thing is the technology and AI, which is still in a very nascent, like we don’t even know the possibilities yet. And so to me, that’s the really exciting part: what are we going to be able to create to create a more equitable educational system? And I think we’re at the very beginning of figuring that out, and that’s exciting to me.

Doug Lederman: What you said, it’s interesting. I totally agree with you on the pressure that is being brought to bear from outside forces. The fact that so many of those outside partners or outside entities feel the need to work through institutions suggests that they understand the sort of advantage that institutions have in this realm. I think the worry is that institutions have still retained the arrogance that I think many of them have had and don’t accept the possibility of partnership with certainly within the ecosystem, but also within the larger sort of what I call postsecondary education and training ecosystem that goes beyond the higher education sector. And so I think there is opportunity because even Google is obviously pushing its certificates through, but it also isn’t, it’s not doing it to higher education. It probably could be, but it’s sort of choosing not to. But I think that’s to me this question of does the higher ed industry sort of drop the arrogant posture of we know best and we can do it ourselves.

Doug Lederman: Those last words from me capped what I thought was a stimulating, encouraging, but also cautionary discussion from last week’s ASU+GSV Summit. We heard during the conversation from Ted Mitchell of American Council on Education, Marlene Tromp of Boise State, Hunter College’s Ann Kirschner and Maria Anguiano from Arizona State University. My major takeaways from the discussion, and I’d say from the entire event, is that there is both plenty of angst around the current state of higher education and a growing acknowledgment, even if it’s grudging in some quarters, that the status quo isn’t good enough. The main vibe at the ASU+GSV conference a few years ago was: colleges are falling down on the job, and we, alternative education and training providers, Silicon Valley investors, major employers, can do a better job than you colleges are doing preparing workers for the jobs of today and tomorrow. That cocky strain of thought certainly still exists in some quarters, but the much more common view now is that there are tens of millions of Americans who need education or training after high school to thrive in work and life. And while it’s clear that you colleges can’t do the job yourselves, we can’t do it without you either. So can we figure out a way to work together for the sake of those people, the economy and the country? That’s going to take a big shift from competition to collaboration within higher education, and a lot more colleges echoing the views we just heard from Marlene and Ted and Ann and Maria on this panel about working with others. I’d love to hear about efforts that those of you in The Key audience are experimenting with on your campuses. So please reach out to me with ideas for future topics for this podcast. You can, as always, reach me at doug.lederman@insidehighered.com. Thanks for listening this week and always to The Key. And until next time, stay well and stay safe.

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