Why Take a Detour...

...on the road from youth to career?

Another story about "alternatives" to college.  Those of us who toil in the fields of conventional academe don't much need to worry about direct competition here; our "product" and the one described here are not direct substitutes yet. But the ideologies, if you will, expressed and implied and strange-bed-fellowed here, should give us pause. Some snippets:

• "'It is like a university,' he told me, 'built by industry.'"
• "... many disadvantaged students are left at the mercy of unscrupulous degree mills"
• "Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, Harry J. Holzer of Georgetown University urges states to provide incentives to universities to steer students toward higher-wage occupations"
• "... the evidence so far suggests that online education may do better in giving low-income students a leg up if it is directly tied to work. And companies, rather than colleges, may be best suited to shape the curriculum."
• "It may not offer all the advantages of a liberal arts education, but it could offer a plausible path to young men and women who may not have the time, money or skill to make it through a four-year or even a two-year degree."
• "... an alternative approach to the 'four years and done' model of higher education, splitting it into chunks that students can take throughout their lives."

We need to do some hard thinking (and actual investigating) about what "all the advantages of a liberal arts education" really are. It is simply not sufficient to yabber on about "critical thinking" and to be complacently certain that producing graduates who are cultivated sort of like we are is the be all and end all.

And, too, it's not enough just to be against the "corporatization" or "vocation-alization" of higher education. We really do need to be rethinking curriculum in terms of the question "what kind of education will it turn out, say, 50 years from now to have been a good idea to get?" or "what education will really prepare a young person for the part of the 21st century that you and I won't be around for?" 

From the New York Times

ECONOMY
A Smart Way to Skip College in Pursuit of a Job
Udacity-AT&T ‘NanoDegree’ Offers an Entry-Level Approach to College

Could an online degree earned in six to 12 months bring a revolution to higher education?

This week, AT&T and Udacity, the online education company founded by the Stanford professor and former Google engineering whiz Sebastian Thrun, announced something meant to be very small: the “NanoDegree.”

At first blush, it doesn’t appear like much. For $200 a month, it is intended to teach anyone with a mastery of high school math the kind of basic programming skills needed to qualify for an entry-level position at AT&T as a data analyst, iOS applications designer or the like.

Yet this most basic of efforts may offer more than simply adding an online twist to vocational training. It may finally offer a reasonable shot at harnessing the web to provide effective schooling to the many young Americans for whom college has become a distant, unaffordable dream.

Intriguingly, it suggests that the best route to democratizing higher education may require taking it out of college.

“We are trying to widen the pipeline,” said Charlene Lake, an AT&T spokeswoman. “This is designed by business for the specific skills that are needed in business.”

Read more at NYT.com

A Model for "Career Preparation Across the Curriculum"

from AAC&U News...

Mapping a Path from Curriculum to Career: The Lynk Initiative at Mount Holyoke College

With the value of college increasingly being questioned as tuition continues to rise and the job market remains weak, how, asks Mount Holyoke College President Lynn Pasquerella, “do we articulate the value of a liberal education in a compelling way to those outside of the academy?” At Mount Holyoke, a liberal arts college for women in Massachusetts, the answer was to build a bridge between the liberal arts curriculum and students’ careers, and to create a comprehensive college-wide infrastructure to support that bridge.

The new initiative, known as Lynk, encourages students to start thinking early about connections between their academic work and career aspirations. It offers support—in the form of advising, mentorship, and funding—to help students complete internships, research projects, or other experiential learning opportunities that will allow them to demonstrate and reflect on the various applications of their studies in the liberal arts and sciences. “You are forced to ask questions of yourself,” says Tatum Lindsay, a recent graduate with a degree in gender studies. “How do I get where I want to go, who can mentor me, how do I identify the next step? When you have a community of people helping you with that and challenging you, [those steps] become much clearer, and it emerges what you’re passionate about.”

Involving the Whole Campus

The Lynk program comprises four stages: 

• goal setting, 
• professional development, 
• practical experience, and 
• “the launch”—a series of symposiums and presentations at which students showcase what they have learned and reflect on their next steps. 

During each stage, students work with teachers and mentors from across the entire college, including the faculty, the career development center, and the college’s three academic centers: the Miller Worley Center for the Environment, the Weissman Center for Leadership, and the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives. Faculty and staff share advising roles and co-teach courses that prepare students to move out of the classroom into internships or other professional experiences. “We’ve created parallel structures so that Lynk is not any one department’s responsibility,” Pasquerella says.

Read More at AAC&U News

STEM Women: Perhaps Many Paths and Many Destinations

FROM 

Continue Reading at the Atlantic online

Richard Arum (of "Academically Adrift" fame) at UCB Tuesday 10 December

NYT 9/13 "New Metric for Colleges: Graduates’ Salaries"

PayScale.com ranks over 1000 institutions in terms of what their graduates earn and what kinds of jobs they get.

COMMON SENSE
New Metric for Colleges: Graduates’ Salaries
By JAMES B. STEWART
Published: September 13, 2013 

U.S. News & World Report released its eagerly anticipated annual rankings of universities and colleges this week, and two of the usual suspects — Princeton University and Williams College — came out on top. Prospective students and their parents can evaluate these institutions on a variety of measures deemed important by U.S. News.

What they won’t find is any way to assess what some consider the most important issue in this still-tough economy: How much can graduates of these schools expect to earn?

READ MORE