When Heads Butt

An actual debate at LinkedIn Headquarters on the value of the college degree

I long for the civilized word fights of yesteryear.

My wish was granted last week.

At LinkedIn Headquarters in San Francisco, I got to debate another author in defense of my book: “Who Needs College, Anymore?” in front of a live audience.

They say people don’t buy books anymore and they don’t show up for live book events. “I don’t go to panels anymore,” said our organizer and co-moderator, Nitzan Pelman, as she opened the panel. But she curated an amazing collection of experts and earlier career folks and even students to tackle the questions around Do We Need College, Why Are the Other Models Stifled, Who Bears The Responsibility of Making College Valuable?

L to R: Nitzan Pelman, Kemi Jona, Kathleen deLaski, Scott Carlson

I was impressed and honored by the humans that showed up. No one warned me that my opponent, Scott Carlson, a longtime higher ed reporter, who has written “Hacking College,” is a jujitsu black belt. Amazon often displays our two books together in that helpful bundling offers section that says “people who read this book also read this other book.” Buy both!

Coincidentally published the same day, our books do take opposing views in parts. Scott is very strong on the value of the traditional degree, but wants to help students see beyond “the major,” telling them not to rely on what essentially amounts to a minority of the courses you’ll take in college to find your path to passion and employment. He urges them to find a “field of study,” to build in a broader range of self-directed experiences and classes to find your purpose and profession. (I love this and recommend his book.)

WhiIe I don’t recommend against college, “Who Needs College Anymore?” points to the growing number of employers and colleges that are offering skills-based career paths, that can be achieved with shorter term programs…that can be a stepladder to a degree, but don’t leave you credential-less if life gets in the way. I call on colleges to embrace all the market share they are leaving on the table, the 60% plus of Americans who are not getting a four-year degree, and to consider providing more modular professional pathway opportunities in addition to degrees.

Two things became clear in our debate. The first “ah-ha,” my opponent and the audience kept defaulting to advice for the 18 year who is leaving high school. Which is the time of life when pursuit of a full college degree makes the most sense, but is only part of the market in a fast-changing learning economy. Our design research at the Education Design Lab led me to recommend four types of learners who should absolutely attend college:

The 18 year old “class transporter”: often a first-generation college student, in a lower-income family who needs college to “learn the ropes” of code-switching and opening new horizons of career ideas and connections that can’t be pieced together from their family networks.

The 18-year-old “legitimacy labeler”: of any income level who may feel like “I’m not taken seriously.” I need the confidence building, the narrative building, the piece of paper, my family expects this of me.

The 18-year-old who needs community and structure: who is not a DIYer and wants to be told what boxes to check, how to become skilled or considers this effort a group sport.

The student of any age who wants a career in a field that requires a degree for licensure: think doctor, lawyer, nurse, teacher, physical therapist (I have a list in the book.) But this is slowly changing, as shortages for these jobs increase, we are finding shortcuts to help learners pick up these degrees while working.

My categories leave out a lot of folks, who I describe (in the book) on a second list that suggests who might afford to skip the degree. It’s roughly the flip side of the types above, including many older students, plus anyone who WANTS a degree but can’t afford the time or money.

Which leads us to the second “ah-ha” from the live debate: the conversation always ends up at the alleged rising cost of college. “Wouldn’t a majority of Americans attend and stay in if we could just make college more affordable?” Nobody is against the idea of college, only that it can break a family’s finances or excludes those who have to work for a living. I have come to believe there is more complexity to the story. 35 states now have some form of free community college available for at least low-income learners. A few states and some Ivy league schools make the four year degree available for free to high need students. (We don’t know if this accounts for the recent uptick or recovery of college enrollment; experts in states like Massachusetts, Maine and Michigan believe it is bringing more students to college.) Whether it’s free or not, as co-moderator Kemi Jona from UVA pointed out the in the debate, the inflation-adjusted cost of the degree is coming down.

And yet the complaints about ROI are going up.

As I learned when I interviewed families around the country, while the price is dropping, they perceive that college is expensive and many Gen Z ers are afraid of debt, of any type, particularly if they can’t see their goal and can’t imagine themselves sitting in a classroom for four more years. 62% start college right after high school, but up to 40% of those folks don’t stay. So, the winnowing process is acute. I interviewed a high school senior who wanted his own place, and to help his single mom. Putting that off for four years was a bigger fear than the stigma, as he explained it, “If you don’t go to college, you are made to feel like nothing.”

But there is more going on here than affordability. Having spent many years working with learners for whom college didn’t work out, I have come to believe that price isn’t the only barrier. the other barriers have to be solved for too: And they include: Relevance, Flexibility, Visibility.

College is a place where any high school or GED grad, late bloomer or career switcher should be able to obtain credentials of meaning. Those people who don’t want a full-on degree shouldn’t have to be on an Odyssean quest to find a qualified credential. Which is part of the problem, as short term credentials are mostly not tracked, and a majority that are, don’t get high ROI marks. (New Workforce Pell legislation is working on that.) So finding the right short term credential in a constantly changing job market is part of the Odyssey.

Colleges are respected (surveys still demonstrate this) for curating high quality credentials. Why can’t they provide this service for all Americans?

At the debate, we got into a well-mannered tiff about my book’s suggestion that all of these offerings come under the umbrella of “college.” Things like apprenticeships, boot camps, industry-recognized credentials. I gathered from Scott’s tone that he wants to preserve the academy for programs that open the mind to the liberal arts. I get it. I love that idea. I was an English major.

But, if we take four years to deliver the scholarly package, and don’t connect it directly to “how to get hired in the job market,” we risk exactly what has happened: a drop in the confidence that the degree provides value. Depending on which survey you read, between 56% and 65% of the adult population believes the college degree isn’t worth it or isn’t very important. You can debate the wording of these surveys, but the stark part is the fairly steep decline over the last 15 years in faith in the degree.

I’d like to end on the question that challenged me the most. I didn’t have a pithy answer for this one at the debate: Whose responsibility is it to make the degree have ROI or be valuable? Is it up to the school or the learner? I think Scott was suggesting that the colleges should lean in with more holistic advising, but by his very book title “Hacking College,” he’s offering students a roadmap to game or work around what I believe is a model in need of structural innovation.

To save their enrollment in the age of enrollment cliffs and AI, I have been recommending that colleges take ownership (and many are). In fact, I suggest several paths to solve toward ROI, but I will end with two here. Put work-based learning in the strategic plan as a priority to connect the academy to skills and get over the T word. Training. Students want to be trained. And that doesn’t keep them from reading Chaucer. Well, maybe it does. And I’m not happy about that. I am a realist.