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- [00:00]
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- [00:30]
Marshall Poe
Hello, everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:37]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to academic life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the show's producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler. And today I'm so pleased to be joined by Professor Kathleen Dalaski, who is the author of who Needs College Anymore? Imagining a Future Where Degrees Won't Matter. Welcome to the show.
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Professor Kathleen Dasky
Thank you. Thanks for having me, Christina.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
I am glad that you're here and we get to hear about the ideas in this book from you. But before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself?
- [02:13]
Professor Kathleen Dasky
Wow, that's a. A big question. Just to organize. I basically am a Washington area creature. So I, I have been in the D.C. area for pretty much my whole life, except for I, I was a. I was a television reporter for a number of years, about, you know, 15 years. That was My first career and I met my husband actually when I was interviewing him, I was sent to interview him and we raised our family in the, in the D.C. area and, and I finished up my, my TV career as a White House correspondent for ABC News and then did a brief stint in, in government at the Pentagon because I'd been covering foreign affairs before that. And then I made a sharp, pretty sharp turn into, into academia, but kind of through the door of education finance. I went to Sallie Mae as an executive for a number of years and I started their foundation, which got me really excited about this idea of colleges. Possible more people should be going to college if they, you know, if they knew like the federal benefits and the federal entitlements around financial aid and Pell Grants and even student loans that more people could go to college. And so the foundation did scholarships and grants and information campaigns and that really kind of got me interested in thinking about college access. I also worked in the charter school movement for quite a while, helping to create, you know, more charter schools around the country. And because I really was like others trying to, you know, think about how do we combat this, this idea of zip code destiny that you, you would definitely know, you know, if you were born in a particular neighborhood or area that had poor schools that, that sort of defined your trajectory and defined whether you could get into college, whether you would succeed in college. And so I, you know, I worked in that area for a while. I was invited to, by the governor here in Virginia to serve on the board of our largest public university in this area, George Mason University, where I now teach. And that really got me interested in thinking about how do, how, how do we help higher education serve more of those folks that I, you know, had met in, in, in, in my K12, my, my secondary school work. How do we help them make, be successful in, in college and how do we think about additional pathways for them besides the degree that colleges could even offer. And at that point, this is around 2013, I started a nonprofit called the Education Design Lab, which was really sort of set up to help colleges think about and execute and design with learners and with employers new forms, new formats of, of career preparation and life preparation that, that could work for people who for whatever reason were not getting through the gauntlet of a four year degree. And that can get us into the next discussion. But that's, that's where I am. I've ran that organization for 10 years. I've now stepped back and I'm, I'm teaching and I'm, I wrote a book as we're talking about today and I'm, I'm serving on some boards. So I'm, you know, you could say maybe I'm in the twilight of my career, but that, you know, that gives you a nutshell of the other trajectory and sort of how I arrived here.
- [06:19]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You talk in the book about how early on you were influenced by this idea called College for All. And it was this very sort of hopeful idea that college could be a pathway for everyone. But one of the things that you found out as you went along was that opening the door didn't necessarily create the true open access that College for All had sort of hoped for. The book seems to be moving us more towards an idea of education for all. And what would that look like? What kind of education do people need and how is that practical? And how does it resonate with the people who are hungry for an education that matters to them and to their future? The book is called who Needs College Anymore? How do you describe it for people?
- [07:06]
Professor Kathleen Dasky
Well, I describe the book. It's actually dedicated to what, what I call new majority learners. And this is the majority of Americans that, that do not have a degree. And college wasn't designed for them. Right. It was designed for the sons of wealthy land owners in the 1600s in the US and even earlier a very similar model in Europe. And so we have built up through this college for all mantra that's lasted maybe 40 to 50 years in the U.S. this idea that college is the ticket to the American dream, the four year degree is the ticket to the American dream. And there's not really any other ticket that's talked about or, or, or, or offered at, at scale. And so what, what has, you know, what has happened over that time period is, you know, it's a wonderful concept, it's a wonderful idea, but it actually isn't working. Like 40%, well, 40% definitely of people who try to go and get a four year degree don't make it, don't make it through for a variety of reasons. And it, and 50% of the people that I'm talking about that, you know, trying to either break the cycle of poverty or coming from a demographic that doesn't have a college going culture, it's 50% of folks who try to go to college, it doesn't work for them. And so, you know, we're now at a point where a majority of people do not have a four year degree, 62%. And yet we, we describe our economy and you know, the progression of life and we describe success as having that degree and that you need the degree to get a quote, good job. And what's happened over time, you know, great intent, but it isn't working at, for enough people. And we've tried to make it work. We now have the data that show that it hasn't worked and instead we have a lot of resentment that's built up over time which I think you see expressed, you know, most dramatically in the results of the 2024 presidential election where you know, people who the, the coastal elites, right were surprised that wow, you know, people were really unhappy with their, the status and, and, and there was a lot of reporting on what's been called the diploma divide. But it's the diploma divide in, in part causes or is one of the factors in the economic divide, right that, that we see in this country. And, and people describe it as getting worse than you know, where the, if you, if you don't have the degree there's so there are so many classes of jobs that are cut off to you. The one stat that has been going around is that 70 million people, workers, 70 million workers in the US have, have skills that should qualify them for higher level roles but they don't have the piece of paper that gives them the four year degree which is so often required. And so that's, you know, it sort of holds them back or holds them beneath the paper ceiling as it's being described. So that's why I wrote the book was to not just to rant about that problem but to describe the pockets of innovation that are happening and the groups of people, learners, employers, colleges, high schools that are beginning to create a different path. And that's what I lay out, sort of a blueprint for the future. And that blueprint culminates or sort of the big idea in the blueprint is that institutions, universities and colleges shouldn't stop offering degrees. Obviously there's going to be a market for them. There are some jobs that will always require them. Doctor, lawyer, maybe accounting, nursing. But we are sort of shutting out a majority of Americans from the funding that comes with going to college, from the prestige that comes from going to college, from the jobs when it's, there's no reason to be doing that at this point. And we could be. Colleges could take the lead in offering a continuum of offerings or products. Colleges don't like the word product, but they could serve a continuum of learners needs and a degree would be one of them, but so would apprenticeships, so would short term industry recognized credentials which some are offering now and that's the fast, actually the fastest growing offering among, among, among college enrollment, they could be offering shorter form boot camps so that instead of paying an average of $100,000 for a four year degree, you are paying maybe $20,000 to get that sort of college experience or adultification process in a nutshell, in a, in a shorter form. You know, those are just some of the things that are beginning to happen. But you know, another reason I wrote the book is that those types of programs are suppressed because we, we aren't funding them. We're funding them at, you know, at fractions of the levels we're funding degrees. And so, you know, there's a lot of policy work that needs to change and some states are starting to do that, but the federal government is not.
- [13:17]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You talk about making certificates and credentials stackable towards a degree and that is something that's been floated by a number of places that if you collect these the way other what we would consider a traditional student collects credits, this all counts towards your degree. And degrees, as you point out, are something people can qualify for funding at, whether they go to a state school, a community college, often private schools offer some levels of funding as well. What did you learn in all of these interviews that you did and talking to people about their vision for how credentials or certificates could be a stackable process that would ultimately result in a degree? In a very practical way, yes.
- [14:04]
Professor Kathleen Dasky
That'S the dream, right? The idea that you could come in and out of college and you could get shorter form, what people are using the term stacks, a shorter term. You do a micro pathway which is maybe a two or three credential course, maybe it takes you six months, you come out with a credential against which you can be hired. You know, one example people like to give is the people who draw blood, right? Like that's a much better than minimum wage paying job. It gets you in the door of a, of a hospital or you know, an immediate care center in your sort of, it's the first rung on the ladder. And to train to be in, in this country they're called phlebotomists is the name of the, of the, of the job. You, you can do a two to six month training period and then you're employable and so then you're in that job. And to your, to your question, you could then train to get the next level job which, which could eventually lead to a, a registered nurse role, you know, which can be a six figure salary in this country at least. But you have earnings power along the way, which, no surprise, surprise, most people need to work while they go to school. 65% of students in the US work while they go to school. 40 or 50% of them work full time. So school is something they're doing on the side. And that has to be recognized. That a majority of learners need to, in order to pay for school and in order to pay for their other, you know, the rest of their life. Right. Need to have earnings power while they're, while they're skilling up to the next thing. And so a stepladder approach is, is the key, probably the number one design criteria that I advocate for. In the book I have a chapter called the Great College Reset where I summarize from all of the anecdotes and stories through the book, I summarize what are the top 10 ways that college sort of offerings, where I call them design principles that colleges should design towards by mid century. And the key one is college needs to look like a stepladder that you come in and out of rather than it being a long form linear journey where you're there for four years. Maybe you know what you want to study when you get there, maybe you don't. And you, it's sort of, and, and it's a, it's sort of. People use the term spray and pray. Right? You learn a bunch of stuff and then hope that somebody will hire you at the end. And increasingly people are not getting hired at the end of at least. I mean that, that's kind of a trend line that's been happening in the past two years where new surveys are coming out from both employer side and education side. We're seeing that graduates are not getting hired partly because they don't have the specific skills of the moment because they've been in school learning the theory. And so now employers want experience, want you to have two or three years experience. But how do you get that when you've been in school for four years? It's very hard and there aren't enough internships to go around. So there's a lot of debate about that right now in the US how do we help students gain the experience that employers want along the way?
- [17:53]
Dr. Christina Gessler
The Great College reboot is chapter seven. And one of the things I was thinking about was a number that you pointed to a few moments ago, this high level of stopping out or non completion. And students have a number of reasons why. But in the reboot where we reconsider the time frame and the chunks of time that people spend in College and we see it as a place that people come to get a set of skills, go out and use them, come back, acquire some more. We would directly address that stop out problem, would we not?
- [18:27]
Professor Kathleen Dasky
Yes, I think one of the, when you study, sort of what causes people to leave. Particularly community colleges where we do a lot of our work in the U.S. community colleges are the two year colleges that tend to be open access, very affordable and often people will use them to reboot their career even in midlife. But it certainly addresses the stop out issue because one of the things we see is that when you come to community college and you're not maybe sure what you want to do, maybe you're going to want to go on to a four year college or maybe you just want to get a degree, there are all these classes that you have to take that are, you know, in this, in this country they're called General Gen Ed is the nickname for the general education classes. You know, your, your humanities classes that are required in your, your maybe a world civilization class and you know, classes on various critical thinking, you know, efforts, all of which are great and nobody's, nobody's knocking them but a student, you know, we lose the most students in the first year or after the first year because they haven't connected really. They haven't seen the connection between what I came to college for and how I might earn, make a living. Which is the main reason people say they go to college. At least in this country, you know, for the past 10 or 20 years it's very much focused on building their, building their economic earnings power. That's why they're there. And they don't see the connection when they're, you know, being, being made to take classes in, you know, very general topics and they also, the length of time if, if you're getting a two year degree at a community college or a four year degree at a four year college, it just, it just, we, we find that if you have shorter term milestones where you can get a credential and you know, see the results sooner, you know, it's, it's, you know, that's a, that's a well documented learning tool, right? The idea that you have milestones, I mean, you know, sort of almost like a gamified approach where you, you, you hit, you know, you hit levels, you level up and that, that appeals to people and it keeps them, keeps them energized, keeps them seeing the, the relevance of why they're there.
- [21:06]
Dr. Christina Gessler
One of the things that you talk about as a, as A takeaway at the end of each chapter. It has takeaways that we can think about as we reimagine what college offers people and how we, how we meet learners, needs. You talk about the importance of the professors or the instructors mapping out the skills and making it very clear what skills you're getting in this class, making it really visible. And I relate to that very much. I took a lot of classes where I left with a very good grade but not really able to articulate to anybody outside academia what I was now good at because I had taken that class and I was in fact good at it. And had I had the language, I could have explained that to someone else in a way that would, you know, highly portable and made me a good candidate for a job. But in fact, all I really knew how to do was say, you know, I wrote this great paper on X and I spent all this time researching in place Y and Z. And that, you know, makes people's eyes glaze over. But if the professors had done a job of mapping for me, you know, either in an exit interview or in a talk during the first day when they present the syllabus and said, here's some really important skills you're going to be gaining. And then they reinforced it instead of giving me a grade, grade, you're good. But also having some kind of list or feedback of these are some really strengths that you developed. And here's some things I think for you to know that you're good at instead. A lot of us leave a class exhausted and with imposter syndrome.
- [22:44]
Professor Kathleen Dasky
Yeah. And I think this is particularly true in liberal arts courses. And let me defend the humanities and social sciences right away and say I was an English poli sci major. I loved what I learned in school, but I do think it's a different time. I think when I was coming out of College around 1980, as a long time ago. Right. We weren't, we weren't in the era of algorithm skills skills searching where the, the applicant tracking systems. Those are the, that's what employers use to sift through, you know, the hundreds of resumes they get for a job application. Right in there. They're reading it for the, the keywords, the skill keywords, the, that were in the job description and you know, learners are, or you know, job applicants are learning now that, oh, if I just paste the, paste the job description into my, into my cover letter, you know, then I'll get, I'll get through the, I'll get through the filter but you know, do you really know, like, if you got to the interview stage as an applicant and they, you know, they, they read this, you know, they named this skill that you, that they want you to have. Even if they just said critical thinking, you're right. We, we as professors aren't equipping our students very well with that translation. I mean, we, you know, we know that we think they know it. They've learned how to think critically. But it's the, it's that context or, you know, the near, near context or far context as, as one of my mentors described it, where you, you know, can you make the leap in the connection when you're describing how well you, how well you know something. I mean, I'll, I'll give an example. My daughter majored in neuroscience in college. I have one daughter who went to college and one who didn't. And she majored in neuroscience because she loved to study the brain. But when she came out, she's, you know, she said, I'm, I'm unemployable. I don't, I don't know what to do with this major. I don't want to be, you know, I don't want to go on and get my PhD. And that was what they were telling her. Well, oh, well, you can't get a job with a neuroscience degree until you go all the way through. But, you know, no one had told her that when she started and she didn't want to be a PhD and so she went to work in a bike shop and like, never, you know, really used her degree again. Now she'll say, now, I mean, she's, you know, she's glad she has it. She said, I learned a lot and we paid for it. So she said, you know, I don't think if, if I had had to pay for it, I, I wouldn't have gone to college. And, and that, and that's kind of the, you know, I think this younger generation and, or, you know, my, my daughter is more of a, of a, of a millennial, late millennial. But, you know, certainly Gen Z is also, you know, really kind of doing more of a cost benefit analysis around the type of major they're going to have. So the more techn. I think they are doing a better job translating. I profile a college in the book called Western Governor's University, which is like, like the second largest single individual university in the US and they have done a really good job. They have created through, looked at, at job descriptions everywhere and created what they call rich skill descriptors. And in the book I describe how you can go and look at the library. They've opened up the library so other colleges can use it, but they map each of their, each, each class, each learning outcome. They're mapping them to these rich skill descriptors which are, you know, which they're drawing directly from scraping job descriptions. So they're translating them to, you know, what would this look like when I go to apply for a job? And that's, you know, that's been. So every student has a skills profile and they have a coach who is working with them. You know, their advisor is kind of helping them build their skills profile based, you know, as they go through each course, which I think is a really good model and not that hard to do if you give your advising staff and you give professors the tools, you know, which in the form of this library of, of skills, I was thinking.
- [27:23]
Dr. Christina Gessler
About from the student point of view about that as a confidence builder. My example before I am very pro humanities. That's what my degrees are in. It was my experience of, of trying to walk out of one environment where I had apparently done very well and into another where I couldn't explain anything in language they understood about me and having this feeling of, of what's often called imposter syndrome. And so I was thinking about the skills, rich skills descriptors and some of the statements in the book about how we need universally understood language, whether it's your certificate or a credential or skill that both learners and employers understand. I was thinking about how employers are going to come and go. The idea that someone has a single career for their whole life is kind of, I think more baby boomer than Gen Z. And but knowing that you, that you had these skills builds confidence. It builds a sense of purpose. I did this thing, here's what I gained from it. And there's sense of a lifelong learner. The, the, you know, the great college reboot and your parallel to what community colleges are doing right now where people can come in and out to gain skills. Those are people who see themselves as one, people who can acquire skills and two lifelong learners. And a lot of that comes from a self belief that it's possible as opposed to the kind of self defeat that I described a few moments ago. And so knowing the language that is more universally understood by all parties seems like a really important piece forward.
- [29:00]
Professor Kathleen Dasky
Yeah. And I, I describe that in the future it might take 10 years for these to be widely available across all states. But think about this idea of a skills wallet where you would be able to take any experience that you had, probably starting in high school, whether you're in a club or you're taking care of folks, you're volunteering at a nursing home, you're on a basketball team, you're in a class, you're, you're doing a workshop. Like each of these things, you, you as, as the self author of your skills wallet could feed them into a tool that is organizing them. And those skills, you can, you know, shape shift them to, you know, ask to query, okay, I now I want to go apply for this job. I'm, you know, I'm, I want to be a lifeguard or I want to be, you know, where, how do I stand up? How do my skills do they demonstrate that I could apply for this job and if not, what's the distance for me to get there and how do I get there? This is the idea of a skills wallet, which a few states are starting to think universally about. You know, a learner's journey starting from high school. So North Dakota, I've profile in the book, and Alabama. Those are two states that are probably the furthest along in offering, in the case of North Dakota, like all their high school students, a skills wallet that they could then take on with them to their post secondary learning experiences and work experiences. And it's really, you know, I say in the book, it's sort of like a, a Hollywood agent, you know, your personal Hollywood agent. And it will, you know, obviously AI plays a part in this and the question is will, will learners use it or will the learners who need it most use it? You know, will it benefit them? My hope is that, you know, we'll, we'll see the benefits of these things because it can give you the agency and as you said, the confidence really to, to, to think, to, to translate what you can do based on what you've done and, and also show you how to get to the next level that you choose to get to and.
- [31:25]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Also to have relevant examples for the job interview. You know, you pointed out that anyone can kind of game the COVID letter, but if you get to the interview and they start using the terminology in, in terms of that actual job and they ask you to provide an example of some time that you've actually used those skills and, and both what you struggled with and what you overcame, you might be staring at them for a few beats while you try to figure out how to translate that. And if you've already had the skills wallet coaching or whatever it might be called in 10 years when people are going to be trying to do this, or right now, if you've had the coaching to be able to do this, adept translating, you're going to get a better result whether you get that job or not. You, you did well at the interview.
- [32:17]
Professor Kathleen Dasky
That's right. That's absolutely right. And we're trying to get. So there's been a movement called skills based hiring, which I describe in the book. That's, I wouldn't say it's completely taken off yet, but it is in the sort of adolescent stage where several states and the federal government have actually said, we are removing requirements that you have a degree for most jobs. Unless there's a, you know, over overriding reason why you have to have a degree for this job, we're removing those requirements. So now you'll see on a lot more job. And many companies have picked this up, many haven't. You know, some people just still feel, well, you know, the degree is a great way to kind of see whether the person has a level of maturity. We know that they've gotten through various gauntlets, they've had to work with folks and collaborate. You know, it becomes a proxy. But more and more employers are recognizing that actually maybe it's not the best proxy, that there's, you know, some challenges with folks who, who have, you know, gone through the degree but haven't, you know, built up work experience. So it's, it's an interesting time. I do think when, when, when people ask me, well, do I need a degree? I mean, is everyone removing degree requirements? No, not, not yet. We're not. It's, it's, at this point it's a concept, you know, maybe like, you know, 5 or 10% of early adopters have done it, um, but you're not seeing it totally widespread. But there definitely is more of a mantra that you could apply for a job and describe experience you have. And we now have tools like AI tools because some of them do exist. We could talk about those to help you do the, do the translation yourself. Google just came out with a new tool in the last month. I think it's called Career Dreamer. I can look it up while we're what we're talking.
- [34:26]
Dr. Christina Gessler
But one of the themes that goes throughout the book is about work experience. You take us early on in the book into your own high school work experience and how it didn't really occur to you to talk about the variety of skills, people skills, soft skills, time management skills that you gained in that job. Because the job itself, you, you thought Quite literally about like, this is a specific type of performance or dancing skill and would I want to take that into a performance or dancing profession? And you thought about it and said, no, I don't think so. But the portability of those skills and even naming and seeing the value of them was not something you were encouraged into. And when I was reading that, I was thinking about, I was recently at grad school. School, I was discouraged from talking about the variety of jobs I worked in addition to going to grad school because I would be seen as less serious.
- [35:25]
Professor Kathleen Dasky
Oh, interesting.
- [35:26]
Dr. Christina Gessler
In my graduate pursuit. And so this shift of, yes, you should be looking seriously at your work history that goes all the way back into teenage years and looking at those skills and what you gain from them as you build a sense of yourself as a person who can move fluidly into a variety of different roles. Because our economy requires that again, the idea that we're going to have like one job. Your example earlier about if you become a phlebotomist does not mean you'll be drawing blood for 40 years. It can be a starting job. You can become a manager of the department. There's a lot of places to go to if you start to see yourself as this person who continues to build skills.
- [36:08]
Professor Kathleen Dasky
Absolutely. Yeah. There's a lot of good focus right now on this idea of, of what we used to call soft skills. Now we're trying to use the term durable skills because the term soft skills was invented in the army to, to, to signify any skills that didn't involve operating machines. And now, now we see the skills which are, you know, what, what we call, you know, the cross functional skills, and some are calling them the durable skills are really the ones that will maybe not help you get your first job, but will help you progress in a career. And you certainly see those as being the dominant skills of folks who are, you know, managers and leaders are the, you know, your ability to communicate, your ability to collaborate, your critical thinking skills, empathy, resilience. And the organization that I founded, the Education Design Lab, we actually created micro credentials around each of the ones I just mentioned. We started this work about eight or nine years ago. And you can see the credentials on our website, education ed design lab.org there. It's just very interesting to see what are the sub, you know, part of the problem when you talk to employers about, oh, well, do you, you know, do you hire people based on durable skills, soft skills, or do you hire them based on technical skills? And they'll always say both. But when you look at the World Economic Forum's list of like the top 10 global skills. It's always more in the, you know, quote, softer department, right? They're always, it's always around analytical thinking, critical thinking, creative problem solving. You know, these are the, these are, these are this quote, skills for jobs of the future. And, and I mean, that makes a lot of sense. But how do we, how do we teach them, you know, specifically discreetly and how do we credential them? And that's, you know, that's a question that we've been working on at the lab for several years now. And it's, it's hard because, you know, every, those skills are, you know, subjective and they're in the eye of the beholder in terms of how you, are you a critical thinker? You know, would you, are you a black belt in critical thinking? You know, how do we, how do we, how do we know that, how do we define that? So, you know, that's a topic that I, you know, could, could go deep on, but that those are some thoughts.
- [38:55]
Dr. Christina Gessler
In the book, you talk about the importance of internships and apprenticeships. You pointed out a few moments ago that there aren't that many internships to go around. So the idea that someone would go to school for four years and do a number of internships is not just going to happen unless the school has intentionally built relationships. You point to a specific school in the, in the book that, that has a lot of that experiential learning through internships as part of how they operate. But most schools sort of encourage people to find an internship, but they're not an easy thing to get on your own. You talk about what makes a good apprenticeship, that they, they need opportunities to explore more than one role the apprentice does. You talk about the importance of a cohort model, about the apprentices feeling that they're part of a community. You also talk about the importance of being paid and how employers could be incentivized. The apprenticeship model is centuries old, but it has died away mostly in the United States. And the internship model is often privilege based. Can you afford to do a free internship and many, many people can't. So can you talk about this reimagining of internships and apprenticeships as ways to help learners?
- [40:16]
Professor Kathleen Dasky
Yeah, I mean, I think this is a key, a key way to embody the stepladder approach. I mentioned earlier. An internship is a short term, usually three months or less, where you're usually assigned to do one thing. And we, you know, we are increasingly, employers are stepping up to pay, to pay for interns. Um, but the bad news is they're probably taking less interns as a result. And we are in a situation where more and more students are realizing they need internships to be able to have that experience we talked about. And there aren't enough to go around. I mean, internship applications are way up, you know, over the past two or even two or three years since COVID way up. And employers are like, wow, we can't handle the demand. So there's a lot of. One of, you know, I profile another school in the book and a company called Ripen R I I P E N which is creating a plat platform for employers who want to, would like to hire a student to do a particular gig or you know, job role. And so professors are being the interlocutors and basically building the work assignment into the class. So those are not paid work assignments, but they are, you're getting, you're getting credit for them and that's a great model, but it does take, you know, it's a fair amount of work for the professor to weave it in and set up a situation where the students are working directly with the, with the employer. So that's a great model, but you know, not so easy. So that's internships. Apprenticeships are much, you know, a much more, you know, in depth model where you, you're basically helping a, a newbie, you know, in, in the field train on the job and they're getting increased levels of salary over a period of, you know, maybe one to four years and like to be an electrician, it's a, it's the same length of time as going to college to go into a four year degree. The difference is you're getting, you're getting paid and you're getting increasing levels of autonomy and responsibility. And those are very set programs that end, you know, result in you getting a license, but you're also paid. So you know, we've thought about apprenticeships in this country lately meaning, you know, in the past 20, 30 years as being mostly for the trades. Right. Electrician and construction are the two hottest areas and have been, you know, for gosh, decades now sort of so called white collar jobs are starting to come into the apprenticeship world and that's been really interesting. I profile an insurance company that is, is, is doing apprenticeship in Colorado and they're actually sort of capturing kids. Not capturing, but like, you know, getting them in high school and they're, they tend to be attracting kids who don't want to sign up to have debt or, or they don't. They're not sure how they would afford college and this is a way for them to get trained into a profession and get paid along the way. And so that's becoming more popular. But most of the action is happening with states and with certain states that are, they're kind of good at this because they've built infrastructure. South Carolina, I profile in the book, Colorado, Kansas is also a state that is, is doing quite a lot and California, so we could talk about those. But I know you have some European listeners and the US right now is really learning from Europe on how to do the apprenticeship model at scale. A lot of American companies go over to Switzerland and Germany to train and sort of how to set these programs up. So that's been interesting to watch.
- [44:30]
Dr. Christina Gessler
We're starting to come to the close of our time together and there's so much more in the book than we can cover here in our time together. The book is called who Needs College Anymore? You tell us in the book that at the time that you were launching off to college, there was a popular magazine cover that was running an article called who Needs College Anymore? This is a question that we have circled back to time and again because of affordability issues, because of access issues for a host of reasons. As you wrote this book and when you came to the end of it, did you have hope for the future of higher ed? And if so, what does that hope look like?
- [45:09]
Professor Kathleen Dasky
Yes, I mean, I say, I think it's near the end of the book that I say, you know, I'm wildly optimistic and practical because I see, I see the changes in consumer behavior and technology as opportunities. I. So I'm excited about the, the possibilities for the 62% in particular who have not had access or have tried and it didn't work to a four year degree. I'm excited that I see evidence that we are beginning to expand, widen the funnel and think differently. And it's because of the drops of enrollment and you know, some of the political stuff going on. In a way, some of that is causing open, it's, it's bringing about more open mindedness. So you know the phrase that gets thrown around a lot like never waste a good crisis. It has been a crisis point for higher education in the US because enrollment is dropping and there's also going to be fewer and fewer 18 year olds. We, we have a demographic cliff, as they say. And so colleges need to get more creative. They need to fish both upstream and downstream for, to meet the needs of Other kinds of learners that may not be coming to the door and may not want the full, the full on four year degree product. So I, I'm very optimistic about, you know, what we can do. The, the one thing, and I say this near the end of the book that I'm concerned about is what do we lose? What are the unintended consequences? And I think where we have just talked about these durable skills and the kind of, let's say broader learning and broader training that learners get in a four year college setting. You know, the contacts you make, the networks. I do worry about how we continue. How do we keep the envelope of the wonderful part of the college experience that's not the just in time skills training. How do we keep that alive as people ask for more and more unbundled stacks of learning. I'm very concerned about that and I do describe some of the things that are being done to try to, or that could be done to try to protect, not throw the baby out with the bath water. When it comes to higher education, my.
- [47:49]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Final question is what do you hope listeners take away?
- [47:52]
Professor Kathleen Dasky
Well, I, I hope that they take away hope. I get approached on, I've been doing a book tour, I get approached by parents. I was approached by one yesterday who, you know, has a child that isn't, isn't going to college or they don't think that they want to go to college. And the mom was like, do I force him? Do I push him? You know, what are the options? And I think it's not very clear today. I think we need more visibility. But it's getting clearer as to other options besides college or bust or college or trade school. There are more avenues. So I hope the takeaway is that, you know, you can look at apprenticeships, you can look at short term degrees, you can look at community college, you can go and try out, you know, career, career ideas. If you don't finish, it's okay. There's lots of, there's lots of pathways that you can, can take. So I, I hope, I hope that's the main takeaway from, from a listener that's thinking from, you know, as a learner.
- [49:04]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Thank you so much for being here today, Kathleen Dasky, and sharing about your book. Who needs college Anymore? Imagining a future where degrees won't matter. I'm Christina Gessler. You're listening to the Academic Life. Please join us again.