Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article headlined: “Small Businesses Get Creative as They Still Struggle With Hiring.”

Here’s one of the examples of creative hiring cited in the story:

In August, Vladimir Gendelman eliminated college-degree requirements from all job positions at his Company Folders Inc., a Pontiac, Mich., maker of custom presentation folders, binders and envelopes. He came up with the idea after promoting his executive-assistant to a job as print project manager, though she didn’t have any skills or training in printing, prepress or graphic design.

“We realized we don’t need an education,” he said. “We need somebody who is learning on their own, somebody who can figure things out.”

"Figuring things out" is one of those soft skills, 21st Century skills, power skills—whatever you want to call them—that are in demand by employers everywhere. And they are often embedded in the college degree. The problem is that many employers, and even many college graduates, don’t know they are. That’s because employers typically don’t ask the right questions in interviews to surface those skills and most grads don’t even know they might have learned such skills somewhere in college, including in co-curricular activities.

We face what I call a translation problem in higher ed.

Students are very good about listing what they did on their résumé or LinkedIn profile, but ask them the about skills they learned in college and they’re often stumped.

“Right now, higher education and industry speak fundamentally different languages,” Matt Sigelman told me at a dinner I hosted with college leaders in Houston last week. Sigelman is president of the Burning Glass Institute, and anyone who has read my last two books where I quote his research, knows that Sigelman has spent a career studying labor market data in real time.

“Higher education speaks a language of learning outcomes; industry speaks a language of skills” he went on to say. “There’s some correspondence between the two, but they are definitely not the same. And so there are all sorts of skills that we are teaching in higher education, but which we don't claim credit for.”

Case in point: Sigelman related a story about work he did for a public university where he was mapping the curriculum and courses to skills. One major was Gender Studies—one of those programs that frequently is the target of criticism by politicians for lacking currency in the job market.

Sigelman found that this particular program had robust field work, “and as a result, robust curriculum around project management, except no one ever called it that,” he said. As he pointed out, project management is increasingly a business skill that is "foundational to 21st Century economy work.”

Students often list what they did on their résumé, but don't always articulate the skills they learned.

I asked Sigelman about The Wall Street Journal article and whether degree requirements for jobs—which are the reason many colleges exist and are able to continue to charge what they charge—are at risk.

Sigelman and I are working on a paper about the future of the bachelor’s degree, so stay tuned for more on this. Here’s what Sigelman did tell me: “Employers are being driven by severe talent shortages to rethink things. We're in an age which is more data driven. And so they're able to be more analytical about what really works.”

But, he added, “what they're looking for hasn't changed.” And that includes what Sigelman described as skills that are the “bedrock of the American liberal education system.”

In recent years, he said the demand for:

• Writing skills has doubled
• Collaboration skills have grown two and half times
• Creativity skills have jumped three-fold

These skills are especially in demand in jobs that have the highest value, are the highest paying, with the most mobility, and the least likely to be automated.

The question is how to better integrate those skills into the undergraduate curriculum. Most colleges say they do it through experiential learning, which continues to be all the rage in higher ed as students, parents, and lawmakers look for a better ROI on their tuition dollars. But Sigelman seems to think we need to rethink how we pair experiential learning with classroom learning in college.

Working, as he put it, is a side gig right now for many college students. But maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe “working is core and maybe the learning is a side gig,” Sigelman said.

That, of course, requires a fundamental redesign of the curriculum at many colleges. In most traditional degree programs, students might study a concept in the fourth week of a semester, but not use it until two semesters later, by which time they probably have forgotten what they learned. Or students have no idea how a theory is applied in the outside world as they are learning about it, so they quickly lose interest.

By toggling between work and learning as Sigelman is describing it, you’re using what you learn in real time and you know why you’re use it. Perhaps such a redesign of the curriculum will come in time as many colleges face real enrollment pressures. But in the meantime, the fix to our translation problem between outcomes and skills is a bit easier one to solve: let's just use the same language.

☕️☕️ Good morning. Thanks for reading Next. If someone forwarded this to you, get your own copy by signing up for free here.

🗓 For your calendar: The "Next Office Hour." This is my regular webcast where I explore higher ed topics in-depth with expert guests. We just added two upcoming discussions to the line-up:

• Monday, November 7, at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT. Our topic: new models for teaching, learning, and outcomes. We’ll look at why the science of teaching is often ignored and examine this idea explored in today's newsletter of infusing more job-embedded learning throughout the curriculum.
  👉 Register for free here. (Support from the Charles Koch Foundation)
• Thursday, January 19, 2023, at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT. Our topic: building alternative pathways to skills and credentials. In this webcast, we'll examine strategies for institutions to rethink their program prioritization processes, create new flexible programs quickly, and build different kinds of credentials.
  👉 Register for free here. (Support from Cengage)

UCLA and USC jumping to the Big 10 is partly about the LA market and consolidating power in NCAA. 

The Great Realignment 

Keeping "learning loss" as the framing from the pandemic is "incredibly demotivating to students.”

Reinventing High Ed Post-Pandemic

The latest episode of the Future U. podcast dropped this week, where I got to turn the tables on my co-host, Michael Horn and interview him about his new book, From Reopen to Reinvent: (Re)Creating School for Every Child and its application to higher ed. 

My three takeaways from our conversation:

📚📚On “learning loss.” Michael surprised me in the book because he doesn’t love the term that has become popularized during the pandemic. He talked about Clark Gilbert's “threat rigidity” theory: “when a threat appears in the environment, it's really important to frame it as a threat. Because otherwise, you don't get the attention of an organization. You don't dedicate resources to tackling it.”

But the problem is that if organizations continue to frame it as a threat, then you only get a top-down response. While it was important to frame learning loss as a threat in the beginning, “if we leave it in that framing,” Michael said “it's incredibly demotivating to students.”

📱📱A rule of thirds in successfully using tech in education. 1. Help in providing rapid feedback for students and teachers. 2. Offer experiences hard to deliver in the immediate environment (such as VR sciece labs). 3. Automate manual, laborious processes to create a more seamless student experience.

🗓🗓 Finally, on the school calendar. Michael has a great story on why the agrarian calendar isn't the reason we get summers off from school. He suggests a more balanced calendar, where every 9-12 weeks you get two weeks off. As Gene Block, the chancellor of UCLA, told us on our Future U. Campus Tour stop there in the spring, rethinking the calendar also gives colleges more capacity to serve students in the summer.

🎧 Given a listen (and rate us).

📖 Get Michael's book, From Reopen to Reinvent: (Re)Creating School for Every Child.

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