In the fall of 2020, soon after Who Gets In and Why was released, I was on Zoom with parents in Southern California. They were from a group of high schools in the type of communities where you know from the moment your kids were born that they were going to college. You didn’t question college nor the cost of the degree.

But what I heard that evening surprised me after 20+ years of covering higher ed. This wasn’t a group of college naysayers, but they were wondering about the value of the degree and asking about alternatives to the traditional post-high school pathway for their kids.

It would be the first of many Zoom discussions like that during the pandemic. I thought perhaps it was just a function of college being mostly online during Covid. But even as campuses started to open, the discussion about when and where college is worth it didn’t stop.

Journalists like to trade in anecdotes, so I filed away these tidbits.

And then a few weeks ago, I read a study from Populace that put some numbers behind the anecdotes.

Populace is a Massachusetts-based think tank co-founded by Todd Rose. I first met Rose in 2015 when his book, The End of Average, came out. At the time he was at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard.

The headline from study on what Americans want out of K-12 education confirmed what I had been hearing from parents and counselors for the last three years: Getting kids ready for college plummeted from the 10th highest priority to 47th.

“It’s not that they don’t want kids prepped for what’s next,” Rose told me, “but colleges no longer have the monopoly on that opportunity. It’s not clear that the value proposition of college is what it used to be.”

Maybe the bachelor’s degree doesn’t pay off like it did in the 1980s and 1990s I told Rose, but it’s still better than a high school diploma by itself. Rose told me not to read into the results that students simply need a high school diploma to succeed.

Rather, he said, the findings demonstrate that the college degree as the only path to a good life doesn’t hold the sway it once did among parents, who want their kids to learn practical skills, be problem solvers, and develop good character traits while in K-12.

The question is how do we give students a mix of the practical and liberal arts after high school to succeed in the 21st century.

While college prep finding in the Populace survey grabbed all the headlines, Rose found something else interesting in the data. For the first time in his research, he said, Americans favored individual learning over standardized learning. For example, they value students “learning at their own pace” over students “advancing if they meet minimum grade requirements.”

This finding seemed to confirm what I’ve also been hearing from college leaders and professors over the last two years: students want options in how they learn. They want a mix of face-to-face, online, and hybrid classes as well as courses that provide opportunities for hands-on learning.

For Rose, the survey also signals that once far-out ideas like “mastery-based learning”—where students move on from a concept once they demonstrate mastery rather than the time they spend in a seat—and which Michael B. Horn advocates for in K-12 schools his book, From Reopen to Reinvent, is not a fad.

Now, I know among educators there are lots of 🙄 for putting so much stock in one survey. Rose said he asked the data scientists on his team three times to confirm the specific finding about college prep.

Populace uses unique polling methodology called “conjoint analysis” that asks people to make tradeoffs to better determine what they think is important versus what they assume everyone else wants. This is especially critical to surface in education where people might be unhappy with the status quo, but they think they can’t change the system.

Chart from Axios based on Populace data.

“The incumbent system doesn’t care what they think, so it leads to a sense of resignation,” Rose told me. “What Covid did was unlock a nascent set of alternatives. It’s still a new market, but it’s a new market that will get better.”

The frustration with education is real. You’ll see it if you spend any time talking to parents or counselors in schools, or watching advisors work with underserved students in community-based organizations, or reading Facebook groups and Reddit discussions about college admissions.

The result is that students are leaving the education system. An analysis of enrollment data released last week by Stanford University in collaboration with the Associated Press found that there were no records last school year for more than 240,000 school-age children living in 21 states and the District of Columbia, which provided recent enrollment details. These students didn’t move out of state, and they didn’t sign up for private school or home-school, according to publicly available data.

Some of those kids are part of the 16.7 million 18-24 years olds who are not enrolled in schooling of any kind, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s 44% of all Americans in that age group.

The pandemic disrupted education, perhaps K-12 more than higher ed. But both sectors need to rethink how to reach, engage, and prepare students “because they can’t go back to 2019,” Rose said.

For too long, we have thought about college as the next logical step after high school without always thinking why. And for millions of Americans it became the only next step when the manufacturing industry collapsed in the early 1980s, closing off a pathway for those who wanted good jobs without going right on to college.

Because the U.S. hasn’t designed legitimate and scalable alternatives to college, we often end up warehousing students at the age of 18 for a few years on college campuses who have no idea why they’re there or what they want to do next. As Ryan Craig pointed out in in Forbes a few weeks ago, “you know a better place to gain those life skills? A job.”

Earlier this month, I returned from a brief trip to Switzerland, where compulsory education, which ends after ninth grade, is designed to give students the core academic skills that parents seem to also want in the U.S. from K-12. At that point in Switzerland, students can choose an academic path or a vocational path.

But the Swiss academic path is much narrower than the one in the U.S. and is focused on the few professions, such as medicine, where a university education is required. Only about a quarter of Swiss students choose the academic track.

The vocational path is much more popular, with nearly 70 percent of students choosing it, and includes some two-dozen areas of specialization from banking and retail to health care. Swiss students who pursue careers in accounting or graphic design or project management don’t go to college like they do in the U.S.—they get an apprenticeship and learn on the job.

Apprenticeships are on the rise in U.S., and perhaps given the high cost of college, more teenagers might consider this pathway. Still, there is a cultural belief in the U.S. that apprenticeships are for the trades and not for other careers. Perhaps the pandemic is changing that belief.

What do you think? I’d love to hear from readers about whether they agree with the Populace survey that K-12 puts too much emphasis on college prep at the expense of other skill-building and what we need to do to fully develop better pathways to good lives after high school?

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

🙏 Thanks to all of those who reached out for an article I’m working on about deferrals from early action programs. I’ll be in touch soon with some of you, but I’m still looking for more examples from students who got lots of deferrals from early action. Please reach out by replying to this email.

🚨 MARK YOUR CALENDAR: The "Next Office Hour" in March will be on Tuesday, March 21 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT.

On this webcast we’ll explore how to make the bachelor’s degree into a much more valuable credential for students and will release the findings from a new paper on what enables the bachelor's degree to have currency in the job market.

Join us for an interactive conversation to learn from:

• Matt Sigelman, president, Burning Glass Institute
• Lydia Riley, director of academic affairs, University of Texas System
• Matthew T. Hora, co-director, Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Lydia Logan, vice president, global education and workforce development, corporate social responsibility, IBM

►Register for free here. (Support from Workday)

🔜 And I look forward to seeing many of you in the chat this coming Tuesday for February’s Next Office Hour focused on improving the pathway from education to career, including the role micro-internships play. See the details and register for free here.

The Great Resignation and Higher Ed

More than 500,000 people employed in higher ed headed for the exits in 2022, according to the Department of Labor.

Why it matters: The employee experience is directly tied to something nearly every college campus is working to improve right now: student success. You can't fix the latter without focusing on the former.

• On a recent episode of the Future U. podcast, Michael Horn and I were joined by two higher ed workplace experts, Mary Opperman, the former chief human resources officer at Cornell University, and Kevin McClure, a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, who studies higher education.

The big picture: Colleges spend so much time, money, effort on enrollment management, but not talent management, although the two are "not altogether that different" McClure told us in terms of importance to institution.

• One place college leaders can start is to stop "gaslighting" campus employees to choose between a commitment to students and their own careers and needs of their families. "That is an unfair choice to ask someone to make," Opperman told us.
• Also, higher ed needs to rethink a "hierarchy of importance" exists among faculty, Opperman said. "That kind of cultural segmentation runs exactly opposite when we talk about belonging and inclusion."

What can be done? Our guests gave us a few ideas. One, invest heavily in employee development and use data to construct the employee experience. Campuses are "knowledge organizations...predicated on the idea of human development," McClure said.

• Also, use the talent of students to develop real experiential learning opportunities in campus jobs -- from IT to student affairs -- that maybe might make students think higher ed can be a career.
• Think of not just faculty as talent. Too often colleges just “replace and replenish workers.” I compared it to NFL refs strike where league mistakenly thought talent on field were just the players. They learned quickly they were wrong with blown calls.

🎧 Listen to full episode here. 

A MESSAGE FROM COREBRIDGE

SUPPLEMENTS