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In today's edition: Why apprenticeships should be an option like applying to college, college advertising in airports, and changes in youth participation rates in athletics. 

EVENTS

We’ll be closing out 2023 with two more episodes of the “Next Office Hour,” my series of webcasts named after this newsletter: 

🗓️ Tuesday, November 28 at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT

• I’ll be joined by Jennifer Breheny Wallace, the New York Times bestselling author of Never Enough about how we can broaden our consideration of success and lower the temperature on the demands of getting into the “right” school.
  👉 Register for free. 

🗓️ Wednesday, December 6 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT

• We’ll examine new signals of job preparedness and what colleges and other learning providers can do to compete in an era when an increasing number of employers have stopped requiring a four-year degree. I'll be joined by:

  • Kelli Jordan, VP, Employee Growth and Development, IBM

  • Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, who is a freelance journalist on the workplace for publications including Quartz, the Washington Post, and Fast Company

  • Lisa McIntyre-Hite, Executive VP & COO, C-BEN Solutions, Competency-Based Education Network

  • Paul Fain, Editor, The Job | Open Campus 

    👉 Register for free. (Support from The Charles Koch Foundation)

THE LEAD

A recent college grad I know who earned their master’s degree in May, a year after completing a bachelor’s degree, landed their first job this month. One thing that seemed to tip the scale: learning Salesforce on their own over the summer.

When I heard the story I was reminded of Ryan Craig. Craig often asked college leaders over the years why they don’t provide training on Salesforce, a table-stakes skill if there ever was one for most entry-level jobs. As Craig tells the story, however, he is usually greeted with blank stares from college leaders.

I’ve known Craig for more than a decade. At the turn of this century, he was part of the development of Fathom, the online Columbia University venture championed by Arizona State’s current president, Michael Crow—an incredibly innovative idea ahead of its time. Since then, he’s been an investor in companies in the ed-tech and workforce space as well as a frequent commentator on higher ed.

This month, Craig is out with his latest book, Apprentice Nation: How the “Earn and Learn” Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America (I provided a blurb on the back cover, so it’s worth reading). In the book, Craig calls for a significant increase in the number of apprenticeships in the U.S.—and not just in the building trades as we often think of apprentices.

Why do we equate apprenticeships with blue-collar jobs in the U.S.?

Last February, when I was in Switzerland visiting a friend, I was struck by how apprenticeships there are a pathway to what we consider bachelors-level jobs in the U.S.—in everything from accounting to marketing. 

Craig says the reason the U.S. lags behind other countries when it comes to apprenticeships is because we lack the extensive network of intermediaries, which take on all the tasks that employers and colleges don’t want to take on—developing a curriculum, reaching out to industry partners, recruiting apprentices, and providing mentorship.

Today, the U.K. has eight times the number of apprenticeships of the U.S. per capita, according to Craig. A generation ago, the U.S. and the U.K. were about event. What has made the difference? Intermediaries, Craig told me.

The call for broadening apprenticeships is nothing new, of course, but its timing now is critical for two reasons.

For one, if you’re the parent of a recent college graduate perhaps they’re back living at home with you or you’re sending them money to help with the rent. While the overall job market may be strong, it isn’t for newly minted recipients of the bachelor’s degree. As the Washington Post reported on Sunday:

Since 1990, the unemployment rate for recent grads almost always has been lower than for the general population. But that changed after covid. New grads have consistently fared worse than other jobseekers since January 2021, and that gap has only widened in recent months. The latest unemployment rate for recent graduates, at 4.4%, is higher than the overall joblessness rate and nearly double the rate for all workers with a college degree, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The second reason should be an even bigger concern to colleges, their students, and parents. It’s about AI, of course. As Craig pointed out to me when I met up with him in New York City a few weeks ago, entry-level jobs and entry-level skills will be replaced by AI—and in some fields, like cybersecurity, they already have been.

Craig told me his first job out of college was with McKinsey. “I spent half my time developing presentations for clients, which AI could do now,” he said. “The bargain was for entry-level jobs that you spent half your time doing the menial, grunt work so that you learn and eventually be able to do the higher value stuff.”

As Craig sees it, if the grunt work is going to be done by AI in the future, then employers will expect their young hires to do “second-level work” out of college, which he maintains you can’t do without experience.

“You’re not going to be able to get a good first job unless you've had relevant experience doing something like that job or doing that job before,” he told me.

Bottom line: Yes, highly selective colleges—those in the top 50 or so—will be able to continue to ignore the demands of the workforce and essentially get away with not providing their graduates with real work experience.

But the vast majority of colleges need to figure out how to integrate work into learning in a much bigger way than they do now (i.e. think co-ops like Northeastern or Drexel), or even become intermediaries for apprenticeships themselves, where students have an apprenticeship as their main activity and learn at college on the side.

My ultimate dream is that apprenticeships outside the trades become a prominent and legitimate pathway for U.S. students after high school. This year, UCAS, which is essentially the Common App in the U.K,. is including apprenticeships on its list of programs alongside universities, according to Craig. Let’s hope the Common App follows in legitimizing apprenticeships as a pathway after college in the U.S.—and soon.

Flying higher (ed)

It’s the busiest travel week of the year in the U.S. And as an estimated 30 million travelers make their way through airports this week they’re likely to come across a lot of advertisements—for colleges and universities.

What’s happening: One of my favorite diversions while traveling through airports is snapping pictures of college advertisements. If you follow me on social media you probably already know this, which is how Gordon Maples found me.

• Maples, a project manager at the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, started to research higher ed airport advertising after being delayed in the Nashville airport on his way to New Orleans for an academic conference in 2018.
• That day in the Nashville, Maples found 25 ads representing 8 universities. “Public universities often emphasized the availability of scholarships or messaged about affordability,” Maples told me, “while none of their private counterparts did.”

Why it matters: I asked Maples if his research uncovered whether the ads in airports worked in reaching their intended audience. “It’s a very good question,” he said. “Airports pitch to advertisers based on how much traffic they get through their terminals, so colleges may be happy enough to roll with those numbers even if they don't have a solid ROI to cite.”

The big picture: As Glenda Morgan pointed out last week in Phil Hill’s newsletter OnEdTech, online education is becoming the new "international" in terms of more institutions relying on distance ed for revenue growth, much like they have international students over the last several decades.

• Most online students enroll in institutions near their home, so colleges further away want to gain brand awareness in order to reach a wider potential audience. What better way than to advertise in airports where you'll reach that far-flug audience. 

SUPPLEMENTS

🗺️ International students return. Speaking of international students, their enrollments at American colleges and universities surged in the 2022-23 academic year, increasing 12%, the largest single-year growth in more than four decades. “Growth was especially robust at the graduate level, where enrollments increased by 21%,” Karin Fischer reported. “Undergraduate enrollments, by contrast, rose much more modestly…however, this is the first time in five years that the number of foreign undergraduates increased." (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

👩‍🎨 But Americans aren’t studying foreign languages. “Enrollment in languages other than English at U.S. colleges and universities dropped 16.6% between the fall of 2016 and the fall of 2021," Axios reported about a new Modern Language Association (MLA) survey. The biggest declines were in German (-33.6%), Arabic (-27.4%) and Modern Hebrew (-26%). (Axios)

⚾️ Play ball, or not. Youth participation in baseball dropped 20% since 2019, according to the Aspen Institute’s State of Play 2023 report. Other sports down in participation include swimming (-26.9%) and tackle football (-13%), while tennis (+51%), golf (+32%), and soccer (+4%) have grown. Also, while boys still regularly played sports at a higher rate than girls, the two groups are going in opposite directions as participation is going down for boys and up for girls. (Aspen Institute)

Until next time, Cheers. And for my readers in the United State, have a Happy Thanksgiving 🦃 🥧  — Jeff