Community Colleges with Real Apprenticeship Programs and a Small College Back from the Brink
Reminder! If you’re a paid subscriber and you’d like to win a copy of Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink’s book Writing for Busy Readers, just enter your information here by April 1st. Three lucky winners will win this terrific resource.
If you’re not a paid subscriber but want access to this and other benefits—like paid-only newsletters, the ability to comment, chat, and more—you can…
Community Colleges and Apprenticeships
For those of you who have followed Ryan Craig, you know that a lot of community colleges love giving lip service to apprenticeships, but don’t actually have many active apprenticeship programs with employers.
On our latest episode of Future U., we spotlighted some places where the opposite is happening: community colleges are actively leaning into and launching real apprenticeships.
Mitchell Harp, the dean of apprenticeship programs at Trident Technical College, joined us to talk about all that they’ve done to offer apprenticeships and youth apprenticeships with employers in their community of Charleston, South Carolina. The amount of work—rethinking when classes are offered, actively partnering with employers and serving as an intermediary, building the “My Apprentice” app “to help the apprentices understand their apprenticeship requirements, document their achievements, and provide information continuously to employers in order to help them manage their progress and evaluate the apprentice's performance for successful completion” is just stunning. It speaks to the need for apprentices, but also the work required to launch them and do it right.
We also featured a past guest on the Future of Education, Pierre DuBuc, the CEO of Open Classrooms. Open Classrooms is partnering with several community colleges from California to Maryland to launch active apprenticeship programs—and is doing the heavy work to bring small-to-medium size businesses on board and make these programs real with its cutting-edge online curriculum. As Pierre told us, the work isn’t always easy.
“It's tough. So we need to spend a lot of time. I think for small business, they don't really have an interest in all of the complexity, the bureaucracy and the red tape of running and registering a bunch of programs. So you need to be really direct with them. They have a need in terms of jobs and talent and skills. They want labor that is trained. That's it. The rest is just fluff to them, and they don't have time, quite frankly, to understand or do anything. So we need to bring them qualified talents and we need to take everything else off their plates.”
Jeff Selingo and I offered our reactions at the end of the show. Some of Jeff’s thoughts sparked these reflections from me:
“Given the importance of experiential learning because of the rapid pace of change in technology, the need for this right now couldn't be clearer… I just couldn't help thinking about one of the theories of innovation from Clay Christensen's playbook, which is interdependence and modularity. And basically what it says is whenever there's an interface between two parts of a system where you can specify, you can verify, you can be predictable that if I meet the specifications, this is going to work when I throw it over the modular interface, then you could have two parties that are independent working with each other. When the rate of change of technology and skills was slow, then that worked great. And so your example is like, ‘Hey, colleges, you take care of the learning, graduate the students. And companies, you take the graduates, no worries.’
But it's clear we're just not in that world anymore. The rate of change is such that you just can’t specify how you teach the skills in clear ways. It's just a moving target. The ability to verify through independent means, assessment or a degree or whatnot, it's just too up in the air. Employers want to see the work product itself. They want to see a portfolio of your work. Can you do the work? It's all making this very interdependent. And so I think that increases the pressure on really bundling work and learning.
And in my mind, that's what Trident is doing. They're not only rethinking their own practices in some dramatic ways. And look, we can laugh about classes on Fridays, can you imagine? But if we're being serious, these are big deals in changing the culture and processes of a place that really ripple through a college stuck in tradition. But the fact that they've also built an entire app, Jeff, to make the mentoring and specifiability of what an apprentice needs to do and is what they're learning clear, that's really impressive in my mind.
And then you have OpenClassrooms coming in to try to make this modular for a community college at another part of the process, as in, “Let us take care of the curriculum for you. We'll take care of the bureaucracy of registering and apprenticeship and getting the funding.” And Jeff, they're not even just doing that. They're also using the valuable brands of these community colleges and putting, it sounds like, serious sweat equity in to educate small and medium-sized businesses about the value of these apprenticeship programs.”
Small College Back from the Brink
Yes, I may be known for my predictions about the coming demise for many small colleges (and by the way—for those who say it isn’t happening, how about the fact that New York has seen 12 colleges and universities close in the last 8 years—and five of those have been in the last 12 months, with two more on the brink!!).
But I’ve also written that I hope these colleges innovate and prove me wrong.
One college doing that? Hampshire College in Massachusetts. Danielle McLean at Higher Ed Dive has a great story about the effort here titled, “Back from the bring, Hampshire College is nearing financial viability.” I’m quoted in the article.
Although Hampshire’s exact playbook is unique, other colleges would be wise to adopt their high-level strategy. Here it is, broken down into three steps:
Double down on “your thing”
Too many colleges are trying to be everything to all people—and doing none of it very well. Instead, focus on being great at what makes you special. Hampshire is succeeding because it recommitted to its experimental, problem-based curriculum through new programs.
Part ways with what’s impeding or distracting from your value proposition
Reorganizing around your “thing” will likely require new inputs and structures. So don’t be afraid to rethink old systems and reallocate resources. When recommitting to its mission, Hampshire eliminated interdisciplinary programs that functioned like departments. And that helps lower administrative overhead costs, which makes a lot of schools unsustainable.
Campaign around what makes you different
In a higher ed market crowded by Harvard wannabes, differentiation is the best-selling point. Both fundraising and admissions efforts at Hampshire have campaigned on the exciting, experimental aspects of the college’s curriculum.
As always, thanks for reading, writing and listening.