Is College Still Worth It?
What about all those federal loans?
As Jeff Selingo told me when we recorded the final podcast of Season 5 of Future U. (which will be out soon!), we’re now into three of the greatest words in the English language: June, July, August.
Agree or disagree, summer is basically here and off to a blazing start. Some exciting news on my end, which is that my forthcoming book, From Reopen to Reinvent, was nominated for Season 18 of the Next Big Idea Club! You can check out the other book nominees here, but suffice to say, I’m honored to be on the list alongside some great authors and books.
As for what’s next, all nominees are shared with Susan Cain, Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Daniel Pink, who in turn will narrow the list down to a small handful of finalists and, ultimately, two official season selections.
In the meantime, please pre-order my new book (before July 13th!). For those interested in buying several copies, I’m also offering a limited-time special.
If you’re interested in having me speak to a group (virtually or in-person), get in touch, as I’m discounting my usual speaker fees for those who make larger pre-order purchases. You can pre-order the book from Amazon, from Barnes & Noble, or from Indiebound.
And a huge thank you to those who have already taken advantage of this offer or have bought individual copies. I’m excited to be spending time with so many of you across the country in the coming weeks and months.
The Value of College
Student loan forgiveness is a hot topic and a parlor game in Washington.
Word leaked last week that President Biden will wait a couple more months to decide whether and how much to cancel in federal student loans. Some are upset, others are frustrated by the lack of clarity, and many others can’t figure out what’s going on and what’s driving the decision-making.
I offered my own take in the New York Sun in “Answer to Student Loan Forgiveness Riddle: Make College Affordable.”
The upshot? The Biden administration is focusing on the wrong objective: how to help individuals afford college instead of making college affordable.
The difference isn’t semantic.
Subsidizing an increasingly costly higher education and forgiving student loans simply encourages the rising costs of higher education and the poor value for far too many students.
What’s more, forgiving loans will cause future students to believe their loans will also be forgiven. That will likely lead a higher percentage of students to borrow more money given the expectation that it will be free. That in turn will further encourage schools to continue to raise prices. The whole piece is here.
Relatedly, many are asking is college worth it? We’ve now learned that undergraduate enrollment has fallen 1.4 million since the start of the pandemic.
In this piece for NPR’s Seattle station KUOW titled “With Tuition Up and Enrollment Down, Many Are Asking, ‘Is College Worth It’?”, I joined host Libby Denkman to break down the topic. There’s a summary of the conversation on the website, but listening to the whole interview allows you to hear much more of the nuance of our extensive conversation.
Finally, I weighed into one more Washington debate for a piece at Forbes recently around online program managers, or OPMs—which, you may recall from this episode of Future U., are companies that help universities create and manage their online programs.
Education wonks in Washington have once again worked themselves in a tizzy trying to micromanage how colleges and universities serve students.
But rather than waste time trying to create universal rules and regulations to govern how universities should operate and what contracts they may or may not enter into, I argue, regulators should instead focus on actually helping students.
How? My argument isn’t that dissimilar from the case I’m making around student loan forgiveness. The key is to make the outcomes from all higher education programs far clearer so that students can make more informed decisions about where to enroll that best meets their needs.
You can read the whole piece, “Micromanaging Higher Ed Won’t Help Students” here.
Khan World School, the Metaverse, 2 Podcast Episodes, and More
There’s a ton of hype right now around the metaverse. If you’re not sure what that is or why Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, you can read more about it—and why many educators are trying to jump on board—in my latest piece for Education Next titled, “Meet the Metaverse.” At the end of the piece, I offer three conclusions for K–12 education and the metaverse. I’d love your take after you’ve read the piece.
Speaking of hype, one development that perhaps hasn’t gone enough hype is the launch of the Khan World School. In this piece for Forbes, “Behind Khan Academy and Arizona State University’s Khan World School Launch,” I lay out what I see as three areas where the design of the school should result in important advances for education more broadly.
The kicker? “We have to create kind of an infrastructure for the world," Sal Khan told me. “There's a strategic oil reserve. There should be a strategic education reserve of systems and processes that in an emergency time a lot of people can lean on.”
At the Christensen Institute, I also offered a response to the potential of credit for prior learning. You can read the original post and my response here.
Finally, two new podcasts for your listening pleasure as we move into summer.
Over at Class Disrupted, I brought Diane Tavenner a puzzle from one reader’s pushback to a snippet of my forthcoming book, From Reopen to Reinvent. The reader suggested that older students are, in fact, relatively fixed in their abilities. We explore what’s behind this assertion in the latest episode, “Are Older Student Fixed in their Abilities?” Spoiler alert: we don’t agree with the reader’s contention.
And at Future U., Jeff and I interviewed Holy Cross President Vincent Rougeau and Fordham President Tania Tetlow, the first lay leaders of their storied Jesuit institutions. They’re also both trained lawyers, which made for an interesting conversation. Have a listen at “Presidencies of Firsts.”
Lastly, Efosa Ojomo and I teamed up again. This time we wrote about the environment. If you’re curious, you can read the piece, “On World Environment Day, let’s focus less on the environment and focus more on people,” here.
And as always, thank you for reading, writing, and listening.