The surprise hit song of the summer came from a Virginia singer-songwriter named Oliver Anthony.

I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay…
…Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground
‘Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down

“Rich Men North of Richmond” made Anthony the first unknown artist to debut at No. 1. He was singing for a young generation of outsiders with no way to break into the economy—and as an indictment of those profiting off them.

Young Americans are more frustrated than ever at their inability to access good jobs—and the rise of artificial intelligence will only compound the problem. To provide jobs and paths ahead for the largest number of people in today’s cutting-edge economy, the U.S. needs to revisit an old-fashioned way of training workers: apprenticeships.

For over half a century, college was the way for American kids to succeed—a socially accepted path to socioeconomic mobility that worked most of the time. From the 1960s to the turn of the century, America’s colleges were fairly affordable, costing students less than a new car. In turn, the vast majority of college grads got hired by good companies and learned on the job while making enough to afford a place to live and a car to commute. The cherry on top was that it felt good. The ethos of college—equipping young people to fulfill their potential, whatever direction it might take them—was the ethos of America.

But starting about 25 years ago, things began to change. Tuition and fees grew annually at double the rate of inflation. Digital technology transformed the economy. The good jobs college grads hoped to land were different than they had been a generation before. According to the National Skills Coalition, 92% of jobs now require digital skills—generalizable only inexactly. Employers want candidates to know how to work on platforms like HubSpot for marketing, Zendesk for customer service, NetSuite for finance, Workday for HR, and Salesforce for customer relationship management.

Few colleges incorporate training on these platforms into degree programs. To top it off, skills aren’t enough anymore. College grads can easily access Salesforce’s Trailhead courses to become certified Salesforce administrators, but not many organizations are excited about hiring a newly minted Salesforce admin without any experience. College graduates are now facing a skills gap and an experience gap, resulting in persistent underemployment; more than 40% of recent college graduates are underemployed—working in jobs they could have gotten without a degree or that don’t require the skills they gained in college.

Because underemployed grads have difficulty repaying student loans, national attention has focused on college’s crisis of affordability and student loan forgiveness. After the Biden Administration’s $400 billion plan to forgive student loans was struck down by the Supreme Court, the president announced a new effort to cancel loans, in addition to changes to income-driven repayment that could cost taxpayers as much as $475 billion. It’s a lot of money to try to mend a broken system.

Meanwhile, underemployment is about to get worse. By taking over menial work that entry-level college-educated workers used to do while they learned the job and industry, artificial intelligence will make it harder to get a good first job. IBM has predicted that while AI won’t replace people, people who use AI will replace people who don’t. That’s going to widen the experience gap and further complicate career launches for young Americans.

Think about a recent graduate trying to get a first job in the claims department of a health insurer. Today, new hires learn on the job while doing a good deal of menial work. But once the insurance company implements AI, new workers won’t review every claim. Only claims that trip one or more flags will warrant human intervention, and such work is more likely to involve problem-solving and troubleshooting—skills requiring some level of insurance claims experience. The same will be true across financial services, healthcare, technology, logistics—a wide array of sectors where new college graduates are seeking to launch careers.

The best and most complete solution to this conundrum: apprenticeships, which provide the skills and experience young workers are missing. Apprenticeships are full-time jobs where a company hires candidates with the express purpose of training them—both in a classroom and on the job. Wages are lower at first but rise as apprentices gain skills and become more productive.

There are about 500,000 apprentices in the U.S. today. That may sound like a lot, but represents only 0.3% of the workforce and puts the U.S. last among developed countries. Approximately 70% of U.S. apprentices work in the construction sector. Meanwhile, in the U.K. and Australia—where there are eight times as many apprentices per capita—it’s common to launch careers in software development, accounting, and healthcare via apprenticeship without a degree. And the Central European giants of apprenticeship—Germany, Switzerland, and Austria—do 10 to 15 times better. Germany has 323 occupations with national apprenticeship standards, including a raft of jobs in healthcare and services, like doctor’s assistant, dispensing optician, and banker.

If the U.S. hopes to catch up, we need to support and fund dedicated apprenticeship programs. Other countries have recognized the central role played by intermediaries: nonprofit, for-profit, and public enterprises that hire and pay students until they become productive. In the U.K., there are 850 apprenticeship intermediaries like Multiverse, founded by Euan Blair, son of former prime minister Tony Blair, knocking on the doors of virtually every large and mid-sized company to sell apprenticeship programs. (I’m a managing director of Achieve Partners, which invests in Multiverse.) In the U.S., there are only a handful.

Current funding for apprenticeship intermediaries and other programs is a fraction of what we spend on college classrooms: federal, state, and local governments continue to pour over $400 billion each year into college while total spending on apprenticeship is under $400 million. An apprentice receives about 2% of what taxpayers spend on a college student.

The only way to rekindle the American Dream is to make apprenticeships part and parcel of core educational programs in college and high school. If we don’t want the soundtrack of the Age of AI to be songs like “Rich Men North of Richmond,” let’s begin giving young people work experience while they’re still in school.

The post In the Age of A.I., America Needs Apprentices appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dear Cal and Stanford,

Why are you running away from California?

Yes, the collapse of the Pac-12 Conference—occasioned by the departure of eight schools seeking better TV contracts—leaves the two of you without a home for your sports teams.

But your flailing around for a new sports home on the other side of the country looks pathetic. Your desperate appeals to join the Atlantic Coast Conference would be a joke, if it weren’t such a crime against geography.

And if that doesn’t work out—and it’s not looking good, since those Atlantic schools don’t want to share their TV sports revenues with West Coast interlopers—what’s next?

Are you going to play in the Arab League?

Instead of seeking unworkable new affiliations three time zones away, please take a breath and a good look at your home state. If you stop panicking and start thinking intelligently—and intelligent thinking is supposed to be your brand—you’ll see that the best opportunity to build your athletic futures is right here in California.

You two, as educational leaders, are naturally positioned to bring together universities from every region of the Golden State to form a new college sports powerhouse.

Call it the California Conference.

This is not a new idea. Intriguingly, sports leaders also suggested it the last time your conference broke up. It was the 1950s, when you played in the Pacific Coast Conference.

As recounted in the book Roses from the Ashes: Breakup and Rebirth in Pacific Coast Intercollegiate Athletics, conference officials discovered in 1951 that the University of Oregon’s football program paid student-athletes from a secret slush fund; the University of Washington, it turned out, did too. The ensuing turmoil resulted in the PCC’s dissolution in the 1958–59 school year.

During the scandal, Los Angeles oilman Edwin Pauley—a longtime UC regent so devoted to college sports that UCLA named its basketball arena after him—suggested that California schools form their own conference. That didn’t happen. But the two of you, Cal and Stanford, helped create a new conference of schools from Western states. This became the Pac-8, and, with subsequent expansion, the Pac-10, and then the Pac-12.

You should start your own conference again. But this time, with the growth of California and its universities, you won’t have to look outside the state for partners.

Football is the revenue machine that drives college sports, and California now has 11 universities that play in the highest division. Two of these schools—USC and UCLA—have gone to the Big Ten for now. But the other nine—you two, plus Fresno State, Sacramento State, San Diego State, San José State, UC Davis, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and the University of San Diego—could make an entertaining and diverse conference for football. These California teams might be happy to jump from their current, non-elite conferences (the Mountain West and the Big Sky) to a potentially higher revenue-producing California conference.

For sports beyond football, the California conference could include more than 20 universities, including seven University of California schools, and 10 Cal State campuses. The California Conference would be a basketball powerhouse, raising the profile of outstanding but lesser-known programs, like St. Mary’s and CSU Bakersfield.

You’d remain the top dogs, academically and athletically, but by bringing in the California schools, you’d elevate them in a way that might ease resentment of your elite institutions.

You should know, though, that a number of these schools can hang with you. Take San Diego State. Its football team is often better than yours. Its men’s basketball program just made the national finals. San Diego State is also a rising academic power, second in selectivity among the Cal State schools only to Cal Poly SLO, whose graduates make nearly as much money as yours do.

A California Conference schedule wouldn’t be a big adjustment, because you already play many of these California schools in many sports. Both of you have a long history of playing football against San José State (the Stanford–San José State rivalry even has a name, the Bill Walsh Legacy Game, in honor of the late Stanford and 49ers coach, a San José State alum).

Sports media executives may question whether intra-state games will draw audiences, but that’s because they don’t understand California. College football is about rivalries between regions, and California’s regions are as populous as most states. I, for one, can hardly wait to see Cal or Stanford go to Bulldog Stadium on a Saturday night with a conference title at stake. You’ll see how Fresno State’s storied football program produces more passion than your wine-and-cheese fan bases might muster in a decade.

The new conference also could spawn cross-cultural local fights—working-class Sac State against hippie UC Davis, or the uptight Catholics of the University of San Diego against loose-living San Diego State.

A California Conference would have ancillary benefits. For example, it might revive the Rose Bowl, an essential California New Year’s tradition killed off by the same forces that exploded the Pac-12. Instead of becoming just another quarterfinal game in a national college football playoff—its current fate—the Rose Bowl could pit the California Conference champion against the best team it can get from the rest of the country.

And with any luck, this new athletic union would forge more academic collaboration between California-based schools, who face the same threat—a United States that is increasingly hostile to higher education, non-partisan teaching, and California’s liberal values.

The California Conference would start with one void: It wouldn’t have USC or UCLA. But if the conference could launch and perform well, it’s easy to see those schools leaving the Big Ten and coming home. USC and UCLA athletes, after a few years in the Big 10, may discover that they prefer less travel, fewer missed classes, and better game weather.

It’s also going to be hard to justify, to the state of California and on-campus constituencies, the climate impacts of burning all that additional jet fuel. Teams in the California Conference could get to most games by train or electric bus.

So that’s the pitch—save the planet, save college sports, connect California. Why not take a swing?

The post Let’s Create a California Conference appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the way that we organize our scientific research is bafflingly tribal. As a practicing scientist who has moved through large-scale industrial projects at IBM and Hitachi, as well as small-scale spin-outs, before shifting back into academia in the late 1990s, I have long been puzzled myself.

From outside the world of science, the public might imagine a system in which someone directs this enterprise, suggests what science is most important for society, and outlines what ought to get done. After all, the public pays for it, whether through our purchases, our taxes, or our charity. But this is not what happens. And ultimately, the public understands very little of the process.

A clearer sense of the greater science ecosystem is required to figure out what role science should play and how society can best make that happen. Who gets to do research in the 21st century, and why? How has it changed over time? Is science in good shape, and how can we know? When I started asking these questions I realized there’s a lot that even scientists still don’t know about themselves.

Amazingly, science is still generally “bottom-up.” We choose what research to do by encouraging scientists at universities to suggest ideas. They share these confidentially with a number of colleagues who rank them formally and select a few to fund. Much of the funding comes from taxes, and governments pass the responsibility back to the panels of scientist to decide which of their colleagues to invest these public monies in.

Scientists have long emphasized that freedom to decide what science they do is much more likely to give long-term rewards for the society that funds them. “Choose outstanding people and give them intellectual freedom” emphasized Nobel Prize winner Max Perutz as his key principle in running the enormously successful and vital Lab of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Yet, non-anecdotal evidence supporting this argument can be hard to pin down.

A review of Nobel Prize winners in the last half-century does reveal that most had no idea what they would accomplish, and could only articulate the path that their achievements had taken many years later, in hindsight. The molecular-based light emitters that now give sparkling mobile phone screens were undreamt of by Alan Heeger, who attempted to make unpromising plastic films conduct electricity in the late 1970s. Similarly, DNA pioneers Crick and Watson just wanted to understand the structure of DNA, not to use that knowledge to fix genetic diseases or do mass screenings of cancers.

In many countries, science is strongly believed to be directly useful to society. But once again, clear economic benefit is hard to assess. Science research comes from different locations, from the industry-dominated United States (80 percent of scientists in industry) to university-dominated Spain (less than 30 percent). A common saying is that “the best form of technology transfer is the moving van that transports the Ph.D. from his or her university laboratory to a new job in industry.” In reality, the United States is littered with university technology-transfer offices built on the dream of San Francisco’s Silicon Valley—or in the U.K., Silicon Fen around Cambridge. They are now waking up to portfolios of undramatic patents no one wants.

There is a great deal we simply don’t know about the scientific ecosystem today. Even counting how big the herd of scientists actually is and whether it is growing or shrinking, has been surprisingly difficult. While we collect simple data through yearly Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) government surveys, this hides the complexity of who is a scientist and what they really do.

Trying to square my personal experience of the intense world of science with these answers led me to the concept of an ecosystem of science. I realized that although there were myriad discussions between scientists on specific topics, there was no overarching description of how the whole system works and what the implications are. On the whole, collectively, science is useful, but how does that square with the parts?

In the ecosystem of science there are individuals and teams, but the ideas they build, and the bridges they build between ideas, can last much longer than either the individuals or the teams. Together this produces robust and persistent scientific knowledge, an interconnected library bequeathed to future generations. But the disjointed ways this library is added to, and how much as a society we are paying for each new idea, is hardly discussed. So, for the past few years, I have been investigating the idea of the “science ecosystem” and how all the actors within it create a meshed web of constraints and networks that are making change increasingly difficult.

I’ve found that the metaphor of the ecosystem can explain not just obvious outputs like delivering technology, but also the beauty of mathematical frameworks and the pleasure in understanding black holes. Such concepts correspond to “ecosystem services,” which are the non-tangible benefits freely emerging from a properly-functioning ecosystem. As a simple example, take a forest which gives us both trees for building houses (“ecosystem goods”) but also places to walk in peace and serenity (an “ecosystem service”). This perspective makes sense of important parts of the science ecosystem that have been harder to defend from a purely economic perspective.

Understanding ecosystem effects in science makes it easier to make sense of some conundrums. For example, it seems like globalization should be a good thing for science. It ought to lead to sharing information around the planet, pushing diverse teams to collaborate, and ensuring science spending is efficiently distributed to where it is done best. But that’s not exactly what has happened.

In the science ecosystem, powerful competitors rule, so organizations ranging from topical conferences to magazines never-endingly compete to maximize their impact and evolve. This pressure has unforeseen consequences.

Globalization has now racked up the competition among scientists, among disciplines, among funders, among universities, among research journals, and among every other species in this landscape. As scientists bring up increasing numbers of their intellectual children who want to find their own niches, the esteem that each gains from their research results necessarily declines. They all strive to publish more research papers, to be noticed in the crowd, making it more difficult to discern intellectual wheat from chaff and ever harder to keep up with what is being done.

Furthermore, doubling the number of scientists (which currently happens every 20 years) does not double the number of new research fields. Researchers instead concentrate where the trendy, most-publicized ideas are emerging. These bandwagon areas become so deluged that scientists lose track of competitors’ work, and research gets duplicated, ignored, or muddled. At present, this kind of frenzy surrounds areas ranging from the stacking of atom-thick materials, to finding uses for quantum effects in IT, and other topics. This explains why dropping extra money into a hot research field is no recipe for breakthroughs.

A second unforeseen consequence of globalization is how copying “best practices” in organizing science reduces the ecosystem’s diversity, ensuring the selection of similar projects everywhere. Applying for research funding involves a panel of scientists ranking proposals sent in to them based on scores returned by a set of external reviewers fed criteria about “utility for society” and “excellence.” More and more, they choose the same things.

I have become more and more convinced of the need for continual creative anarchy, for developing new ways of encouraging science, scientists, and ideas, and for new types of institutions and research centers. One current idea is to fund a new type of scientist, more akin to curators of the web of knowledge, who trawl and correlate existing studies to identify chasms in understanding and new opportunities. Future grants requests might have to have approval from such curator teams, aided by deep AI-based reviews of our current tree of knowledge to support claims for funding. Diversity is a crucial part of a healthy ecosystem, and the resilience of science depends on finding ways to encourage it.

When I started this project, my aim was simply to map what I found. But whenever I chatted with other scientists about it, apart from their fascination at their own lack of knowledge, they demanded suggestions for changes, directions for where we should go next. But we can’t instantly solve these global systemic problems. There remains the question of who is even free enough of the constraints on the ecosystem to help drive the necessary changes, let alone what those changes should be. But finding a way to understand the system as a whole—to comprehend where we stand at present—is a good first step.

The post Why Scientific Discovery Thrives on ‘Creative Anarchy’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the message of a Zócalo lecture entitled, “Are College Campuses Rewriting the Rules of Sex in America?” by journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis, contributing editor at The New York Times Magazine and author of Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus.

Grigoriadis, speaking at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Los Angeles, detailed the difficult and messy story of how universities have come to confront sexual assault on campus—and the backlash against these efforts.

“What’s happening on college campuses has a lot to do with the meaning of consent, and the need for us to change that meaning for a new generation,” she said. Through her extensive reporting on campuses, which involved spending time with students and others in social situations, she witnessed how a standard of affirmative consent before sex—also known as “yes means yes”—has taken hold among college students.

She also praised the state of California for adopting “yes means yes” in state law, and requiring it be part of the high school curriculum. But the standard is still largely confined to universities.

“The rules on college campuses are not the rules in the rest of America,” she said.

Grigoriadis offered a history of the movement to adopt affirmative consent that began with the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which bars discrimination in education. More progress was made thanks to efforts by the Obama administration to make clear that Title IX applied to sexual assault, and to force universities to reckon more aggressively and clearly with the problem, she said.

She credited President Obama—who wrote about his two daughters—personally with acting on data that showed sexual assault on campus was a significant problem. But she added that the government and universities only got serious under pressure from students who organized to make sure new federal rules for handling sexual assault cases on campus were followed. Students at east coast universities were successful in lobbying schools and Washington politicians on the issue, and students at west coast universities led the way in making the issue bigger in the media.

But the momentum of the past few years has been reversed since Rolling Stone published a story in late 2014 on a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity that was later proved to be false. The resulting backlash came from fraternities, conservative and libertarian lawyers, religious institutions, and especially from the parents of accused students, who organized to push back against the Obama administration’s rules on sexual assault cases. “It turned out that there were problems with the campus courts, and there were some boys being railroaded,” she said. As a result, “what we’ve been watching since early 2015 is the death of the campus movement.”

This culminated recently in U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s decision to reverse two sets of the Obama guidelines on sexual assault. DeVos argued that the guidelines—specifically a standard of “preponderance of the evidence,” or proving that an assault occurred “more likely than not”—did not do enough to protect the rights of accused students.

Grigoriadis countered that the preponderance standard is high—and justified—because such cases are so messy and hard to prove.

And she added that DeVos’ decision, and statements by the secretary and her aides that exaggerate the incidence of wrongly accused students, are part of a major problem with misinformation on the campus sexual assault issue.

Grigoriadis warned that extreme or exceptional cases of sexual assault were creating false impressions. Made-up stories and railroaded students are actually exceptional, she said. So are cases of fraternity brothers using drugs to rape students. She also said perceptions of universities as having failed in this area—a claim made by the documentary The Hunting Ground—are exaggerated.

The problem, she said, is that sexual assault has become a hot button issue. “I can’t tell you how many parties I’ve been to where I’ve been cornered by someone who tells I’m totally wrong about sexual assault, or I’m totally right about this,” she said, adding that people are basing their opinions on preconceptions rather than facts.

At the same time, Grigoriadis was critical of universities for tolerating fraternities and protecting important athletes. And she called the online webinars and trainings that universities require students to take on sexual assault “a total mess.” In particular, while trainings often focus on “bystander education” for people who may witness sexual assault, she said that teaching self-defense strategies was more effective. In particular, people can avoid dangerous encounters by learning ways to identify students who were most likely to commit sexual assault by their behavior (“It’s the guys who are very misogynistic, who interrupt women, who make sexualized jokes,” she said.)

In response to questions from audience members about specific high-profile cases, Grigoriadis argued for not getting trapped in the back and forth of particular controversies. We should focus instead on establishing and teaching affirmative consent, she said, which requires changing social norms. And the good news is that today’s college students have already made that shift and support affirmative consent. Fundamentally, changing the definition of consent to “yes means yes” is “about gender parity in the bedroom.”

This is a shift, and a subject, that “is kind of a mess,” she concluded. “The last few years have been very messy. But the point is getting across.”

The post Can Colleges Teach America What Consensual Sex Looks Like? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Going to college in the city seems so normal now that it’s difficult to comprehend that it once represented a radical shift not only in the location of universities, but also in their ideals.

From the founding of Harvard in 1636 onward, college leaders held a negative view of cities in general, and a deep-seated belief that cities were ill-suited to educating young men and women. In 1883, Charles F. Thwing, a minister with strong interest in higher education, wrote that a significant number of city-bred students “are immoral on their entering college” because city environments have “for many of them been excellent preparatory schools for Sophomoric dissipation.” “Even home influences,” he wrote, “have failed to outweigh the evil attractions of the gambling table and its accessories.”

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, higher education leaders believed that the purpose of a college education, first and foremost, was to build character in young people—and that one could not build character in a city. When Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton University, he wrote that college must promote “liberal culture” in a “compact and homogenous” residential campus, explaining that “you cannot go to college on a streetcar and know what college means.” The danger of cities was so self-evident that even the president of the City College of New York, Frederick Robinson, lamented to a 1928 conference of urban university leaders that commuter students “do not enter into a student life dominated night and day by fellow students” and therefore “miss the advantages of spiritual transplanting.”

A 1950 photo of the downtown brewery that housed the University of Newark before and several years after it officially became part of Rutgers University in 1946. Image courtesy of Rutgers University—Newark Library.

Urban colleges struggled to overcome the handicap of their locations. Columbia University, for example, moved three times to escape the encroaching city. In 1897, the new campus at the then-largely-rural Morningside Heights area in northern Manhattan was bounded by walls, with many trees planted inside, to isolate students from the urban growth that would eventually surround the school. Campuses with large numbers of commuters initiated a range of programs to “Americanize” students and get them to move beyond the culture of their working-class and immigrant neighborhoods. However, universities in cities also took advantage of the opportunities the city offered for research, teaching, and collaborations with local museums and cultural institutions.

After World War II, federal and state governments increasingly saw college education as critical, a view reflected in the G.I. Bill and the massive expansion of state universities. College attendance in America grew dramatically, from 1.5 million in 1940 to 2.7 million in 1950, 3.6 million in 1960, and 7.9 million in 1970. By the 1960s, government officials and civil rights leaders also sought to expand access to higher education for low-income students in order to enable poor people to move into the middle class. Two-year community colleges opened across the country, largely in cities. City University of New York inaugurated “open enrollment,” guaranteeing that any high school graduate could attend a CUNY institution.

But even though the higher education landscape was changing dramatically, the term “urban university” still bore a stigma as low-status institutions that enrolled large numbers of local commuter students seen as socially unrefined and academically weak. As a result, “urban university” became a low-status label, which many universities in cities tried to avoid. In 1977, the Association of Urban Universities, which was founded in 1914, voted itself out of existence—reflecting the resistance of its members to its own name.

Then, in the last 25 years or so, higher education’s longstanding ambivalence about urban students and colleges evaporated. As many central cities have revitalized dramatically, growing numbers of upper-middle-class people have chosen to live there. In addition, cities appeal more and more to relatively affluent young people who grew up in homogeneous low-density suburbs. Cities are now “cool,” and the kind of worldly education they offer is in demand.

By 2012 an NYU admissions administrator told a Chronicle of Higher Education writer that, “whereas 20 years ago the city was our Achilles’ heel, it’s now our hallmark.” Freshmen applications to NYU grew from 10,862 in 1992 to 43,769 in 2012. Two years later, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article entitled “Urban Hot Spots Are the Place to Be,” arguing that “a college’s location might be more important than ever to its long-term prosperity as a residential campus”—because college students seek “hands-on experiences” which are most available in the “vibrant economy of cities.”

As students and schools have changed, the once controversial innovations pioneered by colleges in cities have prevailed. City institutions pioneered the democratization of undergraduate education, and universities across the country now strive to enroll large numbers of the kinds of “urban students,” including immigrants and minorities, once viewed with deep skepticism by many in the academy. It was urban colleges, particularly municipal institutions like City College and Hunter College, that began the once-controversial practice of providing college to commuters who could not afford to live away from home while in school.

Today, the overwhelming majority of college students commute. Urban colleges also initiated programs, controversial at the time, for adults and part-time students, including evening classes. Today, adult, part-time, and evening courses are nearly universal in state universities and widespread in private institutions. The broad access to college that was initiated by innovative city institutions is now central to the overall mission of American higher education.

Urban colleges also changed curriculums and research agendas by developing a commitment to community-based research, taking advantage of the extensive resources of the city, and encouraging the study of local problems and policy issues. This kind of research is now widely practiced. The Engagement Scholarship Consortium, founded in 1999, encourages all universities to do research that is important to their communities. Its member institutions are located in cities, towns, and rural areas.

Relatedly, service learning and community engagement by college students has become a central focus of American higher education—vigorously championed by organizations like the National Society for Experiential Learning and federal government agencies like the Corporation for National and Community Service. This is another area pioneered by the so-called urban colleges.

Universities are also seen as key players in the economic development of their communities, a change that would not have occurred without the leadership of urban schools. In 1994, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter founded the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City to “spark new thinking about the business potential of inner cities.” In 2001, CEOs for Cities and the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City released a study arguing that higher education institutions are well-positioned “to spur economic revitalization of our inner cities.”

The following year, Carnegie Mellon Professor Richard Florida published a book arguing that economic development depended on a “creative class” and that universities were “a key institution of the Creative Economy.” Florida re-envisioned the city as a fountain of economic growth and intellectual activity, placing the university—and its knowledge—at the center. Universities have become key entities for economic development in the post-industrial technology economy, not just in inner cities but also across the nation. Old prejudices about the urban university are effectively dead.

The purpose of colleges and universities—and undergraduate education itself—are still widely debated. Many people are deeply critical of American higher education. These conditions make it important to understand the history and value of college in the United States. Today, access to college makes it possible for millions of Americans to improve their socio-economic status and to live richer lives. Many do so while living at home, working, and attending part-time. Colleges teach traditional-aged students and adults of all ages, both full-time and part-time, including many minorities, immigrants, and people from low-income families, in degree and non-degree programs. Colleges play an ever greater role in our nation’s economy. And college students engage extensively in experiential learning, developing work skills and a commitment to civic responsibility.

All of these conditions began many years ago, in universities in cities. Whatever the deficiencies of American colleges, we must not forget how profoundly they serve society—and how those practices emerged initially in urban institutions.

The post How Universities Migrated into Cities and Democratized Higher Education appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Put simply: How do we know how much we learn in college?

If you search for answers to these questions today, prepare to be disappointed. Popular college rankings such as U.S. News & World Report’s are based on factors such as subjective judgments of schools’ reputations and on the difficulty of gaining admission. Rarely if ever are rankings based on direct, value-added assessments comparing how well students perform when they graduate college with how they performed when they first enrolled.

It may seem odd that our colleges and universities—which study complex topics ranging from the spin on subatomic particles to the precise time of the Big Bang—would have so little data with which to assess their own effectiveness. What might cause these institutions to be so complacent, and so reluctant to pursue information that would help them understand their own impact on students?

Some colleges may fear that the results will prove to be embarrassing. Some may argue that college skills such as writing proficiency cannot be measured accurately (even though schools assign their students grade point averages with three digits of numerical precision).

But the biggest reason why college effectiveness doesn’t get measured is that schools, policy makers, parents, and students take for granted that undergraduates’ skills improve during college. This assumption of improvement may seem intuitive, but it is not backed up by much in the way of evidence. There’s been some study at the K-12 level, which is instructive. One such report, by the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy and based on research conducted by the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) within the U.S. Department of Education, found that more than 90 percent of the interventions that schools adopted to improve learning outcomes for their students showed no evidence of effectiveness. In another set of studies described in the book Academically Adrift, more than 45 percent of college students showed no improvement in critical thinking during their time in college.

These sorts of studies should serve as a wakeup call—if schools aren’t measuring student learning, we cannot know whether students are actually learning.

Along with our colleagues, we recently published the results of a nine-year study designed to answer whether students finishing college write any better than they did when they first enrolled. Of course there is more to college than writing, but we studied writing because it is one skill that students, schools, and employers see as critically important. We selected a small private university in the Southwest as our test case, and we randomly sampled students for testing. We modelled our study as closely as possible on randomized clinical trials, the same standards used to determine whether new medicines have their intended health benefits. We tested students both cross-sectionally (comparing first-year through fourth-year students on a single day) and longitudinally (tracking specific students over the course of their undergraduate years).

There was good news. We found that students improved their writing scores, as judged by expert assessors of writing who were blind to the identities of the students and to the purpose of the study. That improvement was approximately 7 percent from the first to the fourth year of college, a statistically significant increase. The same degree of improvement was found in both persuasive and expository writing, for both the cross-sectional and longitudinal data, for both male and female students, and for both humanities/social science majors and engineering/natural science majors.

Our findings, while showing that learning is happening, also suggest an opportunity for improvement: Now that we have a benchmark, we can test new instructional interventions to see how much they improve upon (or prove worse than) the status quo. While 7 percent improvement is not trivial, we would hope that it would be possible to do better. However, in order to know if new programs and interventions are actually leading to improvements, schools need to engage in value-added assessment of their students. Without such testing, we will be navigating blind.

For college administrators who believe that studies such as ours are too expensive and time-consuming to conduct, we encourage them to think again. Universities spend countless hours and resources developing curricular requirements, establishing tutoring centers, and otherwise attempting to improve undergraduate instruction. But they typically fail to establish a formal assessment system to determine whether those interventions are effective.

Studies like ours are simple and inexpensive compared with other common initiatives on campus. And such studies are the only way we can know whether schools are accomplishing their goals.

We hope that universities will begin testing their entering students, not just on their writing skills but on other critical skills as well, so that four years down the road they can see whether their teaching has made a difference. When you bother to collect the data, before-and-after-college comparisons are not that hard to make, and they can make a big difference.

The post How Much Do We Learn in College? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

According to the Federal Reserve, almost 50 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed. What’s critical, said Selingo, isn’t only whether young people graduate from college but “how students go to college.”

Over the past few years, Selingo talked with high school and college students, university faculty, parents, high school teachers, recent graduates, and employers of all sizes and kinds. What he found was that there is a deep disconnect between our higher education system and our 21st-century economy.

Employers, said Selingo, are looking for students with “soft skills” like curiosity and creativity, grit and humility. They’re looking for employees who are good at problem-solving, communication, and writing. The head of global learning at Xerox told Selingo that new employees know how to take courses, but they don’t know how to learn.

College has become more structured as workplaces and career paths have become less so. “College is very task-based,” said Selingo. “It has a certain cadence to it.” Students know due dates, vacation periods, course options. In the workplace, by contrast, recent graduates face an unstructured schedule full of “competing priorities and decisions that need to be made on the fly.” The students who get the most out of college, said Selingo, have learned how to navigate life and build relationships outside the classroom.

The most successful millennials, said Selingo, share three markers of success. The first is that they have less undergraduate debt and more flexibility to choose jobs based on their desires and opportunities for career advancement rather than simply for the money.

The second is that they have at least one internship. “Hands-on learning has become so much more critical,” said Selingo. “Increasingly today it is the only pathway into a job.” Some large companies hire 75 percent of new employees through their intern pools.

The third marker is having a college degree; students with some college credit but no degree are far more likely to struggle than those who complete their degrees.

Selingo believes that students, schools, colleges, parents, and employers can all make changes to fix our current system. He offered three ways to help more young people navigate the years after high school successfully:

First, fail fast, fail cheap. “Most students today don’t see good models of failure in high school or college,” said Selingo. They write a paper or do a presentation, get a grade, and move on. At work, we write draft after draft until we get it right, and have to bounce back from failures.

Second, put more students to work, and give them hands-on learning opportunities. The number of teens working a job while in high school has dropped to a historic low. Meanwhile, colleges put a greater emphasis on general education classes that don’t teach students how to apply their theoretical knowledge in practice.

Third, give students more time. Young people are expected to head to college three months after high school graduation, finish college four years after that, and then become adults. This structure is a relic of the post-World War II era, said Selingo, when veterans went to school on the G.I. Bill, found jobs, got married, and bought houses in quick succession. By contrast, the process of financial independence takes years longer—today’s college graduates achieve that on average at age 30. Job hopping and occupation hopping are part of today’s economy.

“We need to rethink this pathway after high school graduation and into the workforce,” concluded Selingo before opening the floor up to questions from the audience.

How, asked one audience member who teaches at a community college, can students who don’t have the time or money to take internships gain the soft skills employers are looking for?

“Hands-on, project-based learning,” said Selingo. “Can we build more of the ambiguity of what the workforce is into the classroom?”

Another audience member who was reviewing college scholarship application essays from aspiring doctors asked Selingo how he would advise such students to move forward, and whether he thinks their plans will pan out in four years.

“I’m assuming they want to become doctors because we keep telling people to major in STEM,” or science, technology, engineering, and math, said Selingo. He’s heard a lot of talk about “job-ready majors.” But what is a job-ready major in a world where the technology and economy keep shifting? Too many students are “chasing jobs,” basing their majors on a job that exists today but might not exist four years from now, said Selingo.

Students are better served, he said, by choosing a major that’s rigorous, where they’ll read and write a lot, where they’ll work with the best professors, and where they’ll meet the smartest classmates.

The post Your Kid’s College Degree Might Be Worthless appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The educational landscape of today is rapidly evolving—millennials have an abundance of options for their degrees, including community college, online learning, and for-profit schools, as well as more traditional four-year private and public institutions. As they try to choose majors and classes, they have to navigate new branches of research and scholarship that seem to appear every year. And when it’s time to graduate, employment prospects are uncertain, often bewildering, and they are probably leaving school in the red. Most students borrow money for college, and the average total educational debt among graduates of not-for-profit, four-year colleges was over $28,000 in 2014—a crisis that current presidential campaigns have highlighted. So how should higher education change to serve the students of today? In advance of an upcoming Zócalo Public Square event with Jeffrey J. Selingo asking “Have universities failed millennials?”, we posed to a range of experts a related question: “Are universities doing all they should for millennials?”

The post Are Universities Cheating Millennials? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Over the past generation, USC has transformed itself from an easily mocked regional school for rich kids (“University of Spoiled Children”) into a global powerhouse. That growth has coincided with the decline or stagnation of other local entities, and turned USC into one of the most influential institutions in Southern California. And, through its successes, USC has demonstrated the growth that might be possible for California’s leading public universities—if they weren’t subject to the whims of our dysfunctional state government.

Central to the growth has been a strategy of capitalizing on USC’s flexibility as a private school to raise the school’s endowment and profile. Public universities are hamstrung in fundraising by the perception that they are primarily state-funded institutions (even though state funding is a small and declining fraction of their funding) and by the possibility that a big gift might come from an unpopular source. USC doesn’t have a meddling minority investor like the state government, and thus can fundraise as relentlessly as it likes. Its endowment, at nearly $5 billion, is one of the fastest-growing in the country.

And USC has spent aggressively—without the required disclosure and resulting second-guessing over big salaries common at our public universities—to recruit a more qualified and diverse faculty and student body. It now ranks among America’s elite universities by most measures, from the GPA of entering students to the amount of financial aid it offers (nearly $500 million annually). And, as public universities in California were forced to cut during recent budget crises and the Great Recession, USC accelerated its growth.

Public universities are prisoners of annual budgets and short-term political thinking. Just consider how UC President Janet Napolitano’s thoughtful proposal for a multi-year enrollment and funding plan won her criticism last fall from virtually every politician and editorial board in the state. By contrast, USC President Max Nikias, building on the success of his predecessor Steve Sample, has pursued a long-term strategy of better connecting the university to all elements of life in Southern California.

The Trojans have been expanding their campus and adjacent sphere of influence. USC has secured effective control of the L.A. Coliseum and is developing the nearby $650 million USC Village complex of housing, retail, and commercial space. USC has gobbled up institutions elsewhere in greater L.A. (from Verdugo Hills Hospital in Glendale and the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena), and sought a stronger presence in San Diego. USC has also been a big winner in two big L.A. trends—the rapid revival of downtown as a place for new residences and businesses (USC is just south of downtown) and the construction of new rail lines (Metro’s Expo line, which will reach Santa Monica next year, has three different stops along USC’s campus).

USC has never wielded more political influence, as our academically inclined mayor, Eric Garcetti, seeks to redesign the city’s basic systems. And with so much money and clout in a city where most people have very little, USC has become the place to go when you need help getting something done. One small example: When the daughter of Alfred Song, the first Korean-American to serve in the state legislature, struggled to find money for his memorial, USC arranged for the 10-foot-tall steel monument at the subway stop at Wilshire and Western.

More than a Trojan horse, USC is viewed across the region as the ultimate white knight. Many struggling L.A. institutions fantasize of being rescued by a USC takeover. These institutions include the L.A. Times, which, in my view, could find long-term viability by becoming a publication of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

At the same time it grows locally, USC has unabashedly prioritized global expansion, especially around the Pacific Rim. USC leads the nation in attracting foreign students, a fact it rightly celebrates. That’s in stark contrast to the University of California system, which has been bitterly criticized in the legislature and the media for adding foreign students, even though they pay higher tuition fees that effectively subsidize lower in-state tuition for Californians.

California’s public universities are desperate to hold onto their reputations for academic prestige, and thus can be quite traditional in their hiring and academic cultures. USC has few such hang-ups. The language of its strategic plan—especially its support of “entrepreneurial activities through flexible structures that allow faculty to move swiftly into new areas”—would trigger protests (“hey hey, ho ho, those corporate stooges have got to go”) in Santa Cruz. And USC has proudly opened well-funded and attention-getting institutes led by noted academicians like Dr. Dre and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In L.A., Trojans are notorious for arrogance (and for alumni networks more tightly knit than most Mafia families), so it won’t surprise you that USC has been accused of being obnoxious in pursuit of growth. USC’s recent effort to steal a major Alzheimer’s research project from UC San Diego was so brazen that the University of California sued; the dispute has produced headlines and claims and counterclaims of conspiracy and bad faith. And indeed, as it catapults itself from mediocrity into the nation’s top-tier of private institutions of higher learning, USC will be facing the same questions now confronting the Stanfords and Harvards of the world—questions about whether its success contributes to widening class divides and inequality, and whether it should be doing more for those who have been left behind by poor high schools and circumstances.

I’ll be wearing a UCLA T-shirt this weekend for reasons personal (I grew up going to Bruin games at the Rose Bowl) and professional (UCLA is a vital partner of Zócalo Public Square, which produces this column). But I do root for USC as a powerful example for California. Yes, our public universities have found ways to remain excellent despite all the cuts and constraints. But just imagine how much more they could do if the state stopped its cuts and meddling, and allowed our universities to fight on with all the flexibility the Trojans enjoy.

The post Why Can’t We All Fight On Like Old USC? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You flunked higher education.

Another state budget, accompanied by an eight-month-long controversy over the University of California, demonstrated once again that we Californians don’t have a clue about what our public universities mean to the state. Because if we did, we wouldn’t make them beg us for the money needed to educate more of our children.

Instead, Californians—from our leaders in Sacramento to average voters—think that the UC and California State University systems are too costly and administratively bloated. That tuition is being raised to cover academic nonsense. And that taxpayers already give too much money to higher education. These claims are either nonsense—or the fault of Californians themselves, not the universities.

But before we get into all that, let’s start with the history lesson on higher ed that most of you seem to have missed. Most Californians think that we’re all here because of Junípero Serra or the Gold Rush, or oil, or sunshine, or Hollywood, or Silicon Valley.

Nope. The biggest force luring people to California over our history has been our abundance of free—or very cheap—high-quality public education. California pioneered such educational access very early—by 1912, Berkeley was already the largest public university in the world. Offering university degrees on the cheap was a great money saver; we stole away some of the smartest people from other states and countries and had to pay for just four years of their education (a much better deal than paying for K-12 for Californians). The result of this policy: For much of the 20th century, Californians weren’t just better looking than other Americans—we were smarter too, with the highest rate of college graduates.

But, then in the second half of the 20th century, we began to forget what we had. The state locked in lower tax rates and higher spending on other things by ballot initiative, at the expense of public investment in our world-class university system. The universities made it up by adding tuition fees, especially during the prolonged budget crises of the past 15 years.

Today, we Californians still look great—but we’re not as smart. We’ve fallen out of the top 10 of U.S. states by percentage of adults with college degrees. And if you look at younger people—ages 25 to 34—we’re in the middle. Montana’s young adults are more likely to have some kind of post-secondary degree than ours.

The public universities have held onto their reputations and found ways to serve more students—more than 238,000 at UC, and 437,000 at CSU—despite relentless cutting in state support. The UC 10-campus system, the target of so much political and media criticism for supposed bloat, saw a 30 percent decrease in state funding—and a 20 percent reduction in its cost per student—in the past decade. Those cuts have been made even though state taxpayers were already getting a bargain with UC; they now cover just $3 billion of a $27 billion budget.

But try telling that to voters, legislators, or the media, all of whom see the universities as greedy and inefficient—even as they’ve educated more people with less state support. UC and CSU haven’t fought very hard against cuts—they have, like good teachers, tried to appeal to reason, and they’ve tried to make funding deals with politicians. But reason and politicians are not to be trusted in California, especially when recessions shrink state revenues.

So how has UC come up with more revenues? By raising tuition fees—especially for out-of-state students who are still interested in coming here. The justification is that the higher rates for out-of-state students ($38,000 compared to $14,000 for in-state students) subsidize about 9,000 California students whose enrollment is not funded by the state.

In one disgraceful legislative hearing this spring, lawmakers actually complained that out-of-state students eligible for financial aid were in fact receiving that aid. Yes, you read that right. The state legislature doesn’t want any poor kids coming to the UC from out of state. “There are plenty of fish in the sea that can pay full freight,” said Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, a Sacramento Democrat, at the hearing, according to The Sacramento Bee. “We’re not elected to expand education for low-income kids from Nevada.”

Give us only your rich kids, please.

Since the state has a demonstrated need for more educated workers (we’ll be short by 1 million by 2025, according to a much-cited report), we should be building on our historic lead and rapidly expanding our universities. But today’s California is so small-minded and budget-obsessed that no one seems inclined to make long-term investments in our well-being anymore.

The usually reliable and nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office has itself fallen prey to the myopic short-sightedness, declaring that UC doesn’t need to increase its enrollment, even as it receives record numbers of applications. The LAO points to recent dips in the number of college-age Californians and in the percentage of recent California high school graduates going straight to college to support its wrong-headed conclusion. But those same statistics argue for opening up more slots and opportunities for students from California and around the world, and making it cheaper for those students to graduate.

In response to Sacramento’s combination of cuts and meddling, the UC finally got tough and hired former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, the former Secretary for Homeland Security, as UC president and political champion. Last November, she sucker-punched the newly re-elected Governor Brown and legislature with a choice: give UC more money or watch it raise tuition again. Sacramento leaders and their media cheerleaders howled about the UC’s behavior, but Napolitano’s strategy worked. She forced Brown to the negotiating table and ended up with more money—including an increase in base funding over the next four years and crucial one-time money to cover pension costs—than anticipated.

But Napolitano still had to beg the legislature to cover an increase in enrollment of 10,000 students over four years (and appears to have gotten only enough in the budget to enroll an additional 3,500 students). Memo to legislative leaders, who cast themselves as champions of the state’s Latino population: much of the growth in California high school graduates and UC applicants is among Latinos.

With immigration flat and the birth rate under replacement levels, California will need to attract more foreigners and other Americans to study and work here to maintain the state’s vitality. It won’t be easy, as other countries and states are more competitive now, especially when it comes to cost-of-living considerations, including the cost of education. But if we don’t act to bring more young and ambitious people to the state, we’ll lose some of our advantages in diversity and connectedness.

It’s an argument that Californians haven’t much heard—and clearly don’t understand. Maybe we all could enroll in a refresher summer course on the importance of higher education in California, and the massive returns we receive from our investment in it.

But who would pay for it?

The post Californians Have No Idea How Important Public Universities Are appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.