(2018-08-23) Qa With Ryan Craig Author Of New Book On Faster Cheaper College Alternatives Inside Higher Ed

Q&A with Ryan Craig, author of new book on faster, cheaper college alternatives (Alternatives To A College Degree). The investment firm seemed to be betting that, with the right mix of outside help from Silicon Valley-backed companies, colleges and universities could meet the growing demands on them to provide affordable, high-quality education and training to satisfy graduates and employers alike. Six years later, Craig’s doubts about higher education’s ability to step up to that challenge appear to have grown

Higher education’s official interface to the labor market -- career services -- is suboptimal. The concept of “career services” as a separate office, distinct from every other part of the institution, conveys to students that they aren’t expected to think about employment until senior year

Last-mile training is the inevitable by-product of two crises, one generally understood, the other less so. The crisis everyone understands is affordability and unsustainable levels of student loan debt. The other crisis is employability

while colleges and universities continue to do an unparalleled job of preparing graduates with key cognitive skills like critical thinking and problem solving, employers have moved the goalpost. Technology has fundamentally changed hiring in two ways, particularly for entry-level jobs.

First, as enterprises have digitized, digital skills now outnumber all other skills in entry-level job descriptions, across nearly every industry. Second, because every job is posted online and generates hundreds of résumés, employers utilize keyword-based filters called applicant tracking systems to determine which résumés are actually seen by a human. If you don’t have sufficient keyword density, you’re not visible. And without the digital skills employers are increasingly listing in their entry-level job descriptions, too many college graduates are invisible

Last-mile training is the missing link in that it provides immersive training on the exact digital skills employers are listing in job descriptions -- from SQL and Python to Salesforce, Marketo or any of thousands of SaaS platforms increasingly utilized to manage business functions. Increasingly, this digital training is occurring in conjunction with education on the industry in question.

Finally, because last-mile training always occurs in an in-person setting, with students working on real projects derived from employers, it also helps build key soft skills that employers care a great deal about in the hiring process.

On the candidate side, you have what I call “education friction.” Education friction is why individuals fail to upskill themselves. This is a result of the time, the cost and -- most important -- the uncertainty of a positive employment outcome. Education friction is a major cause of the continuing skills gap.

On the employer side, there’s also “hiring friction.” Hiring friction is why employers are loath to hire candidates who haven’t already proven they can do the job, due to risk of a bad hire, or higher churn.

The key to closing the skills gap is to reduce or eliminate these frictions

We are seeing new intermediaries like staffing companies and service providers -- organizations that had very little or nothing to do with education or training previously -- starting to close the skills gap at scale.

Last-mile training should already be a common feature of community colleges. But it’s not. The fundamental reason is that community colleges maintain a split personality. On one hand, they’re supposed to be vocational and labor market aligned. And many do a great job with a range of shorter certificates and industry certifications, although primarily in old-economy blue-collar professions. But most community college students are enrolled in academic programs conceived of and led by academics who, by and large, would prefer to work at a four-year college or university, and a selective one at that.

In certain sectors, like technology, we’ve already passed “peak credential.”

Rather than starting by asking faculty what curriculum they might like to offer, placement colleges start with employers and available jobs, then aim to provide the last-mile training that students need to be considered for these jobs. Whether or not students would receive a recognizable academic credential for such training would be a secondary concern