I was a little surprised at Mark Garrett Cooper’s essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education that I think shows more sympathy to departed Temple University president Jason Wingard’s book on higher education than is warranted. But I take the point that specifically named skills tied to specific credentials are important for many contemporary college students, and we shouldn’t be so reactive to the shallow vision of a lot of ed-tech that we scorn altogether the need to concretize what students in any version of liberal education are learning.
I know I said I was done with sketching out plans for new kinds of institutions, new sorts of curricular structures, etc. and so I am in terms of doing so with any remotely serious intent.
But it’s kind of how my mind works when I’m confronted by an issue like this. It seems kind of pointless to get involved in an argument about whether skills really matter or whether there’s some particular way to signal our seriousness about them or some way to take just enough of what ed-tech is offering and not too much—you’re either going to end up affirming some obvious proposition or endorsing some sort of caricature of what we’re already doing.
Imagining a kind of extreme institutional design, on the other hand, seems to me a bit clarifying both in terms of affirming that maybe some of our current approaches make a lot of sense—that we are already doing a lot of what Cooper thinks we don’t do enough—but also helps turn out what some radical alternatives might be like.
So what if you organized a university education around a set of discrete skills and said “When you demonstrate robust competency in these, you’re done, we will certify you; we will charge you at completion so that there isn’t a financial incentive to do it as quickly as possible and thus engage in some form of deception about whether you’ve done it or not”. There’s a fair number of existing and imagined pedagogies out there like this, though not with the radical financial model—that students should move on or “level up” at their own pace. They tend to be limited simply because it’s hard to figure out how to go all the way on this idea within the standard structure of a 14-week semester.
So in this more extreme version, you unbundle the skills from “courses” and “semesters”. Later skills depend on competency in the easier, single-purpose skills. You’d avoid teaching a skill that once learned will never be reused so that there are no single-ordeal tests that you cram for, pass, and forget. Everything would be cumulative. You’d finish in some sort of master-class exercise where all the skills come together and you work under the guidance of one or several “finishing tutors”—that might look more like a conventional semester or year-long course. But the rest wouldn’t.
I almost imagine something like a bunch of instructors who are just sort of waiting in their offices and labs working on their own scholarship or designing training exercises. They get a ‘ping’ every time a new student is coming over for training. You’d probably need some kind of routing efficiency so that you synchronized multiple students at once undergoing the same training. You might even begin to standardize the times that certain training is offered. (Notice here that the more you think about anything radically different like this, the more you uncover why some of our current systems of scheduling and planning instruction exist.)
In the first tier, you’d have potentially hundreds of skills, many of them requiring only a half-day or day to learn. Maybe you’d do a week of “petri dish lab procedures”: preparing a culture, sterilization, swabbing, extracting a sample, avoiding unwanted contamination, and so on.
If you get stuck on a full-day skill, you just do it again, as many times, until you’ve got it. Again, no rush: you’re not paying for each try, you’re paying only on satisfactory completion.
There would be a lot of suggested sequences of starter skills where they interlocked and led to some repetition to help with retention of the skills, and maybe you’d also maintain half-day “refresher” facilities where you just come in and keep your earlier certifications in practice.
Logistically, there seem like some obviously huge problems here. I’m more concerned by a deeper problem, which is that there’s robust pedagogical evidence that learning skills without some purpose for them is a proven loser—and learning skills that don’t address some kind of interesting, relevant content is equally pointless. The skills don’t take if you don’t immediately apply them to something, and they don’t take if you aren’t motivated to continue.
So this whole alternative approach would need to quickly move from widely shared skills that transcend disciplines into something like disciplinary knowledge or some form of structured address to a real problem or question.
The other problem is that I think it requires breaking down skills into incredibly specific named sub-skills that can be taught and credentialed separately in a way that’s real-world incoherent—another sense in which it isolates skills from context. To give an example, if I broke down “writing” into “speechwriting”, “advertising copywriting”, “think-tank white-paper writing”, “crisis communications writing”, “creative writing”, “scientific writing”, “social media writing”, I would be doing something contextually true in the sense that those are competencies that match existing labor markets. But now imagine my one-day workshop on speechwriting, cut off from other writing skills sessions. The petri dish session is easy to set a standard of evaluation for: no, you made a bad solution, the agar is liquid, or it’s contaminated. No, you didn’t swab correctly; no, you didn’t warm the dish up after taking it from the freezer. It’s why labs are so effective: the failure points are clear. But a speechwriting session, cut off from actual speechwriting? Just the instructor sitting there sourly saying “this speech sucks! here’s the rubric! go back and do it again!” That’s not a one-day thing and nobody in the hunt for a speechwriter would say “there’s my boy, he’s got the one-day certificate”. It doesn’t work without all the other writing certificates and it doesn’t work without some contextual teaching about speechwriting. Who hires a speechwriter? What are they wanting? You need someone who actually works in that field or has worked in it, and why are they teaching, then?
So I love the idea of sliding time to mastery and I love the idea that in some sense you don’t pay until you have. But man, the bill when it comes due will have to cover a lot of labor time, so there’s that problem. Plus of course the obvious problem that the smart play would be to go right up to the edge of mastery and use up a lot of labor time, deliberately fail, quit with having paid nothing, and start up somewhere else where you rapidly ace the skills you were pretending to fail before. Or have employers send people to learn with the same trick—quit when you’ve essentially learned it, pay nothing, come back to where you’re already valued, and do something new.
The problem really is that courses as a way of bundling all that learning together turn out, surprise! to be pretty efficient as a routing system, and that the gestalt of many skills working together turns out, surprise! to be what most employers really want. Nobody wants a speechwriter who flips out and says they’re not certified to write a condolence message to the children of a valued employee or a crisis-communications specialist who says they can’t possibly write a basic newsletter that is just about all the ordinary good stuff that’s happening around the office.
You can have all sorts of frustrations with liberal education as it stands, but in the end, single-domain jobs that require one major skill and only that are pretty rare, no matter how the jobs page looks. Even when employers say that’s what they want, they don’t really want it.
Image credit: Photo by Branko Stancevic on Unsplash