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Hey Nora, Sometimes I think about how much college is going to cost my kids when they're old enough. I think about this when I want to be depressed.
Okay, understandable.
Okay, So four hundred thousand dollars a year. That's how much a private college is estimated to cost my daughter, well, in state tuition it fees at a public school would cost about one hundred and seventy two thousand dollars. These are just estimates from NEFA dot org. It's a calculator online, the Massachusetts Educational Financial Authority, And I did that. What's an estimate, but you know, hopefully, hopefully that's not what it is number, But it does raise the question will
college be necessary in fifteen years? Is it necessary right now? I mean, look how much the workforce has shifted in just the last few years. We've got with us at Kathleen d'laski. She's the founder of the Education Design Lab. It's a nonprofit organization that, in its own words, works with colleges, states, and employee to design shorter, more targeted forms of higher education. She's also the author of Who Needs College Anymore, imagining a future where degrees won't matter.
She joins us from McLean, Virginia. Kathleen, good to have you with us. Who does need college right now?
Well, I still tell any eighteen year old, I'm not sure about how old your children are.
Two and six, two and six, So maybe the robots will rule by the time there and there, we may have.
The new system wired. But yeah, for your children to see that they have other options, because that's the problem, even for eighteen year olds right now, is that is that they really see still a kind of college or bust narrative going on in the country. We have we say college is too expensive, it's it's maybe not worth it, and so we have a lot of people. You know, enrollment is down in the degree form and it's to drop pretty quite a lot since twenty ten. It's starting
to it's starting to shift up a little bit. But what's interesting is the way that enrollment is improving right now is because of short term certificates and other forms
of enrollment that colleges are starting to offer. You know, they're competing with like the boot camps and apprenticeships that are that are having trouble getting to scale, and colleges themselves are starting to offer alternatives, and so I wrote I wrote the book really to kind of raise the argument that we need more, we need a better fund, and remove the stigmas from alternatives to college, because only thirty eight percent of Americans have a four year degree,
and yet we tell all of our kids, you know, that they have to either go into debt or figure out how to get that four year degree. And as you said at the beginning, that's starting to change. It hasn't changed yet, So I still, you know, I think you have to give a lot of caveats when you're giving advice.
Today you speak a bit more to those alternatives in terms of we think about a traditional four year university or maybe a two year community college. Can you just dive a bit deeper into what those alternatives could look like and what that could mean like for the could mean for the future.
Absolutely, And I describe in the book that probably the two most successful alternatives right now, I mean, if you're looking to go for a professional pathway career would be apprenticeships and industry certifications and the problem, the problem with these two you know, wonderful alternatives to a four year degree is that they are not not evenly available, Like you can find them in some cities and states and
some professions, but not not widely. But they are being looked to as as as sort of the models that we need to create, that we need to create more of and either colleges can develop and offer them or you know, independent organizations. A lot of entrepreneurs have been you know, looking in these spaces too, But we have to we have to get off this idea that that that it's only that the government should only fund the degree programs for people who were going, you know, at
least half time into a degree program. That's how the funding follows. You. Now, if you want to do one of these other kind of programs, you know, you're usually not funded. And that has got to change.
How disruptive do you think AI is going to be to the workforce?
That's a great that's a great, that's a great question. There's already reports coming out that AI is starting to impinge on and UH and and and shrink the number of entry level white collar jobs. Right because expertise UH that that you can you know, use chat GBT or other other other options to to try to get answers to questions that may not be within your realm of expertise, those that it tends to wipe out a an entry level white collar job, you know, that doesn't that doesn't
require a physical interaction. And so we're we're already seeing some of that new reports are coming out. Uh but where where I think on the flip side, for a college student or a learner or a job up again, there's also they're also able to use AI to to uh find out about more jobs, to help them write their resume, to potentially uh learn learn the bits of expertise that they need to even you know, sound good
in their job interview. So, you know, it's a there's a there's a positive and negative side to AI from the standpoint of of of the future of work. But you know, probably the nature of jobs and the speed at which they'll change will continue to accelerate.
As we're thinking about AI. Just more broadly, we have a lot of students who are sitting here, you know, everyone's looking at chat GPT. But it's also a really good tool for teachers and people in the education field. To utilize AI to better uh, you know, educate the youth. What has been your take on AI and just what the implications can be from a teaching perspective.
Yeah, I teach at the college level at George Mason University here in Virginia, and I you know, I've tried to It's interesting. We haven't been given a lot of you know, policies about how we're supposed to, uh, you know, whether whether we're supposed to allow students to use it to write their papers, for example, and so a lot of us are just kind of you know, we're just kind of forging into our own territory and deciding how
to use it. And I've I have been treating it as my friend right to say, to have students use it to basically like pressure test the ideas that we might come up with the in the classroom. I teach design thinking, and so I have the students use it to pressure test the ideas that we do live in the classroom. And then they're supposed to you know, go and and see, well, you know what, what is what does the rest of the landscape say about this about
this point? That's one example. But it does mean that we can't really assign papers in the way that we used to. You know, we have to figure out how to project tie things that are that that create unique responses from the students or require unique responses from the students. And that's been that's been really difficult, but kind of exhilarating. Really Yeah.
I mean, I just I might be old or a lud Eite or I don't know. I don't know. I just I worry about what this does to critical thinking. I mean, I remember when I was in college and I would be working on a paper and I would have some sort of breakthrough with the thesis, and it would have required me to sort of go through all the notes and really come to a conclusion and distill
an argument. And I don't and and I learned so much by doing that, And it required me exercising a part of my brain that I don't know would need to be exercised if I had chat GPT, right.
I mean, it's the same. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when the calculator came out and we were worried about, you know that doing the math problem and if you're not doing your like, do you learn do you learn enough? And I think the you know, the argument now is okay, the calculator like, yes, we don't have to no long division anymore, but you still, you know, so you have to use math in different you know, you have to learn it in different ways or learn
the applied version of it. So what I try and do in my classroom is force those aha moments that you had writing your paper. I forced them in a live setting, in a you know where we're where, we're creatively problem solving together, and that that does help. I mean, it doesn't work for a history paper, but it works if you take the history lesson and try to apply it to a real world situation that you have your
students work on together. Because they want, you know this today, they want they want school or college to be an engaging experience, not a you know, not if it's something they can read and learn or even write a paper about. They they want to be able to get that at the you know, drop of a hat. So learning has to become a whole lot more of an engagement practice experience for students to even care or stay engaged. That's what I'm seeing in my classroom and many of my colleagues too.
I really want to just keep an eye on. There's been this conversation about AI picking up plagiarism in about thirty seconds or less. I'm curious what is your standpoint as a teacher as to how to actually figure out if students are plagiarizing using AI. But there's also been some situations where AI falsely detects plagiarism from students.
Falsely to text. I have heard a little bit, a little bit about that there are apps that that you know, usually most colleges and schools are you are you know where you can you know, run you run the kids papers through theirs and through these these applications. Yes, I mean I think that's happening maybe a little bit. But you know, there are ways to check up on or have your student. I mean you can usually tell without the without the apps, whether whether the students came up
with the argument right not necessarily supporting facts. I mean, I don't I don't hear my colleagues having much trouble in that regard. But but yeah, I mean, can you can go back to the student and use prompts, you know, live prompts, right, he prompts to figure that out.
Kathleen, we got to get you back. We got to go everywhere with you at the end of our program, and we do really appreciate it. Kathleen's Alaski. She's the founder of the Education Design Lab. She's a teacher. She's also the author of Who Needs College Anymore, imagining a future where degrees won't matter.