Welcome to Ed Tech insiders. In this podcast we talk to educators and educational technology investors, thought leaders, founders and operators about the most interesting and exciting trends in the field. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an educational technology veteran with over a decade of work and leading edge tech companies. Mitchell Stevens is a sociologist of Higher Education at Stanford University, and the co director of the Stanford pathways lab with John Michell.
He's the author of many research papers about credentials, student debt, workforce development, and higher education generally, and has edited and authored a number of books on higher ed, including creating a class college admissions and the education of elites and remaking college the changing ecology of Higher Education. Professor Stevens hosted virtual convening at Stanford in mid 2021. To frame a, quote, applied science to
support working learners. This involved over 180 participants from universities, nonprofits, philanthropies and edtech. Companies that serve working learners, such as ripe in bright hive, straighter line Gladio fourth rev Roblox and path stream. In this discussion, we're going to discuss the recommendations that came out of this convenience, as well as the role of edtech and helping shepherd the future of lifelong education. Mitchell Stevens, Welcome to EdTech insiders.
Thanks, Alex. Delighted to be here.
So you recently convened a large number of education thought leaders around the topic of how to develop an applied science to support working learners. What was the origin of this project? And why are the needs of working learners so important?
Well, long term and short term motivation for this one long term is as a student of alternative educational forms, I have been studying the rise of private capital in education provision for adults, nationally and worldwide for some time. The more proximate motivation is the COVID 19 pandemic, which really suspended business as usual for the conventional post secondary
education sector. And, and got surface pretty core questions about the the importance, need and cost of physical co presence of residential based higher education, and a kind of emergency emphasis on alternative educational forums. And my colleagues at UC Irvine, Richard Arum, and I got the opportunity to write a policy brief, recommending ways in which the federal government might assist colleges and universities, conventional schools, in their response to
the COVID 19 pandemic. And one of our recommendations was that some portion of federal relief to colleges and universities ought to incentivize the production of new kinds of data and infrastructure to support systematic inquiry on adult learning, and lifelong
education. So it was to use the this disruption and business as usual, to encourage a research program that would be targeted on doing better science on what kinds of learning and educational programs work for which kinds of Americans in which industries, and that idea really did have some legs, at least among our colleagues nationwide, there's a, you know, a growing recognition that the, the science infrastructure that we inherit from the 20th century, is really organized
around the conventional delivery of conventional college and university credentials, in a physically co present way, in the late stages of childhood. And on our view that, you know, that way of thinking about human capital development is just not tenable anymore. Yeah.
You mentioned the late stages of childhood. So that's sort of the traditional college age between 18 and 22, or 18, and 24. And when we talk about working learners, I'm imagining that it sort of starts at the low end at that type of age, but goes to a much, much more advanced ages. Is that right? Yeah, that's right.
The The term has only recently come into policy parlance, but I very much like it, though. I can't take credit for the term. What I like about it is that it embodies a recognition that in fact the majority of people who are pursuing formal education beyond high school are doing that while simultaneously participating in the labor market. And so that has been the case for some time.
But the the scientific imaginary has long focused on an on a kind of full time student who's foregoing paid work in order to, you know, to be in a conventional school. And working learners sort of disrupts that presumption, I think in a in a powerful way. And yes, I think focusing on adults over the age of 22, or 25, who are who have yet to obtain four year credential is, is a good operant definition for this group.
That makes a lot of sense. And that is a group that is in true need of either traditional or alternative credentials to be able to really enter the information economy at a at a sustainable level.
That's That's absolutely right. The parallel work of mine and many others across the country now is kind of a growing recognition that, you know, possession or non possession of a four year college degree has become a very fateful dividing line in American life, separating people who can reasonably expect to have stable well compensated employments through adulthood, and those who cannot.
One related project that I just want to mention before we dive into some of the details, is the Stanford new map of life, which takes us it's premise that in the United States, as many as half of today's five year olds can expect to live to the age of 100. So you've worked with Professor Elana Horwitz, from Tulane University to drill down specifically about, you know, what does this extended lifespan
mean for education? And what does it mean for for a working life, but tell us a little bit about the map of life project, and how that sort of relates to the needs of working learners.
I'm delighted to talk about that, and happy to be on the new map of Life team, which is a project of the Stanford Center on Longevity, and was just released to the public last month. The basic thrust of the new map of life is that lengthening lifespans are both an opportunity and a challenge. For Americans. The opportunity is that we've been given the gift of more potentially productive years to invest in ourselves and our
loved ones. The downside is that the institutions that we inherit from the 20th century have not been organized for us to optimize on those longer lives, and they've given us longer lives quite inequitably. Let me say a little bit more about both
of those things. As my colleague Laura Carstensen says many times, what we've done with longer lifespans over the last couple of generations is essentially added those years to old age, is that the best way to be spending additional years, you know, could we add those years to midlife or young adulthood or childhood and delay old age? And what sort of institutional infrastructures would we need to build to do that? How might our education system for example, look
different? If we presumed that people were going to be in the productive labor force for 510 15 years longer than they have in the past? The other challenge is that long life is very much a gift of class privilege. And a lot of that privilege gets mediated through formal educational attainment.
So essentially, the the more formal education, especially college education, people are able to experience in their lives, the happier and healthier and better compensated, frankly, their working lives will be so there are important sort of institutional and equity questions are kind of bound up in the lengthening lifespan.
That's very insightful. And I mean, I'd love to drill down a little bit into the some of the the inequalities that stem from education in America right now. I you know, as you mentioned, college has become you know, college educational attainment post secondary attainment has been increasingly correlated with many different measures of what we consider sort of success in America. That's economic success, health outcomes, longer lifespan, lower chance of drug
addiction. It reminds me of the, you know, the depths of despair and the future of capitalism, which was an excellent sociology book, you know, a year or two ago from from Princeton economists and sociologists, can you tell our listeners a little more about the backstory about why educational attainment has become so determinative of everything else in American life?
Yes, and this is a fairly complicated and sobering story that the sociologist alone Horwitz and I sort of wrote through together basically has two components. One is that a great deal of propensity and disposition toward school, a desire for school, the capacity, the basic skills that enable one to succeed in school, are late in
the very first years of life. So really, from infancy, infancy to middle school are really crucial periods for putting children on a pathway, to desire to do well in school to take pleasure in school and to enjoy its benefits. But because we live in such a stratified society and children grow up in highly class and race segregated environments, opportunity to learn as my colleague Sean Riordan calls it is very
inequitably distributed. So and this does a lot to explain why variation in learning and educational attainments by the time one reaches Middle School are highly correlated with post
secondary completion. The second half of the story is that the way in which Americans have organized educational provision after high school is that, you know, if one either hasn't completed high school, or doesn't have the material resources, or the academic capacity to enter and succeed in college, one is basically systematically disadvantaged in labor and marriage markets for the rest of one's life because Americans use possession or non possession of a college credential to sort job
applicants to shortsword potential marital partners to develop their friendship networks. So there's kind of a two sided problem here, inequality in early childhood, and then tying a lot of social benefits to successful completion of college combined to create the inequality problem that the new map of life emphasizes
your citing that it's it really starts very early in life. And one of the quotes that jumped out to me from the report was, you know, and I quote, us, higher education is akin to an elevator in a structure in which most people enter on the upper floors. I thought that was such a great quote about, you know, how higher education institutions can sort of select for people who already have so many social advantages.
And I have to credit my colleague Elana Horwitz, for developing that that metaphor, but I think it's I think it's actually quite sobering. Lee true. Consider, for example, that if you haven't finished high school, you're essentially ineligible to enter
college. So that sort of categorically excludes from the opportunity machine of college, you know, anybody who has has been so poorly served by either the education system or the health system or the criminal justice system, that they haven't had the benefit of
finishing college. But then also because college provision is is largely organized as a consumer market in the United States, people are have a much easier time, you know, entering college, if they have family wealth to support them in that endeavor, or if they have access to, you know, certain kinds of information about scholarships, grants and loans that are
unequally distributed. Many people who who have the savvy to enroll in college, even without significant financial means you're essentially mortgaging their own futures by acquiring federally backed debt to pursue that. So you kind of have to, you have to be at a certain level of educational attainment in order to even get on the college elevator, we should say, and then the elevator goes a lot faster. That's an express system, if shall we say, if one has family wealth to bring to that project?
Let's talk a little bit about how the higher education system in the US also has these different tiers of education. So, you know, the highly selective four year institutions that a lot of people think of as sort of synonymous with college, including Stanford, are maybe the fastest elevators of all using that metaphor. If you can make your way into a highly selective top, you know, let's say 50 college in the United States and attend and graduate.
You have enormous advantages and you probably had enormous advantages to get there in the first place. But there's a whole other system there's there's a vast number of higher education institutions and the majority of students Do not attend selective for your universities. So talk to us a little bit about that sort of tiered system and how it creates inequality or sort of what how people can fall out of the benefits of college through that type of system.
Absolutely. And I think this is a good opportunity to, for me to pause and talk a little bit about a glass half full. Sociologists rarely get smiley face emoji
cons associated with them. We're kind of a frowny face industry, I do think that there are some very important, positive cultural values that are embodied in Americans affection for college, we are a nation of school builders, we have great faith, that educational opportunities, in their myriad forms can make individual lives better and make whole societies better, and we hope more
equitable. And so throughout American history, Americans have, you know, created new forms of educational opportunity for their own children and also for their fellow for their fellow citizens. What we haven't done is invest in other forms of social provision that are arguably at least as important for people's flourishing. This is not a country that guarantees people employment, it is not a country that guarantees people a
living wage. It is not a country that guarantees people health care, regardless of their income or wealth. It's not a country that assures people that they will be housed, fed and clothed adequately. So because we have a society that offers very few sort of guaranteed social supports, for all of our citizens, we invest a lot more in in educational provision. And so that's one of the big reasons why we have some of the highest rates of college going in the
United States in the world. But it also means that we enable people to build a very stratified higher education system, right, to the extent that educational provision is, you know, not presumed to be a project of the central government, sort of anybody who wants to create a school and charge tuition and find a constituency can can go for it.
And so, you know, over many generations that has created conditions of in which have a highly Tiered System of Higher Education products, if you will, that cater to variably, to different class groups and serve
people have different means. And since you know, function at the high end, like, like exclusive clubs, they're kind of like private welfare states, in the sense like, if one has the means, and the credentials to be admitted to say Stanford University, one can be largely assured that the the resource of a Stanford degree and an alumni affiliation will sort of, you know, follow follow me through
my entire life. And that's a very, you know, powerful social asset, but it's really only available to, you know, very small number of people who have the means and the credentials to, to obtain that kind of educational treatment. And if people have sort of fewer resources, they, you know, they enter different kinds of kinds
of markets. And one way to think about the EdTech sector at present, I would say is, we're seeing a proliferation of not school forms, in part due to the market failure of the conventional sector to provide you know, affordable, meaningful college credentials that people can actually meaningfully obtain.
That's a terrific synopsis, it's a really interesting way to look at, look at it, that that the US is lack of sort of welfare and guaranteed guaranteed supports in so many other ways puts the onus more and more on education to be the the engine of mobility, because people can rely on so few other other things. I call it I call
it the United States of your on your own right. You are your own individual business. No, no, your household is your own firm. You know, ideally, the ideally, you know, government creates conditions under which your ability to do business is is occurring in a fairly transparent marketplace. But we do we do presume that, that, you know, my livelihood and the lifelong employability of myself and my children is, is really the responsibility of myself and my family.
And then it creates this ironic situation where in the least selective schools also have the highest dropout rates, which has always been to me one of the biggest paradoxes and sort of just head scratchers of American educator Because the schools with the least selectivity criteria, and often the least, not always, but often the least tuition still graduate students had at half the rate of elite four year institutions.
Yeah, I think that's an that's that's true for, you know, a couple of interesting reasons I would say. One is that elite schools, as my colleague gives up, A Rocha at the University of Virginia has said many times, elite schools systematically exclude people on the basis of the things that might prevent them from graduating. So you know, they tend to not let people in who can't afford it, they can't let they don't let people in who have children. They don't let people in who have full time
jobs. They don't let people in who had poor high school preparation. And you know, once in a selective school, young people have access to an elaborate array of services that essentially assure their graduation, right. So it really is a sort of, you know, rich get richer kind of situation, I call it, I call it graduation
insurance. But at the other end of the distribution, you have people who, you know, whose lives are more complicated, who were not as well prepared for college in the first place, who don't have the same kind of savvy to navigate an academic landscape, and who does have
more polls on their time. So, again, this is where I think that the the ed tech sector, you know, figured out well before many others in the conventional in the conventional ecology, that, you know, college, as usual, does not very well serve working adults with complicated lives. And, you know, other forms of educational opportunity should probably be designed specifically for those people and those lies. Yeah,
so that is a terrific segue, because this is an edtech podcast. After all, I love talking about the sociology of education. But you've mentioned ed tech and its role a couple of times. And I, I wanted to drill down on that that definition of working learners that you've mentioned, the idea that they are in this, in this framing, employed adults who do not possess a four year post
secondary credential. And you know, what one of the things that the report goes into is that working learners seek both education and work simultaneously throughout adulthood, they don't want to have to quit their jobs or are unable to quit their jobs, many students. So let's talk about
how this relates to EdTech. What models do you see either, you know, past present or future in edtech, that might sort of bridge this gap and allow employed adults who don't have a four year credential to receive advancement and work at the same time?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you know, let's let's let's start this time with the with the bad news. And with the good news. The bad news, I would say is that educational entrepreneurs beginning in the 1990s, figured out that working adults were being very poorly served by conventional colleges and universities that community colleges, comprehensive state schools, and you know, myriad private nonprofit providers that hadn't really changed their core operations to accommodate
working adults. And it is the proprietary college industry that recognized the just how poorly served millions of working Americans were by conventional colleges and
universities. And we know what happened in the first two decades of the 20th century publicly traded for profit institutions, which were, let's face it, universities only in name, they were training programs, figured out how to systematically defraud millions of people and by extension, the American taxpayers by running Pell grants and federally subsidized loans through the bank accounts of poorly informed educational consumers that was a on my view is sort of an
unmitigated civic tragedy. But there is there's some good news here. The good news is that the great deal of private capital that's sort of flowing into the adult education marketplace is much more flexible and creative and and forward thinking then then the then the legacy sector, the prop. The challenge between the glass half full and the glass half empty is that Americans have not figured out how to create a responsible marketplace. For education business. It's essentially
pretty regulatory. The regulatory capacity that the federal government has is really tied to title four provisions for Pell grants and loans if, if a if a firm is not participating in those programs, then then they're essentially outside of federal government regulation. And that's, that's just a terribly dangerous situation for
working learners. I mean, I, I say all the time, you know, I can, I can purchase a used car in the state of California sight unseen, and have a better sense of the value of my purchase than if I go to seek an associate's degree. Here, there's, there's, there's a shocking absence of information about quality and value. And the nation has just not had the political will to figure out how to how to create a responsible marketplace.
And so you promised some good news. And I think the good news, it started with the idea that that capital
is flexible. And that, you know, as that in that sort of Wild West space that is pre regulatory, as you say, there are some very bad actors, including for profit universities that that have, eventually, some of which have have closed down or been regulated in various ways over time, but they're also this, there's also this ecosystem of edtech startups that are also pre regulatory, but that are, I think, so far, at least better willed and seem to be doing a
better job. And I framed this as a question, do you feel like they are doing a better job?
Again, the good news is, there's a lot of money and a lot of creativity and a lot of, again, an American faith that, you know, educational opportunity can make people's lives better. You know, we might, we might call this the problem of an absence of regulation, I would prefer to say it's actually, you know, how does a good actor demonstrate that it's a good actor, right?
Like, if I want to, if I want to, you know, you know, make clear to my clients, right, or to a future regulator, that, that I deserve the privilege, right, of an operation, and perhaps the privilege of direct or indirect public subsidy. You know, I have a mechanism whereby I can demonstrate that I'm a responsible player, and we don't
have those mechanisms. And I frankly, don't don't anticipate a sort of a government regulatory apparatus that's going to be sort of nimble enough or fast enough to to
address that. That hazard. I do think that alternative educational providers themselves, have the capacity to create to create a marketplace that would reward responsible behavior, and discourage irresponsible behavior that that would that's going to require a, shall we say, an economic and civic farsightedness ad tech sector has has yet to mature into. Yeah,
that that's really compelling way to frame this issue that, that in the absence of a clear government regulation, structure, there's sort of a lack of I would I would call it metrics, there's, there's a lack of shared understanding of what it means to be a good actor in the adult learning space.
That part of it, Alex, and that's a part of what motivated this project was to sort of think about what kind of observational infrastructure a nation built at the intersection of government and business, the intersection of philanthropy and the end of the Research Academy. So I do think that that is, you know, that is part of it, I think, but another part of it is a pernicious obsession, on my view, with something called results, both firms and their investors and philanthropists tend to want
something called results. And these seem to be things that emerge within the space of one to three years, and they tend to take the form of, you know, completion of a program, you know, employment at the conclusion of a program earning is on first job, but that's not how education and learning work, right. I mean, the the value of a third grade education, right, when conveyed with quality and and accomplished with skill, you know, does not show up in
admission to fourth grade. It shows up in the cumulative impact of a longitudinal investment in skill development, right. No one equates the value of a Stanford college degree with the amount of money that someone earns the year that they finish college here, right. But the philanthropic sector and the VC sector in a tech on my view is just naive. obsessed with something called short term, short term gains, right, and you just don't do science that way.
And you don't build education policy that way.
So this, that's a really interesting point. And it brings me to a, one of the recommendations in the report is very much stating what you're what you're naming now, which is that, you know, it's a recommendation for new
education providers. And it basically says they should observe the impact of their programs throughout the life course throughout the adult lives of their alumni, in a similar way, in a sort of longitudinal way, in some of the same way that traditional education researchers have looked at the, you know, lifetime earnings gains, or the lifetime outcomes that result
from a college education. I want to drill down on this for a very specific reason, which is that, you know, as somebody who's been inside a number of different edtech, companies myself, I think the reason why, why the companies and investors behind them are so caught up in the short term gains is simply that they're, they're very, they're
much easier to measure. There's something that you know, yet the speed at which ed tech evolves, the idea of saying, you know, once this student finishes this bootcamp, or this alternative degree, we want to see what their life is like, in 10 years, or 20 years, by the time that report comes out, there's been four new generation of edtech
technology. So I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about how edtech companies can sort of bridge this gap, how they can think longer term, without but but also be able to report out in, you know, the short term sort of business gains about, you know, we know that our learners are getting placed in jobs, or we know that they're getting salary boosts.
It's, you phrased it that way, Alex, because here is where, on my view, you know, Wall Street and Silicon Valley conspire to create very bad public policy frameworks, you know, shareholder value. And, and, you know, and, and firm on the East Coast and firm valuation on the West Coast are very powerful incentives for business people. They're terrible ways of organizing public policy, because public policy has to be organized around long term costs
and benefits. I hadn't imagined raising the specter of climate change. But somehow it seems appropriate this afternoon in our conversation, right? Climate, you know, global pollution is the function of long term accumulation of externalities that were overlooked in the interest of
short term gains, right. And, you know, despite the the great discipline, that shareholder value and firm growth give to entrepreneurs, they're terrible mechanisms for thinking about investments in civil society, precisely because they're organized around short term
metrics. And, you know, this is why this is why Americans invest in some institutions that are not subject to market forces, in the same way religious organizations, public health organizations, colleges and universities, I daresay, government's, you know, we invest in some institutions, because we we recognize that they have sort of, you know, long term value propositions that are not well served by market logics, somehow the tech sector hasn't quite figured out,
you know, what has been true for millennia, which is that education and human learning are
long term propositions. Right. And I frankly, I think that the sector is smart enough to figure this out, whether it has the the, shall we say the will, to, you know, to tame its own Wild West, right, and commit to figuring out ways to reduce risks for everyone, including including future investors, I think we're gonna continue to be kind of trapped in this sort of short term results kind of logic, which really doesn't does not serve the sector very well.
I want to push on one piece of of that, which is that, you know, edtech companies tend to be writ large, I would say, you know, try to sort of focus on what they call, you know, a double bottom line, they want to be successful from an economic perspective, but they also really do want to be having positive impact on their, on their, on their users and
learners and customers. However, you wanted to find that so that the short term business issues that you're bringing up the idea of, oh, we need to you know, place our students to be able to keep the money flowing in is one aspect of it but I would say that is often the The will to measure immediate and short term outcomes isn't always a, from a pure monetary perspective, it's to make sure that the program is actually effective. And it's getting, it's getting its users
what they want it. And because ad tech can be more agile than traditional institutions, knowing exactly what's happening to, to the graduates or the, you know, alumni as soon as possible, and then weaving those findings back into the product is sort of the the product ethos of some of these companies. And I don't I don't, you know, I agree that that that the short term can blind to the long term. But I do still feel like there's
a core paradox here. I mean, I look back at you know, 10 years ago, was the dawn of a lot of large edtech companies, you know, Duolingo, started at 20. If Duolingo did a study right now and said, What happened to our graduates who finished a class in 2011? And they learned a new language did that did
that? What did that do for their lives over the last 10 years, it would be fascinating, but the product that people were taking in 2011 is so far away from the product that they'd be taking now, that it would be a little bit hard to know how to use that.
That data. Yeah,
that's good. I mean, that's a good point, Alex. And, you know, let's add another, let's add another silver lining to the results oriented focus of edtech. And again, I want to say and the philanthropic sector, that serves them, too, is is a recognition that that measurement is essential, which is something that, you know, basically for generations, we've we've we've let the elite colleges and universities off the hook for measuring anything,
right. I mean, elite higher education is very much a trust us enterprise, you know, the, the trustees of universities, like the ones that I work for, probably have very little interest in value added measures, you know, conditional on inputs, you know, how, how much value are our fancy schools adding? So I think that focus on measurement does have an asset, like, as you were talking about, but it's also the case that the vast majority of that
measurement is opaque. Right? So the measurements that seem to count are, you know, shareholder value and company valuation? Right, you know, not measurable
learning. That's, you know, we, the world got, you know, some fairly effective vaccines against the COVID pandemic, you know, not because we had a million pharmaceutical companies secretly competing with each other, right, under veils of ignorance, right, we got a COVID vaccine in a year because of a presumption that every incremental insight would be shared with a global scientific
community. We don't have anything like that in education provision, we are on the other side of the moon, from that we live in a world in which you and I work in a world in which internal processes are presumed to be proprietary secrets. And you can't do science that way. Right? I can I can maybe jack up a company valuation that way, you know, that I can't build a cumulative science of learning that way.
Yeah. The discussion about metrics and how the new learning provider sector may be really myopic, and looking at very short term
outcomes. Reminds me of another quote from the report that that stood out to me, which is that about how the metrics used by legacy colleges and universities and I will, quote, quote, the report here, so quote, inherited data systems tend to be organized around measures of institutional success, retention and graduation rates in colleges and universities, for example, rather than measures of success or progress defined by learners
themselves. And that really jumped out to me because it's something that I think a lot of edtech companies wrestle with, as well. They, they know that, you know, learners in very informal learning environments are often held to standards, like, you know, completion rates, graduation rates, year over year retention, that are really designed for formal
learning environments. That tell us a little bit more about how, you know, as a field, both new providers and legacy schools might move more towards this, this lovely concept of, you know, measures of progress defined by learners themselves.
Yeah, and here's a I'll come at that in a in a slightly different way. Perhaps you consider that in the US the relationship between biography education, and work is completely anarchic. Let me tell you that, you know, When a 17 year old, you know, confronts her final year of high school, and considers the very fateful next steps in her educational and occupational career, she has essentially no map for how to
how to do that. And she relies entirely on the organizational context in which she and her parents are living to do them, right. That's why families send their children to private schools, or public high schools with elaborate counseling programs. And that's, frankly, why families send their children off to colleges and universities, that kind of tame that anarchy for them, right.
So, you know, if I send my child to the unit, you know, to the University of California, Los Angeles, I can go to bed at night, sort of knowing that, you know, a lot of the uncertainty that we will confront my child has has been removed from the equation, right? I know who her peers are going to be, I know what kinds of educational options are available to her, I know what kind of career counseling she's going to get.
And this part of the United States of your on your own right, because we don't have a, we don't have a comprehensively managed human capital system, like in the Nordic countries, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, the UK, right. We instead, you know, give people this sort of staggering array of choices, and basically tell them good luck. And so there's, you know, that there's a lot of risk of making the wrong decision in in, in
that context. And so, you know, one of the things we might think about is, if we wanted to know, if we wanted to maintain the benefit of an open educational market, right, with a lot of different options, right, but we wanted to reduce the amount of risk that's associated with too much choice, you know, how would
we do that? Right, so what kinds of informational systems could we make available to people, you know, beginning in their teenage years, and, you know, throughout adulthood, that would sort of help them think about how to connect their own ambitions right in time to with the, with the work and learning opportunities that are available to them in time one, right? We don't, we don't have that kind of map for people in the United
States. And we certainly don't have a data ecosystem that would enable people to, to place themselves, you know, in this ecology, and consider, you know, investments in their own futures, on the basis of some
kind of systematic evidence. So, you know, that's what we were sort of hinting at with that sentence that you quoted is, you know, rather than thinking just in terms of, you know, does program X, you know, complete a high enough proportion of people who enter it, it's like, how might we help people make sense of the options that are available to them and connect cause and effect in their own educational trajectories? in ways that would be less risky for
them? There was a college scorecard project from the federal government. At this point, I guess it would have been six to 10 years ago.
Creation, yeah. That
was designed to, if I understood it correctly, to try to begin to have that conversation to put all of those incredible array of options for a graduating high school student, or for somebody looking to go back to school onto a relatively level playing field with relation in relation to the metrics and the outcomes.
And, you know, it also puts me in mind of Raj Chetty his work, I tried to write about about, you know, which schools are useful for sort of economic mobility for getting for moving students from the lowest quintile to the higher quintiles
of, of income. I guess my question around that is that, you know, it felt like the project like that might, in an ideal world, those might have really moved the needle and sort of given people some of the information they need to make wise post secondary decisions, but I don't know if they've really, if they really have I'm not sure.
Let me let me underline your phrase, try to begin to have that conversation. I'd say that's pretty much right. So again, this is this is a place in which the the legacy sector, you know, I would say the conventional colleges and universities don't have terribly
much to brag about. So the spelling's commission report of the early 2000s had surfaced a clear call for the creation of a student unit record system in the United States, which which would enable longitudinal observation of how people accumulate academic credits, as they move across institutions over the course of their lives, and then link that link that educational attainment with
earnings. And it was the higher education lobby, that made the creation of a student unit record system illegal in in Congress and in the name of privacy, which on my view, was to unmitigated just dodge of public observation, right. Because because higher education leaders recognized appropriately that all that all of the news in such a system would not be good.
And they sort of successfully blocked the creation of of that kind of, of that kind of endeavor, you know, begin to start to have the conversation. You know, the the projects that mentioned, we're all are all organized on the basis of schools that receive funds under Title four of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which is essentially Pell grants and
subsidized loans, right. Any provider that doesn't make use of those of those financial instruments does not report so and this is something we call for expressly in our project, right? The the course eras, the to us the guild's, the General Assembly's, right, all of these organizations that don't receive government funds also do not report any information about cost or outcomes, which effectively makes it impossible to make informed public policy
for the sector. So yeah, that's, that's the kind of infrastructure that we're calling for, right, a kind of recognition that, you know, if we're going to tame the beast of, of the tech sector, and on my view, you know, make it more cumulatively effective, both for learners and for investors, we're going to have to create some sort of mechanism for for knowing what works and what doesn't, why, under what conditions for which, you know, for which kinds of men and women, I'm not asking Washington
to do that. In fact, we're, we're calling on alternative providers themselves to take the initiative to imagine what that infrastructure might look like, and how it might be paid for.
Yeah, that it's a great point. And, you know, I think the the, some of the new providers you named, you know, to you Coursera guild General Assembly, they each do have some version of a public outcomes report where they, where they explain, you know, what percentage of their income, right, and so, but But what is, I think, drastically missing is any kind of alignment with each
other. So there's no way that any student per prospective student could look at General Assembly's report and Coursera is report until use report and guilds report and decide with any kind of, you know, accuracy, which one is more is most, you know, is most effective for people like them, because each of the each of these insert each of these companies, does it under their own logic with their own data. And it does just no oversight from anybody.
That's right. I mean, another way of saying it is it takes it takes a lot of cooperation to compete. And, you know, think, for example, about intercollegiate or Olympic
athlete athletics, right? You know, in order for there to be national or global sports competitions, right, participants have to, you know, a seed to a fairly elaborate, you know, set of agreements that enable competition to happen routinely, right now, and we don't have anything like that, in the post secondary space, right, we have, we have a lot of, we have a lot of, it's something that's kind of more akin to, like a medicine show or a circus, where everyone's sort
of vying for eyeballs and, you know, making promises, you know, on again, on the basis of something called results, right, the mechanics of which are, are almost never revealed, right.
And, you know, I sort of prefer to like, have a educational ecosystem that looks more like professional sports or the global Olympic system than like a circus or not that those, you know, not the coordinated markets are ever perfect by any stretch, but again, they they reduce risk, and they reduce risk, especially for the most
vulnerable participants. Yeah. And, you know, I have every faith that the The edtech sector has the smarts and the capital, and frankly, even the business incentives to do this, but it is a very substantial collective action problem, right? Yes, I'm
not. But I mean, I think it requires a certain degree of maturity, either for businesses at a certain stage in their development, or perhaps private capital, that has a certain civic orientation to, you know, to try and intervene in sort of, you know, creating that that architecture. And again, this is where, I think philanthropies are might especially be well positioned to do this, but they would have to get over their, you know, short term results orientation as well, to take this long
view. So we've been discussing the sort of interplay between a few major actors in this system, you know, new education providers, Legacy education providers, and universities, and the government, that which can be, of course, state and federal government 1/4 player in this ecosystem, that the that the Stanford report, really, or the the working learners report hones in on a little bit is his
employers. And you know, one thing you've come up a lot, and one of the things that's come up a lot in on this podcast is the fact that, you know, the number of learners who, you know, overtly state that the main reason they are attending post secondary education is for employment and outcomes for career has just risen steadily for decades. It's just now it's a very open, you know, that's that people explicitly say, I want to get a degree so that I can get a better job or a job
with higher income. And so so let me just frame this question. Forgive Forgive a little bit. Actually, no, go ahead. You can you can respond directly to that. I have I have a
lot that Alex. Oh, sure. Yeah.
So, you know, the report states how social scientists have extensively studied that how formal educational credentials work, VAs MBAs, PhDs, professional degrees, but that nobody has really made sense of the value to employers of these alternative credentials. That would be you know, bootcamp, courses, cohort based courses, MOOC certificates, industry certifications, and other new
learning options. And the report goes, you know, goes further and I think, in a really, really insightful way and says, Well, the these the value of these new learner opportunities, these new learning opportunities is totally dependent upon employer behavior, basically, you know, you would only really invest in a boot camp, if you believe that on the other side of that boot camp, employers will look favorably upon that experience
for you. And what would Oh, it would always strikes me, Oh, do you want to jump in now, then? It's just such a long, such a
long question. Okay. So what strikes me about this is that there may be a little bit of a sort of zero sum competitive aspect to to this, which is that, you know, if we were to truly find out what employers value, and we found out that employers continue to value traditional degrees from Legacy colleges, universities, well, that overtly threatens the value proposition boot camp providers,
or MOOC providers. And alternatively, if employers overtly value alternative credentials more, it obviously would threaten the value proposition of often higher cost degrees. So I'm just trying to get my head around how that kind of collective action might work. When the results made really sink one of the two sides of the education industry.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now this is very, another way to think about a credential is it's it's the, it's the product of a negotiation between three parties, right? A credential provider, a learner, and an employer. Right? Credential providers can make plenty of money, if they just convince learners to acquire the credential. And they can even be acknowledged, you can have a perfectly fine business model. As long as you get enough people to sort enough learners to purchase the credential you're
selling. The value of that credential, however, goes way off, right, if employers take that credential as as a marker of value to compensate, and that's where the ambiguity in the current ecosystem, you know,
currently is. And frankly, I think what you pointed out is why the ambiguity is made with this again, and frankly, that ambiguity is why I think a leap legacy providers are so ambivalent about alternative credentials, you know, If, if Harvard and Stanford and MIT begin to purvey a wide range of institutionally branded certifications, does it contribute to the zero sum dilemma that you were just just
talking. And on my view, the jury is still out on that, that elite providers, you know, are still quite equivocal about their role in the alt cred. Domain. But it's also the case that, you know, for the, for the holder of an alternative credential, the, the, the exchange value of that is entirely dependent on what happens in the, in the, in the
personnel office. And, and that, too, is a black box for this applied science, we, we just don't know, how it how employers are making sense of different kinds of certifications and credentials. And it also might be an ideal terrain for Applied Research, essentially, you know, longitudinal experiments in which alternative providers, firms and researchers might cooperate to develop, you know, credentials that that truly do
have that exchange value. So what we were emphasizing in the report is, you know, don't just focus on the the learner and provider, you know, part of the triangle, you know, think also about, you know, how employers are, are variably, using credentials to, to staff their firm's?
Yeah, you know, you are the co director of the Stanford pathways lab, and you've, you've done a huge amount of research about informal education pathways alternative credentialing, and one of the recommendations in the report is that working learners can pursue a number of different pathways that can be, you know, micro pathways, or map or pathways. tell our listeners a little bit about this concept of pathways and what it means to you and how it relates to the EdTech landscape.
Yes, sir report suggests that the pathways heuristic might be a useful way of organizing inquiry in this domain. Most broadly, what is the pathway, it's a sequence of educational and occupational experiences, that has a cumulative character. By that I mean, you know, the, the move I'm able to make as a worker or a learner today, is predicated in part on the moves I did or did not make, right or the moves I was allowed to make
throughout my prior history. And so sort of making sense of activity at any particular moment, one needs to sort of think about the past that sort of brought the learner to that, to that circumstance, we use the image of a person in a maze to describe this, in some sense to a path is a function of my, you know, navigating a complex system. But it's also a function of the of the opportunities that
that complex system enables. And that's the imagery that we've been seeking to advocate for, just to sort of recognize that people are accumulating educational and work experiences over a much longer period of their lives than in the past, right. So we need observational mechanisms that enable us to kind of see how people move into, into and out of educational opportunities into and out of occupational positions in a sort of dynamic
way. And we need to be able to observe that at the individual level, right, Alex Garland's career, but also at the aggregate level, right? careers of people like Alex Sarlin, in order to in order to kind of, you know, you know, make sense of the character of the entire ecosystem.
There's this concept of the open loop University.
Yes, Stanford. Exactly. Another Stanford,
great Stanford concept and metaphor, that, that I think, speaks to some of what you're saying about how in a, you know, these all come together in 100 year lifespan, if people longer working lives, they, the idea of front loading all of the education into the first quarter of somebody's life, and then expecting them to keep up with the changes in society for the next 75 years.
Feels very naive. So what might it look like for you know, to have this open loop concept where students can come back, or it can or any anybody in the society can make themselves into a student, either simultaneously with their work or take a you know, learning sabbatical, which is another, you know, edtech term? I'm curious, just talk a little Little bit about, you know what that what a society that looks like that would look like?
Yeah, that's right. So again, let's, let's remember that we will continue to live in the United States of your on your own by which, you know, we won't expect the United States to develop a political economy, have master planning or centralized regulation that just does not comport with our
political culture. But I, but I'm hopeful that we could, we could, we could collectively build a, a new map of work and learning opportunities, that would presume that the pathways of prior citizens could inform our, you know, could inform present and future citizens about how to organize their own work and learning lives, right, you know, could create, can we create some, you know, some, some evidence informed map for how certain kinds of life destinations are linked with particular educational
trajectories? And, you know, sort of route rather than letting those those journeys unfold and archaically? Could we provide people with, again, with maps, compasses, telescopes, binoculars, you know, aerial views that would equip them with with, you know, real information that would enable them to connect cause and effect as they plot their own futures?
Yeah, I love the anarchic metaphor, I think it's really dead on for the sort of emotional and intellectual tax that, that high school students and parents or anybody trying to, you know, advance their education as an adult has to, it does feel like anarchy you, you know, there are these interesting scenarios right now, where you'll go to a website that pretends to sort of tell you all, you know, the top, the top programs in your particular field, but the entire website is
run by one of the providers at, you know, behind the scenes, so a lot of the recommendations are coming from, you know, are targeted, there, there really is a sense of sort of this bizarre, you know, bizarre marketing, bizarre in the sense of a marketplace, where you're sort of getting pitched from every direction, this is going to be the most the most effective experience, this is going to be the best ROI, this is going to
be the fastest. And I think, you know, learners are so under equipped to make to make decisions.
Yeah. And it's, you know, it's, it's, it's interesting, I do think it's a, this is one of the ways in which this is a civic challenge as much as the scientific one, Alex, because I fear that, you know, Americans aversion to something called tracking has prevented us from, you know, providing this kind of baseline
information to people. So what I mean by tracking is we're very averse, you know, we're constitutionally averse to the notion that, you know, that, that people should categorically be placed on different pathways by virtue of their educational accomplishments early in life, as is off, as is the case in more sort of master planned economies or human capital systems, shall we say, the ones that are common in Northern and Western Europe. So we don't like that, and we celebrate something
called choice. But I think we, we forget, as you said, that, you know, that that relying too much on choice creates the sort of overwhelming cognitive and, and psychic challenges for people and actually ends up systematically rewarding people who have no access to information and expertise that enable them to get around that uncertainty. Right. So, you know, too much choice can be as as sort of any gala terian and discriminatory as, as too little
choice. And so the challenge is sort of figure out a mechanism for helping people navigate their lives that you know, is as equitable as possible, and information driven as possible, rather than anxiety, rumor and advertising driven world that we currently live in.
There have been some fascinating studies about how students from underrepresented backgrounds make their choices of what school to go to, and often the, the decision processes have a lot to do with you know, how close physically close you are to the school or whether you knew somebody else who went there or, you know, it's it's these heuristics that are so divorced from the type of college scorecard you know, beautiful information, data driven decisions that I think we all think about
when an ideal person would make. Right.
Right. So, you know, I have a final question. This is this, I could talk for hours about these topics, and I can't believe how much ground we've already covered, but have a final question specifically
about edtech. Providers. And, you know, one of the other really interesting recommendations in the working learners report is that for new learning providers, you know, they should recognize that while they can offer, you know, code nimbleness, and on the ground know how they really might want to think about partnering with legacy colleges and universities that offer capacity for scaled research, including the type of longitudinal research you mentioned, and scientific and
instructional training. So I'd love to hear a little bit about that type of partnership, the the Nimble edtech company and the science scaled scientific legacy college university coming together to you know, what, what does that look like? Now, if you have examples? And what might that look like? If, if they if these groups were to work together more effectively?
Well, I'll confess, Alex, I read this question in your notes in advance. And I must confess that I can't give you a single example of the longitudinal research focused, tech firm research university collaboration that we're calling for, I have been trying to, to address that need for the last decade here at Stanford, and despite some effort have have not yet succeeded. If you or your listeners, you know, know of successful examples, I would be eager to hear of them.
Stanford and MIT and other universities have long legacies of industrial Academic Partnerships for radio and communications technology for defense technologies for healthcare and pharmaceutical science for climate science. We have not figured out how to have industry academic relationships in the learning and education
space. And I think we haven't figured out the how to how to manage the the upfront conflicts of interests that would make those relationships doable, but I but I think I think they're absolutely possible. And on my view of priority for this applied science, what might they
look like? I think they would, they might look like the kinds of relationships that happen routinely on in the engineering side of research universities, which is that firms recognize that research, universities have a long term view of a problem.
And they also have the capacity to train researchers and practitioners that are of sufficient value to the firm, that the business partner is willing to both put some capital into the relationship and have some of the science that's done the beat open science, reciprocally, the University recognizes that the firms have the understanding of the space and the service and the access to learners and users that he
wouldn't otherwise have. And you would create a a way of doing academic business that sort of recognizes the reciprocal assets and limitations of the project, we can do it just taking a little longer than I thought, but you know, eager to engage in conversation. Yeah, to have on but we can do it, it's just taking a little longer than I thought. And I'm happy to say that several conversations such as this are now underway.
That's terrific to hear. And let's take that as a challenge to our listeners to try to bring that that world into into existence. As I just moved into the very last question. I have a, I have a couple of brief examples of where this may come from. I don't think they have happened
quite yet. But, you know, one thing that we've started to see over the last couple of years is some of the sort of large ad tech providers that work directly with universities, places like to you and some of the OEMs and Coursera and others, actually, you know, I won't get into this, this is
this thing. Now, if we talk about an offline but I think that there are some people who really want to make that happen and are trying to sort of set up long term relationships with individual universities that may include some research arms, like you know, you see Coursera with Illinois MBA program, that it's now they're so deeply entrenched with one another that that you know, they can actually measure over time, you know, or to use relationship with UNC or with Syracuse, I think they're
starting to starting to build the that type of deep, long term relationship that may lead to this. But it is interesting, though. Really interesting.
I mean, yes, yes. Off the record, it is like, yeah, this I thought this nut would get this is off the record. I thought this cracked a lot sooner than it has. But I don't know of any successful industry affiliates program, for example, space. We've, we've, we've tried a couple of times here. We haven't figured out the business, the business value for such things. But yeah,
that's strange. Okay, so I'm gonna just launch into my final two questions by my show. This has been a really deeply, deeply interesting conversation about about education and sociology and how you know, American society builds its educational landscape. You know, I asked two final questions of every podcast guest first one is, you know, what do you see as something very exciting in the EdTech landscape right now? What's something that has caught your eye and you'd love to share with
our listeners? Well,
it won't be a surprise to a lot of your listeners. But the the movement to make college education a portable benefit of employment as represented by organizations like guild degreed and the ASU Starbucks deal, I think that's a very important move in the history of the negotiation
between labor and business. It's sort of its its reconfiguring the relationship between higher education, labor and, and employment in ways that I think could have sort of far reaching consequences for the way social welfare and and the educational social contract in the United States is imagined. So I'm following that that movement very closely.
That's a great answer. And Amazon is going to jump in in one way or the other. And I'm very Yeah, though, they're either going to wall the garden or make it portable. And it's going to be a very consequential as the as the biggest single employer in the US, I believe, now, it's going
to be a big decision. The last question is, what is a book or blog or twitter feed that you would recommend for somebody who wants to sort of dive deeper into some of the topics we've talked about today about education and sociology?
Yeah, can I give you two books, of course, the first is by a historian at Lake Forest college named Christina Grover. It's called the education trap. It's a fascinating study of the the post secondary educational ecosystem in the Boston metropolitan area between the Civil War and the Great
Depression. And if you think we live in an educational Wild West in 2021, I would present to you Austin, Cambridge, in 1901, which had at least as cutthroat, an educational marketplace with ambiguity about about value and prestige as the one we live in today. And the other one that I'm in the midst of is Audrey waters, new book teaching machines, the history of
personalized learning. Another American faith is that something called technology can revolutionize and make more equitable, the education process. That's a dream that a certain kind of wonky American has been dreaming for a long time. And I find both of these books to be sobering reminders of not everything is as new and shiny as Silicon Valley and environs imagined it to be.
Fantastic suggestions. As always, we will put links to those resources in the show notes for this episode fessor, Mitchell Stephens, what a fascinating and really, really compelling conversation about, about how education plays itself out in 21st century America. I really appreciate your time today.
Thanks, Alex, an off the record, I fear you got the B minus Mitchell this afternoon. But maybe there's probably enough in there to find it half hour. Your questions are good. And I learned a lot as usual. I mean, having these conversations really helps me to sort of, you know, develop a language. So I really appreciate it. And this one is specially important. So thank you.
Thank you. And then that the Stanford report on working learners that made by this consortium of thought leaders is available, we will put that link in the resources as well as links to the map of life, the open loop University and a number of the other Stanford really interesting Stanford studies and cross university studies that have been done on this topic. Thank you, Mitchell Stevens. Thanks for listening to this episode of
the EdTech insiders podcast. If you liked the episode, remember to subscribe on Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're listening on Apple please leave a rating and review so others can find the podcast. For more edtech insiders content subscribe to the Ed Tech insiders newsletter at ed tech insiders.substack.com