The Future of Work and What It Means for Higher Ed

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

And welcome to Future youe. I'm Michael Horn. My colleague, Jeff Zalingo out at the moment on assignment as he reports for his upcoming book that he's working on. But he'll be back with us for the second half of this episode. And right now I'm delighted to be joined by Susan Lund, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute and an expert on thinking about the future of the economy, globalization, how it's all going to change. One of the favorite topics of this show, future of work, and what does that mean for higher education? So, Susan, welcome to Future youe.

Thank you. My pleasure to be here.

So I want to start we love to ask our guests when we start out about how they got to this crazy world of higher education. And in your case, it seems like not the most straightforward pathway through. So I'd love you just to sort of talk about how you've come to this work and how it drew you to the higher education nexus, if you will.

Well, I don't come as an education expert at all. I actually was trained as an economist, and I spent a lot of time working with companies. And what's come about in the last three to five years is really fundamental changes in the workforce and the advent of advances in artificial intelligence and new types of automation mean that companies are seeing a big change in who they need to hire and the workforce that they need. And so I've come to the issue of education and workforce training and preparation research, really from that lens, from the private sector side and the company side, and looking at the impact that technology is having on the jobs that are out there.

And you've written extensively in a terrific report that I recommend everyone read around about how literally hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide. I think if I have these numbers right, I think it's 16 to 54 million jobs in the United States, anywhere from 12 to 102 million jobs in China, anywhere up to 38 million jobs in India are at risk of this automation as artificial intelligence, machine learning, robots, et cetera, come into the workforce. But it seems like there's a silver lining of that. Can you just talk about what you see in the future of the workforce and how it's evolving in this way?

Yeah, that's a report that we put out last December called Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained. And we developed a really detailed model of how much work that people are paid to do in different countries, could be done by a robot or an algorithm, an artificial intelligence Algorithm. And we got the numbers that you're talking about. And those are not even the jobs that will be affected. Those are the net people who will be displaced. So if you're a retail cashier in the us, we look at how much of that work could be done by a machine. And those are the people on net who are, say a retail cashier today who are going to need to find an entirely new set of skills in a different occupation altogether.

So just to be clear, that means that it's not just aspects of their job that are changing, but actually their

job won't be here, their net FTEs, exactly, that are going to be lost. So those are people who need to shift entirely now a lot more of us. What we found is that machines are going to do part of what we do. So when you think about what you do every day, or I do every day, it can be broken down into different types of tasks. And we actually built this model on the task level and what we find is that for 60% of occupations, about a third of the tasks people do in their job could be done by a machine by 2030. So even as there are some people who are going to need to find entirely new careers, all of us are going to end up, I think, 15 years from now looking back and seeing how machines do some of what we do now. Hopefully it's the boring stuff, right?

It'll take care of the routine administrative tasks that I hate doing, in other words.

Yes.

So as these changes sweep through, you've made some interesting predictions in that report where you said the amount of physical work that we do might go down, but in healthcare it might actually go up. The amount of management and leadership work will actually go up. The amount the technical skills, and I assume you mean sort of platform centric skills like coding and salesforce or things like that will go up and. But it seems like it's different from different jobs. How did you actually tackle that?

So after we looked at the task level of which tasks are going to be done by machines, we then broke down, well, what skills do people in different occupations use for each one of those tasks? And what we found is, as you're mentioning that on net, when you look at the US and Western Europe, so advanced economies, high wage, we see a big decline in demand for physical and manual skills. So, so those would be people working on a manufacturing assembly line or moving things. It could be a fast food cook. And then we also see big declines in jobs that only require what we call basic cognitive skills. So that would be basic levels of literacy and numeracy. And then on the other end of the spectrum, huge demand growth for people with all types of STEM skills, so science, technology, engineering, and math. So that's to build, develop and maintain these technologies. But also, I think, interestingly, almost as much demand growth for what machines are not good at, and that is social and emotional skills. So people who can work in teams, lead others, teach other people, apply empathy. So there will be a huge increase in demand for people with the soft skills, too. The good news for the listeners out there is not everybody's going to be a computer coder, thankfully, or an engineer. So if that's not your cup of tea, that's okay. But then really focus on those softer skills.

So before I ask about the implications for higher education, just go one level deeper, which is, you said that there's a silver lining, which is that you're not of the view that even as these individual jobs or job functions will be eliminated, new jobs will likely be created at the. It's not like this is going to be a net job destroyer. Did I read that correctly? Is there an optimistic version of where we end up in the future?

Yes, there is. So we look out, not forever, but out to 2030. Right. A reasonably long time frame. But as an economist, I can tell you all sorts of sources of new demand for work. So one of the sources is in health care. We, of course, have an aging population and older people consume more health care. And so throughout the last 10 years in the Great Recession, the one sector of the US Economy that kept adding jobs was health care. And we project that will continue as the population ages. There are also going to be a whole set of jobs that we can barely even imagine today. So if you look back 25 years, say to the mid to late 90s, so remember the International.

It's hard to believe that's 25 years ago, but keep going.

Yeah, the Internet. I know for some of us who were there and alive at that time, cognizant, the Internet was just a thing. Amazon had started selling books. Everyone was on AOL to get email. Right. And think about the jobs now and the growth of the Internet economy. E commerce, app developers, web designers, user experience experts. Experts. There's a whole plethora of jobs associated now with the Internet economy that back in 1995 we really couldn't have imagined.

So what do you think that's going to look like in 2030?

Well, certainly they're going to be a lot of jobs that are going to come up having to do with building and maintaining the artificial intelligence algorithms. So the way AI works is it uses a process called machine learning learning. And right now, machines tend to learn from what humans do. So, for instance, imagine developing computer vision. You want a computer to understand. This is a picture of a cat, this is a cat, this is a cat. But this is not a cat. Not a cat. Well, somebody's got to go through by hand and label all those photographs. Cat, dog, chair. So that actually takes a lot of work. And in fact, I just was reading about a new startup employing people in developing countries to go through pictures and just manually.

So image recognition, literally training the algorithm.

Exactly. And there are many different types of instances like this. So that's one potential source of new jobs. Artificial reality and virtual reality, or augmented reality and virtual reality. So AR VR is going to potentially be a growth field. So it's hard for us to imagine now, but I think that there will be part of the new jobs of the. The future are ones that we can't even really predict.

Okay, so let's shift to what this all means for education and the future of higher education specifically. You said STEM skills are going to be critical across a lot of jobs that maybe didn't formally have them. What does that mean for us in terms of what expertise we need to build and have?

Well, I always tell students, people always ask me, what should my children study? I said, look, if you have any ability at math and science, do that, because that just opens up so many doors. So for sure, for ASU and other higher educational institutions, really building out the STEM fields and figuring out how to get a more diverse body of students. So right now, one of the problems we're starting to recognize are biases in artificial intelligence algorithms, because they were all built by a very narrow demographic of person. So we really need more women in stem. We need more minorities. And there are now some programs, and you're probably aware of them or even have developed some of them to, for instance, identify why do women drop out of STEM fields in engineering and mathematics? It's like, oh, well, with a mentor freshman year, you can actually improve the retention rate hugely. So things like that, I think we need to really take seriously helping more students who start out, the ones who drop out at least stay in, and then even going down into the high schools and figuring out how to attract more kids into so much earlier in the pipeline. Yeah, so it's incredibly exciting when you think about what new technologies can do. So I think we have to convey that to students at the same time, however, I think there's going to be a big push for what we call lifelong learning.

Yep.

So the model where you go to school and then you're done when you're 22 or 25 and then you go out and work for 40 years is not going to work for any of us. And so adult continuing education courses that you can take at night or for a six week break in your job, that kind of intermittent learning is going to become incredibly important.

Talk about the liberal arts in that vision, because that's obviously a favorite conversation of those in higher ed. Where does it fit in or not fit in into that picture?

So I think there's definitely a place for liberal art. So remember I said, well, what can't machines do very well? Well, they're not good at a certain range of higher cognitive skills like problem solving, taking a lot of different information, synthesizing the results. Creativity also not good at the social and emotional type, skills of working with others and teamwork, et cetera. So I think there's really definitely a place for the liberal arts program and developing those innately human ways of thinking and reasoning and creativity that so far machines really can't replicate.

Will liberal arts majors of the future need a basis in the STEM fields or will they be able to say, oh, those people or those machines? Sort of got the basics. I get to think about, say, the, you know, the intense ethical questions about does this automated car choose to, gosh, God forbid, hit this person or that person when disaster strikes?

Look, I think everybody's going to need a basic understanding. And you know, this is true of business people today. This is true of CEOs and senior executives at major companies who are looking at adopting these things. Not everyone needs to be able to build it, but you need a basic understanding. And I think that will be very true for liberal arts students. I think a real sweet spot is somebody who can do both the engineering and math side of something and then combine it with, for instance, art or music. So those fields are just incredibly hot. The sort of interdisciplinary intersection of two different fields will be popular.

Sounds like in some ways thinking about sort of these things as STEM or liberal arts may be the wrong, maybe a false dichotomy actually in the future. Is that how you see it?

I do. And I think that it'll be a challenge for schools to think about how do you make engineering or programming a robot accessible to the liberal arts students? So when I went to college, and I don't think it's changed much, there was an engineering school, then there was a liberal arts school. And the liberal arts students were generally afraid of all the engineering classes and vice versa. So I think a way to create. And not the Mickey Mouse courses as we used to call them.

Right. We don't want the physics for poets or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. It's gotta be a bit more rigorous than that. But accessible to the other side of the aisle, as it were, between liberal arts and technology.

We're in Washington D.C. so that's a funny way, a funny analogy to use. But the last question for me is there's obviously this huge transition period. We're going to have to be retraining folks to get into this new economy. You just said not only do we have to think about what we study, but how we study. It's not going to be you go to your four institution and then work for 40 years. That's a lot of changes. Who's doing this? Well, from a government and policy level, from a company level and from an education level. Do you have like an exemplar in each of those that you would say, hey, this country is being thoughtful about this aspect of it, this company, et cetera?

Well, I will say at the outset it's a new world and nobody has it completely nailed. So everybody is starting to realize the scale and the pace of change that we're confronting. I would say there are several countries in northern Europe who have better programs for helping the workforce transition through different jobs jobs. And that would include Germany, which has a very strong government run set of local labor agencies to help people who are unemployed find new work. In Scandinavia and Denmark and Sweden they have what they call flex security models where companies can lay off people. But in Sweden, when somebody's laid off, they go to what's called a job security council, which is basically a caseworker. And it's not run by the government, it's actually privately funded by employers. And that person then would go and their skills would be assessed. They'd figure out, well, do you need additional training or do you just need information about where the job openings are? And so it's somebody to help you transition between jobs because it is difficult and it's scary. And so that is very well suited to the pace of change we're taking talking about. I think for companies, lots of companies are trying different things. There are companies like Amazon and Starbucks that are paying some amount of tuition for their workforce to get more education. Some of it online through asu.

Yes, indeed. Starbucks. Yep.

And that's not to Stay with the company. That's just to prepare themselves for whatever their future is. And Amazon has a similar program for their warehouse to distribution center workers. There are companies like AT&T that are going through a big transformation. They have also developed a whole range of different online course options that their employees can take to become qualified for the jobs that are growing within the company. Because AT&T is moving from being an analog telephone company to a digital company. And so it's similar in that the company picks up the tuition, people decide which courses they want to take. There are other examples in Europe. SAP, the big software company going through a big workforce transformation where there they're identifying of their current workforce which people need new training, for instance, to become experts in cloud or Internet of things. So they're a software company, they have lots of software consultants and they need to shift into these new frontiers of technology. And so they're trying to train a large portion of their workforce and it's happening more on the job within the company. So there are all sorts of different models out there and I think it's too early to say which ones work. I think one of the great things about the United States is that we do have 50 states and different states are getting involved in different ways. Arizona, I know, has been working with, with LinkedIn. The state of Colorado has been. So I think right now we've got lots of experiments and in the coming years we need to watch to see what works and how can we scale up the successes.

Terrific. Well, we'll be watching with you and watching your reports to see where this future is heading. Not just from the higher education landscape, but really this future of work and not just in the United States, but globally. So Susan, thank you so much for your work and thanks so much for us joining joining us in Future youe.

Thank you.

And we'll be right back.

This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher education and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. This episode was also made possible with support from Entangled Solutions. If you want to shape the future of education, Entangled Solutions would like to hear from you. Entangled Solutions is hiring smart, mission driven team members interested in helping world class institutions solve their most vexing challenges in learning and education. Learn more at Entangled Solutions.

And welcome back to Future youe. I'm Michael Horn, now joined by my colleague Jeff Salingo, back from reporting on your book. Welcome, Jeff.

Thanks. It's great to be here, Michael.

And we had a great conversation for the first part of the episode with Susan Lund, partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, and Jeff. She focused a lot about not just the fact that hundreds of millions of jobs are going to get actually wiped out over the next many years, but there's a silver lining. There will be many hundreds of millions of new jobs that we haven't even conceptualized, created. But a big thing she talked about was the content that we need to train people to be ready for those new jobs around complementarity and so forth. And this blend I took away from it of liberal arts and stem, and this is a topic you've written and thought a lot about. So how do you think about the training for this future of work?

Yeah, I mean, as I always tell people, technology's always displaced jobs.

Right.

We go back to the Industrial Revolution. We go back even earlier in terms of that. And the answer always been has. Has been to increasing technology is more education. And I think the question in this new world where machines might do jobs better than humans is how do we complement rather than compete with that technology? And I think the best way to do that is to blend the liberal arts with computational skills and with the STEM degrees. I think one of the most dangerous arguments we're having in this country right now is this idea of pushing more people into the stems because STEM fields, because that's where we think the jobs are and we see so much research. David Deming of Harvard just recently had some work on STEM degrees. Right. The payoffs are huge in the beginning, right after college, most people end up, by the way, leaving STEM fields eventually. And the payoffs are not as great in the long run. One of the reasons they leave STEM fields, especially think about technology. Technology changes and they can't keep up. The other thing that we're seeing, and we've been seeing a big, big change in the majors at colleges, universities, again, more. The humanities have been in a steep decline in the last few years.

Yeah, I mean, you look at the number of history and English majors, it's just hollowed out completely.

And I just finished a piece on this that hasn't appeared in the Atlantic yet. But because it's also happening, where it hasn't happened until recently is at elite liberal arts colleges and elite research universities. They still had great humanities departments. And what you're now seeing is fewer majors even than there and what the liberal arts leaders are telling me is that students see where the jobs are, but they also see the interesting intersections between the liberal arts and math, for example. Data. Let's take data in any of our jobs. I think in journalism, when I was leaving the Chronicle of Higher Education, the jobs we were hiring for were people who could manage large amounts of data to help tell stories. You need both the liberal arts background to tell the story, but. But you also need the math background to maneuver in that amount of data. And we see that in every industry. Every industry has some sort of science, technology or math as part of all their jobs. And so we have to have a blending of these two departments. It's not an either or. And that's what's really frustrating to me about this argument.

So I'm curious, because when I hear that, I can imagine a college just say, well, just double major. And by my unscientific count, it seems like many more students today are double majoring. So that's true?

Yes.

Is that the answer or is it reconceptualizing the major itself?

I think it's really about reconceptualizing the major. I mean, I think first of all, double majors are on the rise, mostly at selective and elite universities. It's much harder to double major. You usually have to come in with some credits or you have to have some time in your summer and things like that. And as we know, first generation low income students and a vast majority of students just don't have that flexibility. So I think that's one of the things that has to happen is how can we blend more of these majors? How can we team, teach more courses? We continue to be so siloed in higher education around the disciplines. As you know, I wrote this piece for the Chronicle many months ago about doing away with college majors. I got a lot of criticism about that. Okay, so let maybe not go that far, but this whole idea of interdisciplinary majors has been a talk in higher ed for as long as I've been in it, and I still don't think we're there.

Right. So let's stay on this because something that's always occurred to me, and I remember when the former president of Duke, Dick Brodhead, left Yale and joined Duke, he said to me, it's so much easier, Michael, to create this interdisciplinary thinking here because we don't have hundreds of years of departments that have operated on their own. But I think actually there's a deeper problem if I step back and think about it, which is that Tenure at a lot of these institutions is governed by publishing in your field, which gets increasingly narrower and narrower and speak to, speaks to itself. And there's not really these cross disciplinary publications that allow you to get tenure. So is the notion of trying to bang heads and get people to cooperate sort of at odds with this promotion process we have and how do we break that?

It is, it's not only at odds with tenure. And there's another issue that where tenure enters here is that when you hire somebody, you're making a 30 plus year commitment, which doesn't give you a lot of flexibility. So if history's hot now and you start hiring all these history professors, what happens in 30 years when history is not as hot?

Right.

Or these new fields? So it really constrains kind of the human capital element of colleges and universities. The other thing that we kind of have to break the bind between tenure and majors or this idea of interdisciplinary is also around kind of budgeting. Right. So the reason why the English department doesn't want to lose majors is because that then equals jobs, it equals faculty lines, it equals budgets. Right. Everything's all interconnected. And if we're able to break apart how we do budgeting and how we assign faculty lines away from departments and think about departments as an organizational structure rather than a budgeting structure and rather than everything else that departments that now focus on, I think that we could then become much more interdisciplinary. That's hard to do.

It's interesting. We've said we want Ben Nelson on the show from Minerva.

We have to get.

It gives, it gives, it gives ammo to me, I guess for the argument that as in many things with, with wind disruption and other change, not necessarily disruption, but other changes afoot, it's a lot easier to start fresh than it is to change the old things. So last topic that I think she, that she touched on was this transition period that we, while we have these hundreds of millions of jobs. And I guess just the one thing that I wanted to add to that conversation, Jeff, you weren't here for it, but was. She talked about how we have to pave the way and help people upskill and things of that notion and gave some examples of places that are doing it well, where they create landing spots essentially with caseworkers that help them navigate and the like. The other thing I would love to see more of is these learn and earn pathways start to mount where companies actually are paying entry level workers in some cases to come in and take a course of study before they even contribute as an employee so then they can contribute. Because I think something we forget a lot about in the world of scholarships and grants and so forth is that's great. It pays for tuition, but you still have living expenses. You're still trying to make by with your family. You're still trying to afford the lifestyle that you have had when you got displaced. And so it's not enough just to think about tuition in this equation. So lots of interesting things to consider there. Great conversation with Susan. Great to have you, Jeff, join us and get back to that book writing and reporting. And until next time, we'll see you on future you.