The Robots Are Coming

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe. I'm Michael Horne, joined by Jeff Salingo and really excited for our guest on today's show, we have my former colleague Michelle Wise. We work together at the Clayton Christensen Institute, and she's currently the Senior Vice President of Workforce Strategies at the Strada Education Network and the Chief Innovation Officer at the Strada Institute for the Future of Work, which we'll hear more about. But before we go there, Michelle, something we love to ask guests when they come on the show is how did they get into this crazy world of higher education? So we'd love to start that question with you as well.

Yeah, I don't know if you want to ask me that question, because it's a long answer. I have a career trajectory that's more like a spaghetti noodle,

which is the future of work, right? Yes, it is.

Yeah. Pathways, Right. I started out actually in academia. I thought I was going to be a professor for the rest of my life, and I had this incredible tenure track assistant professor role at Skidmore College, where I was teaching English literature. And somewhere along the way, a few years in, I just sort of realized that I wanted to work with a more diverse student population. The students that I was teaching were great, but they were mostly white, affluent students. And I was teaching Asian American literature, you know, to eight or 20 of them at a time. And so I sort of saw the limits of. Of what I was doing there. And in academia, it's not like you can just kind of up and move and go, say, I'm going to go work at Berkeley with more diverse student population. It's just. It was right during the recession, I was lucky to have a job, and I made the crazy choice to leave. And luckily, I got an incredible job with an ed tech startup that was helping service members transition out of the military into civilian careers, where I really got to work with that diverse student population that I was looking for.

And.

And it was through that work where I met you, Michael, as one of the board members. And what was really important about that work is I got exposed to every online nonprofit provider's version of online education at the time. And this is like pre MOOCs. And so these were early days.

It's like 2010, 2011, right?

Yeah, exactly. And so they were pretty clunky at the time, but it was still incredible to get that bird's eye view into all this edtech innovation and just get an understanding of what that world looked like. Because everyone wanted to partner with us to get education to service members. Once that pivoted, I reached out to you, Michael, and I said, let's start a higher ed practice for what was then the Innisight Institute and now is the Christiansen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. Through that work, I got the amazing sort of perch to be able to see demos of every single for profit and startup's version of edtech innovation. So I have this. Through this spaghetti noodle trajectory, I've gotten this real great bystander, third party, kind of objective bystander look at all the innovation going on in higher education. And I had an incredible time working on projects around the disruptive potential of online competency based education aligned to workforce needs, and then wanted to kind of put the theories of disruption into practice and went and worked with Paul LeBlanc over at Southern New Hampshire University and built their research consultancy called the Sandbox Collaborative. And then now I work at Strada where I get to be on the funder side. So I've kind of had every vantage point in higher ed where I've been the professor, I've been in ed tech startup, I've worked, worked for a think tank and now I'm a funder. So I have empathy for all pieces of the puzzle.

So could you tell us a little bit about the Strada Institute for the Future of Work? There's a lot of discussion right now on the future of work and what it means. There's a lot of people studying this. What's the role that you're trying to play? And I guess we should say, Michael, that both of us are advisors for this institute, but what's the role that you're trying to fill that is maybe not filled out there.

So there are tons of initiatives right now and it's becoming a very trendy conversation to talk about the future of work. But it's precisely because there is so much energy in this space that it's important to kind of start getting some clarity about a lot of these projections that are out there. The waters are getting a little bit muddied when it comes to thinking about things like the skills gap and underemployment and unemployment stats and wage stagnation and job obsolescence. And how do we make sense of all this, all this noise? How do we kind of parse the signals through the noise? That's the intention of the institute. The other piece of this is I'm very swayed by the fact that because of all the exponential changes in technology, our lives could be getting longer and more turbulent just because we're seeing technology reshape the way we work. We also are seeing medical advancements increasing our lifespans, except for in the case of middle aged white males. But you know, there are, there are these, you know, it feels, it feels like it's worth thinking about, what if we have longer, more turbulent work lives, what are we going to do? Because everyone talks about lifelong learning and I feel like we are doing nothing to actually invest in any of the systems, the infrastructure and architecture needed to facilitate movements in and out of learning and work. You know, like I, it's so difficult for us to take an off ramp out of work or college and make it work to come back in. So that's really the purpose of a lot of the research which is trying to understand where are the gaps, what do we need to study more in order to seed that learning ecosystem in the future.

I think it's an interesting point because lifelong learning seems to be such a buzzword right now by everybody. And everybody talks about this concept and people shake their heads. Yes. But then when you talk about the tactics and the strategies for actually addressing it, we have a hard time. You know, we have a system that was really built for young people and it's been one and done. Right. And so, and now we're gonna, you know, we, we, we've had the president of WGU on recently and we were talking about adult learning. Now we're not only talking about adult learning, but we're talking about continuous learning. So what might a platform like that look like or what might a system like that look like?

Yeah, I think part of it. We'll have to integrate advising at a different level. I think anyone who works in online education today is seeing need to embed human touch, human voice almost more in the system than they had imagined initially. There's only so much you can automate. And so the advising and that high touch piece will probably come in the sense that people are going to need help creating some sort of navigation system for themselves. You know, Michael, you've written about kind of this gps, right? An education gps and it's precisely that there's so much out there, but these adult learners have no idea how to make sense of it. So it's not like you can go in and type something in Google and you'll be able to get a good answer for what pathway is really the best thing. For me, I don't know whether it makes sense for me to go to pluralsight or do a nano degree or do an EDX Micromasters. I don't know what the outcomes are for those sorts of things. So I think we're going to see interesting kind of platform curations of kind of marketplaces emerging where you're going to get more verified reviews, like consumer reviews of these things and whether they actually panned out for people. So there's going to be a lot of advising, there's going to be a lot of curation, there's going to be more free flowing information about what is sort of a needlessly opaque market. Those are some core elements I think that we're going to see. And we're going to see some new kinds of assessments of the future where we're going to get better at assessing where people are at now so we can then understand their gaps for the future that they need to fill.

How do you think such a platform deals with the fact to your point, and maybe this is what the institute starts to eliminate, illuminate is given the nature of work is changing so fast and I might get recommended to do a nano degree for yesterday's job, but there's a new job, there's new programs, we actually don't know the performance of those. How, how do these systems grapple or shed light on that for someone who's trying to navigate that pathway?

Yeah, that's actually really relevant to some research we're about to put out in. I don't know when this podcast will come out, but we're about to release a report all about, you know, in preparation for this kind robohuman future. What are the human plus skills that we need? So a lot of people who are working on future work studies the literature out there. Everyone kind of keeps saying there's certain areas in which we're never going to be able to out compete a computer. Right. There's just certain things we need to relinquish and they'll just always do better. But the things that they will not be able to do are our specifically human capabilities and skill sets. Right. They will never be able to maybe have ethical judgment about something. They will never be able to have a values, conversation or high emotional intelligence that we need in order to sometimes convey terrible news. So those kinds of human skills are a lot of the same skills that we talk about today in slightly different language around communication, collaboration, critical thinking. So I think those will be kind of foundational to these sort of vertical offshoots we're going to have to develop throughout our working lives where they're almost going to be like you Know, just little bursts of learning or sometimes longer bursts of learning where we get skilled up for, you know, moving ahead in the workforce. And so that's kind of the way at some point, you know, if someone is sort of has maybe gone the CTE route and is very highly technical, maybe their job becomes obsolete. There may be a case for needing to access learning to get at more broad based foundational skills that they need to develop in order to move into a management position. For instance, others might need to learn how to do SEO and learn how to, you know, work with an HRIS system or, you know, these kind of things that seem like more technical skills. So it kind of goes both ways. There's going to be some who will kind of have to go broad and some that will have to kind of go vertical.

Michelle I want to go back to the beginning of the pathway, the beginning of the, the spaghetti there of a person's pathway, and that's undergraduate, you know, traditional undergraduate education. You talked a little bit about the beginning of your career teaching traditional undergraduates. We saw recently some data that came out from IPEDS data showing a huge drop off in humanities degrees, even at elite institutions, both elite liberal arts colleges, where a third used to be humanities, and now it's under 25% in some cases because everyone wants to go the CS and math route. And even at places like Yale and Harvard and other elite research universities just

named both of us there. See how I did that?

If this idea of human capabilities, of complementing technology is going to be so important, I think the people in the liberal arts say, hey, that's us over here. Right? We could do that, but yet more people are not majoring in those fields. Is that, is that something we should be worried about?

Yeah, that's actually the crux of this report is if you think about these human skills and the kinds of skills that employers say they value and that liberal arts institutions say they cultivate, it's all the same thing. They're all kind of converging on these same skills of communication, critical thinking, those sorts of things, but they use completely different kinds of taxonomies to talk about them. And one of the problems, and one of the reasons why we are seeing that kind of decline in liberal arts majors is because we haven't necessarily done a good job of helping students translate those skills into the language of the workforce. So there actually are some really important skills that we are cultivating. We could always do better. There's a lot of room for improvement. And the paper goes into sort of making a case for problem based learning as opposed to kind of scaffolding learning artificially in departmental silos. But still there is, you know, liberal arts majors. We wanted to kind of curb some of the wild narratives out there about liberal arts majors because policymakers in particular are quite down on the liberal arts, right? They think of them often as worthless and not worth pursuing. There's not that roi. Others on the other side are saying, you can do anything with a liberal arts major. You will out Earn a STEM major by the time you're 20 years into your career. Those are false, you know. And so we want, we wanted to put some clarity around the outcomes of liberal arts majors because we can do that with job postings data. We can actually see where liberal arts grads end up in the workforce, the skills that they're deploying, because we're seeing the matching of resume data to job postings data. And we can see how they're moving from first, second to third careers and they're quite mobile and they're moving out of underemployment more quickly, but they're stumbling in the dark. And so there's a real kind of onus on liberal arts institutions to not be out there saying, see, we cultivate these human skills needed for the future of work, but really what can we be doing better in order to help create that education gps for them so that they can make themselves more marketable upon graduation?

How transferable are those human skills though, from field to field? It sounds like you're saying that you need that technical deep dive. Does my skills that I've learned in a liberal arts degree naturally poured over when I make that next vertical deep dive in a new technical field?

That's what's interesting about the data is if you take like a broader skill, like a broad human skill like communication, and you look at the different kinds of sort of most highly trodden pathways that liberal arts take. Like they're often in hr, finance and marketing and pr, and you actually look at the way that their communication skills develop, that they are actually, that that broad skill actually transforms into what seem like highly technical skills. They're working on things around conflict resolution, contract negotiation, writing employee handbooks. They're deploying that skill in various ways. We just haven't had visibility into it until now, where we're getting so much more sophisticated with labor market analytics. So that's what's really illuminating for us is to be able to say, here's what we actually mean by communication. It's not that you Necessarily have to. You're not going to go get a badge in learning how to do search engine optimization. But that broad skill enables you to learn how you transform that problem solving skill into SEO, for instance.

So hence the need to get much more specific about what we're actually talking about and sort of the what you're doing with it as opposed to just this sort of vacuous, You're a good problem solver, a communicator or something like that. Doesn't anchor on anything.

Yeah. We call it the need for a Rosetta stone. We need that sort of third layer of language to help us translate what's getting lost between educators and employers.

Awesome. Go ahead, Jeff. Yeah.

So, Michelle, one quick last question. You mentioned underemployment. It was the topic of the first paper that came out from the Institute. This is a bigger problem than we thought, correct?

Absolutely. I think people have this, again, this false narrative that when you graduate from college, a newly minted college grad who's maybe working at Starbucks or selling and close at the gap, that's just a short term problem, we think, oh, maybe it affects like a small minority of students or it just lasts a very short, a short amount of time. But what we found from our research is that you can actually stay underemployed. If you start off underemployed, you are five times more likely to remain underemployed five years out. And 75% of that sample of 4 million unique resumes actually stayed underemployed 10 years out. So it's actually not a short term problem. It's a long term problem with long term consequences, financial consequences especially, but also the loss of access to social capital networks and building that kind of vital work experience along the way.

So these presidents who say we prepare our students for a fifth job, not the first job, that's actually a problem.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, you have those, right? You have the we teach you how to learn, how to learn for a lifetime. Right. That first job matters a lot in positioning them for higher wage growth, for instance. And again, with this liberal arts outcomes piece that we're kind of looking into, they do end up kind of hitting their stride in their 30s and 40s,

but they do need help kind of more.

They do need help much earlier on in the process.

That's great. Well, Michelle, it was great to have you with us today and thanks for all the work that you're doing. And we're really looking forward to the work and the research that's going to be coming out from the Institute in the near future. So 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.

Welcome back to Future youe. Just coming off a great conversation with Michelle Wise. I'm Michael Horn, joined by Jeff Salingo. And Jeff, the area that Michelle's doing a lot of research on is one that you've been writing and thinking a lot about. And of course we've had Joseph Ioun and Susan Lund on the show talking about this notion of complementarity as the future of work and technology does more and more that humans shouldn't be competing with, but complimenting it. And that sort of creates some big questions for how we architect majors and courses of study. I'm curious your thoughts about what colleges should do about the research that Michelle said.

So there are three things that I think came up in our conversation around that that I want to point out. One was we talked a little bit about the humanities degrees and the huge drop off in the humanities. And that is worrisome to Michelle and it's worrisome to me because if these complementary skills are going to be critically important in the future and we don't provide students with both kind of the hard skills of the STEM fields, for example, and the softer skills of the humanities and the liberal arts, we're losing something. And so we have to figure out, I think, institutions. And this goes back to something I've talked a couple of times on the show about doing away with majors because we have to stop talking about the practical arts versus the liberal arts or the sciences versus the false dichotomy. Dichotomy does us no good. So that's number one. Number two, I think, and she brought this up, we have to help students translate the skills that they have, no matter where they get them and whether they're humanities majors or STEM majors. And I saw this over and over again in my reporting for the last book, is that students are very Good about repeating the bullet items on their resume or repeating what's in their LinkedIn profile. But as soon as an employer or potential employer starts to ask them, okay, what skills did you learn or what did you learn in that class or on that internship or on that project, they can't tell you what they actually learned. Right. They have a hard time translating the skills. And in some ways I think if we help humanities majors better translate their skills and that means like simple.

That's almost sounds like just like explaining, explaining. I was able to do X, Y and Z because of the.

And some of it's building in reflection into the curriculum. So I just got back recently from the University of Wyoming and they've launched a new system out there that they're going to eventually use for all their students called soar, which is essentially a web based database that allows students to inventory all that they do, everything from going to lectures and talks to their internships. And they talk a little bit about what they learn in each of these things. So that by the way, three years later, when you're actually applying for a job, you, you could go back and you have a record of this, you have a running record from this. So I think that's critically important. And then finally, I think in terms of this is that the STEM degrees in general and Michelle references a couple of times, the payoff starts to even out over time. And this is a narrative that we don't talk often enough about. Eventually the humanities majors catch up in terms of earnings and sometimes the STEM fields actually fall off. David Deming at Harvard Education School has done some work on this recently where he looked at the fall off in stem earnings after 10 years. And one of the things that he mentioned is that a lot of students are going into STEM because they think it pays money and it does. But 10 years out, their skills are starting to wane and they have to decide at that point, do I double down and go back to school and get more skills or do I get out And a lot of students who go into STEM for all the wrong reasons get out after 10 years. And so again, I think that we it's balance and I'm really worried that we're a little bit off on the balance of majors and pushing too many students into STEM for all the wrong reasons, not focusing enough on the translational qualities of humanities, given what's happening to the future of work.

Well, and in reporting with and talking to parents, I'm constantly surprised by the number that say, I don't want my kid wasting time on arts, music.

Even though, by the way, they might have any humanities.

They might, they might have been in many cases, you know, they're Silicon Valley engineer or whatever else. So it goes both ways. But they say, I don't want my kid wasting time on that. I want them only learning how to code and so forth. And I've been so surprised for the reasons Michelle said, which is it's very unclear computers will ever be good at ethical judgments, high emotional intelligence things, things of philosophical and fundamentally human in nature. And they may become very good at writing their own code. And so it's not, I mean, after the baseline and understanding how it works, the real value may be in these things that the machines don't do.

And it's interesting that was there was a recent announcement that was in the Wall street journal about MakeSchool and Dominican University in San Francisco. You know, Dominican being a small liberal arts college makes school being kind of a coding boot camp that doesn't have accreditation, Dominican does. So Dominican now makes school is going to essentially offer a computer science minor to students at Dominican. Dominican is going to take its liberal arts curriculum and move over to make school. And they may share accreditation out of Western Association. So it shows how we can have these models competing with each other, that they really do need to complement each other and blend together.

So, Jeff, the flip side of this on the STEM side is the liberal arts major side. And there's sort of two narratives that I hear on this. One is the research that Michelle's group at STRADA did around underemployment. Your first job actually could really harm you on your third, fourth, fifth job and to the tune of $10,000 lost annually with some compounding impact there, I imagine. But liberal arts majors, if I heard her right, many of them actually are able to jump and sort of hit their stride in their 30s and 40s and so sort of overcome that underemployment problem. What's your thinking on that first job? Because this is obviously something you wrote about quite a bit in the last book.

Yeah, and I get this question from parents all the time. And to me, the first job is probably less critical if it's really short term and leads to that second and third and fourth job. And really to me, it's around what's really referred to as job hopping. And I encourage new college graduates to job hop, often in their 20s, because I think in many ways in the four years of college now, it's almost impossible to learn everything you need to learn to be really competitive in this job market. And think about people who went to work for big consulting companies right after college. Right. It was almost like free graduate education for them.

Right.

Continuing to learn. And then they probably stay there for two years and then they go off and work somewhere else. And that's in some ways I think how people need to approach the job market after college is it's a continuation of college. Where are you going to go to learn stuff that will eventually lead to a more permanent career, more permanent job in your later 20s, especially if you don't go to graduate school immediately?

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Last thing just on my mind was she talked a little bit about this notion of moving more toward a problem based learning methodology. I'm interested that higher ed calls IT problem based, K12 calls it project based versus a more scaffolded learning structure by department. And I kind of wondered if that's another false dichotomy because I wonder if we want a more nuanced look at students and understanding. If you're a novice learner, having more scaffolding before you jump in, a full fledged problem or project may be important, but maybe departmental structure is the thing that needs to go. And you've obviously written about this in thinking about majors as well.

Right. And I think, as I said before, we need to kind of delink or decouple the connection between departments, majors and disciplines. And then one final question I have for you, Michael, is that we talked about the platform for what lifelong learning looks like. Lifelong learning is. Every conference I go to now, people are talking about this. People are shaking their head. Great.

By the way, as she was talking about it, I think she came up with the phrase continuous learning, or maybe you said it. I think that's the phrase we should be using.

So that's okay, because. Okay, continuous learning. How do you actually. How do you do this? Right. Because we have institutions that were built for episodic learning.

Right?

You come back and you focus on learning, whether even as a part time student, you're still focused for a substantial amount of time. How do you build a platform that allows for this continuous learning?

So it was interesting. I appreciate that she reads my work and referenced my piece on the Google Maps for education. But I actually wrote that piece in reference to places in the curriculum where the knowledge map is really well known. So in mathematics, for example, we have a pretty clear understanding of what prerequisites you need to learn before you tackle higher order math and so forth. And so understanding what you want, what you know, we can start to chart a path for you through material like that. And that's probably true for a handful of subjects in the K12 curriculum, maybe some higher education. I think the analogy is very tantalizing for helping people navigate pathways. And we know that Hunt Lambert at Harvard that we've had on Northeastern, other universities are working on constructing this. I just worry because that future is so dynamic, like Google Maps works well when the roads are not changing, but the roads are changing almost real time. And so I worry that our analogy for all this may just be a little bit off. And it's part of the reason I was asking her what does this platform look like? Because I don't know that I'm fully there that I understand it.

No, we need to be talking about that again on a future episode of Future youe. But as usual, we have a ton to talk about and we've run out of time. Thank you for joining us again and please tell your friends if you're listening to us on any platform, please rate us and send comments and also send suggestions. We keep getting some suggestions from for guests and we're going to be getting around to some of those folks that have been suggested to us. But continue to listen. And thank you again. And until next time, we will see you on Future.

You.