It’s Time To Ditch 4 Years Of Costly College For Directed Apprenticeships
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
Short, intense directed apprenticeships that teach students how to learn on their own to mastery are the future of higher education.
So it turns out sitting in a chair for four years doesn't deliver mastery in anything but the acquisition of staggering student-loan debt. Practical (i.e. useful) mastery requires not just hours of practice but directed deep learning via doing of the sort you only get in an apprenticeship.
The failure of our model of largely passive learning and rote practice is explained by Daniel Coyle in his book The Talent Code (sent to me by Ron G.), which upends the notion that talent is a genetic gift. It isn't–in his words, it's grown by deep practice, the ignition of motivation and master coaching.
Using these techniques, student reach levels of accomplishment in months that surpass those of students who spent years in hyper-costly conventional education programs. The potential to radically improve our higher education system while reducing the cost of that education by 90% is the topic of my books Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy and The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education.
Let's start by admitting our system of higher education is unsustainable and broken: a complete failure by any reasonable, objective standard. Tuition has soared $1,100% while the output of the system (the economic/educational value of a college degree) has declined precipitously.
A recent major study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, concluded that “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.”
'Academically Adrift': The News Gets Worse and Worse (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
These two charts are the acme of unsustainability: college tuition has skyrocketed, along with federally funded student loan debt.
The typical graduate of a short, intense directed apprenticeship says “I learned more in a month here than I did in four years of college.” This is a statement of fact, and it is the result of the methods deployed in structured on-the-job training.
It is a fact that passively listening to a lecture does not generate the sort of mastery that creates economic value or the sort of deep understanding that is the goal of a classic liberal arts education.
It's also a fact that rote practice also doesn't lead to mastery, and often kills the very passion for a subject that in more productive programs jumpstarts mastery.
Our higher educational system has failed so badly that many students are incapable of writing/communicating effectively. In a world of rapidly changing technologies across every field and an emerging economy that places an ever-higher premium on collaboration and clear communication across multiple time zones and languages, the ability to write clearly is absolutely essential.
To “graduate” students with poor writing skills is completely unforgivable. Yet in the current system, if a student logs the requisite number of credits, a diploma is …read more
Source: It’s Time To Ditch 4 Years Of Costly College For Directed Apprenticeships
