Unbundling undergraduate degrees: transform universities or double down on education?

Ryan Craig is a thoughtful commentator on US higher education. In this article he argues that restrictions on lots of campus activities to minimise the risk of Covid-19 change the university experience, making the bundle of education, sports, societies, residences, etc., less valuable.

We agree on the problem, but disagree on the solution.

For the past decade, it’s been unclear how all the ancillary components of the higher education bundle serve the employment imperative. The next year will prove that – for the most part – they don’t. Colleges and universities will continue to award the same degrees as they did for the capacious bundles of yesteryear. Students will discover that dozens of deanlets don’t help them find a good first job. And graduates with three semesters of a one-dimensional higher education experience won’t be at a relative disadvantage in terms of employment, in large part because whether the modality is digital or in-person, schools continue to refrain from teaching the digital skills and business knowledge employers are seeking for entry-level positions. Not that there’ll be many entry-level jobs to be had.

Craig provides a list of the types of transformations that all but the most selective institutions must make to survive. The result are highly employment focused institutions, with much few “experience” components in their offering.

I see an alternative: double down on rigorous education.

For a long time we have known that the number of study hours and the educational outcomes from university study have been falling and students do not necessarily sufficiently invest time in their independent study. As a HEPI overview highlights, moving online will exacerbate this problem.

So, let’s use the time freed from a fragmented employability agenda and the on-campus experience and help students spend more time on their academic work, the work that develops their capacity to understand a complex world and act effectively in it. Lots of the basic employability skills emerge from this. Nothing encourages the use of tools (technology) like the kinds of repetition required to be good at academic work. It does not take too many evenings drafting and redrafting essays to become a wizz at Word. The same applies to working with numbers, iterating through complex group assignments (no possible because students are studying for 40 hours a week instead of 16).

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