 So we are now going to segue into our first hack and I'm looking at the title of it I think there must be some kind of misprint because it says get government money out of higher ed And we're in Washington DC. How could we ever suggest that and Future Tense has as one of its partners sponsors a public institution of higher education, so surely Surely you're saying get more government money into higher ed But to give us this first hack we have with us Brian Kaplan Brian is a professor of economics at George Mason University He is the author of among other Books the myth of the rational voter, which was really good. I actually I read that book and The upcoming the case against education Brian. Thank you for joining us. Thank you all for coming You know as a college professor what I notice is that it's very easy to improve student learning in fact you can do Any number of things and get very predictable results. So for example, you could take attendance Taking attendance will give you more learning. There's research on the effect of attendance on how much students learn Attendance actually works if you want to get attendance up a simple ways to take attendance and base students grade on it And yet outside of a few early classes with freshmen almost no professors take attendance So it's not at George Mason not any place that I've been it so that's one way that you could improve learning Now here's one you could have daily class quizzes You could actually say if you don't pay attention today, you will have a reduction in your grade So you better pay attention each and every day. You better not just say, yeah, yeah, yeah Whatever I'm going to figure this out later on rather. You can make people pay attention at the time You're talking by saying at the end of this class. There's going to be a quiz on what I said Right, or here's another one. You could actually count teaching ability when you make tenure decisions. I am on the George Mason oversight committee for promotion and tenure and everyone we denied tenure was an eye tenure based upon research No one was an eye tenure based upon their teaching. I made some effort to do that But no one listened to me All right So even people who have seemed to have the very worst teaching the very worst teachers are considered to be well above the bar Good enough perfectly fine Now what's striking about all these simple improvements as well as many of the more sophisticated ones that you've been hearing about and some of the ones are going to hear about later today So most of the most of these easy improvements fall on deaf ears People just aren't that interested in saying well in doing a daily and doing taking attendance or doing a daily quiz or Basing tenure decisions and part upon teaching ability, you know, really basing it not just officially basing it on teaching ability And it's not so surprising that the suggestions from proving learning fall and deaf years when you take a look at the labor market numbers Because it really is true that students who graduate from college on average make a lot more money Then to then people who have not graduated from college if you go into the academic literature Yes, of course some of the difference in earnings between college graduates and others is due to the students pre-existing ability But even after you make adjustments for anything that you can measure Still there seems to be a very large financial payoff for college Furthermore, it's not just engineering and computer science that are that are given that are that are yielding the numbers You can break it down by majors and while of course the majors that you think of as being lucrative are in fact more lucrative Even the majors that you think of as not paying Actually adjusting for everything you can think of still yield a substantial financial gain in the market So even education majors adjusting for everything else seem to make about 25 or 30 percent more than people who didn't go to college But did finish high school right, so on the one hand you've got The puzzle that you've got these easy improvements. They're falling on deaf ears if the labor market doesn't seem to care Labor market doesn't seem to care that students aren't actually learning very much Now to me this suggests that we are misunderstanding the function of college Probably a lot of the reason why people go to college is not to learn at all. That's not what's going on That's not what students are trying to do furthermore That's not what employers are actually looking for in a what in a large number cases, you know Obviously for engineering they care whether you've learned engineering But what about all the people in the non vocational majors, which is most of them? all right, so suggest that we should rethink the function of college and This is the heart of the book that I'm writing the case against education I say the main function of college really the main function of Formal schooling in general is not primarily about teaching people job skills Rather it is a way for students to signal to the labor market that they are Employable right and hopefully to signal that they're not just employable, but that they are awesome There's a there's a whole package of traits that students are trying to signal So there's the obvious ones like intelligence When someone does well in school, this is a sign not a perfect sign But nevertheless it is a predictor of greater intelligence and that's one that's actually pretty easy to cheaply replace You just do an IQ test that'll be that that might take an hour or two hours cost a few hundred dollars if you get an expensive one So I focus actually more on some other key parts of the package So conscientiousness work ethic Right now, of course once you start thinking that a big part of what students are trying to show to employers by doing college Is the work ethic becomes easy to understand why it is that there isn't a lot of man for easier ways Because if there's someone is if you go to someone and you say alright So or you know someone comes to you says well, I want to go and show that I'm really hard worker What is the easiest possible way for me to show that? Yes, you obvious well the if you take the easiest possible way that's showing that you are not a hard worker If you want to show that you're a hard worker you need to actually do quite a bit of work Furthermore, it's not enough to say well, I want to show that I'm really hard worker So I'm going to work hard for one day now give me a job That's not enough either because even a very lazy person will work hard for one day If there's a large financial payoff at the end of it for them So you actually need to show that you're hard worker not only to work hard for a while or at least to work hard enough But to do it for a long time Right, so maybe that maybe you need to show that you're willing to do this work for years before you can actually convince someone that you were generally a genuinely hard worker But a third thing that I think is probably the the real key to understanding college and education in general The students are also trying to signal conformity in our society. You are supposed to go to college in our society You are supposed to finish if you don't do these things you have shown that you are willing to violate social conventions And if you're willing to violate that one why not another and when employers are looking for people to hire They don't want to hire someone who is who is who is going to violate normal standards of behavior, right? They want someone who when they find out what is expected of them try to excel Within the groove that has been assigned to them Right, so yes, you know you get it you hire a computer program You want to be a computer a brilliant computer programmer You don't want to be saying well is this thing really worth doing at all maybe we should dump this client I don't like this project is not worthwhile Yes, one of my best friends from undergraduate days was a brilliant computer programmer He made a lot of money by distributing games on the early version of the internet and just asking for donations Every day he was getting about twenty five dollars. He was getting like four to six twenty five dollar checks from strangers So imagine how many people were actually enjoying his game you fast numbers and yet he dropped out of his first year and Was able to get work as a computer as a computer programmer But had a lot of trouble keeping jobs because he had an attitude problem. He was an extreme non-conformist So a lot of what you're really doing well, you know in higher education and you know in education in general is You are jumping through hoops You are doing things that you're supposed to do trying to do them well in order to impress employers when you're done Right and a key part of the conformity, of course is actually finishing All right, so on the panel people are talking about is finishing overrated Well, your employers are very concerned about someone who says well Yeah, I did a year college, but I thought finishing was overrated Hmm. Well, maybe you think that keep it following our expectations would also be overrated. Of course Imagining this conversation is actually getting we're getting way ahead of ourselves because probably the person who didn't finish college Isn't even going to get an interview Rather employers get 300 in 300 applications for a job Step one is they we as they look for any possible reason to say to not give you an interview and Once they're down to maybe 30, that's when they start the interviewing process So if you haven't met the paper requirements, you probably aren't even getting a chance to put your foot in your mouth and And and say things that will make your employer think well, we don't want to hire that guy All right Another way of thinking about the signaling model or a key part of the signaling model is that it suggests that yet that The idea of sending people more people to college in order to raise their income It really suffers from a fallacy of composition the classic fallacy composition, of course is imagine We are all you know sitting here at a concert now suppose that any one person in this room wants to see better What can one person do at a concert in order to see better? Stand up Therefore it follows this night does day that everyone stands up everyone to see better right wrong All right The signaling model suggests that the financial benefits of college are very much like that if you go to college You make yourself look better compared to other people you make yourself a more attractive employee This is likely to improve your chances of getting a job and the pay of the whatever job you get But if everybody does this if everybody goes to college Then it no longer serves as function rather what this means is that if you want to show off in a world where everyone goes to college What do you have to do get a master's degree when everyone has a master's degree? What do you need you need a PhD? when people talk about how the economy's technologically change one thing that's quite striking is when The Department of Labor is actually over time assessed what no way of what kinds of skills are required for different jobs to actually do different jobs They've been doing this for at least 40 years all the main thing they find is that The the main thing has changed is not so much what the job requires is what is required to get the job So there are many jobs which don't require any which we don't require any more skill today than they did 40 years ago The jobs have barely changed and yet the required educational credentials to even get an interview to get the job have gone up So your usual number is that out is that while you know the average worker now is maybe two more years of education than 40 years ago Only about 20% of this is due to the change in the kinds of jobs that people do Almost all of it You know the remaining 80% is because in changing requirements for what's expected to get the job in the first place So it's the difference between what you need to do the job versus what you need to get What you what you what you need to get the job and it's really what you need to get the job It has changed as education has risen rather than what you need in order to do the job Which is much more stagnant than people want to realize and people in this room are in the innovative parts of the economy There's a lot of parts of the economy that are fairly stagnant and have been for for quite a while All right now if you accept the story that a lot of what's going on in college is signaling That's really the main function of it the reason why people aren't interested in figuring out way and actually applying methods of improving learning Is that it's not about learning anyway? Once you were willing to buy the story Then there is an uncomfortable Implication for someone like me teaches at a public university which is well Hmm, what's happens when you know in a state in a in a signaling world right when signaling is the main function of college? What happens if you make it for more affordable? What happens if you make it easier to do what happens if you build more universities? So it requires less of a commute Well, of course, there's the obvious answer was it well more people go to college when you throw more money at it Yes, but then when more people go what happens and in the signaling model the answer What happens is you know not only do you have more college you also need more college Like what happens when more people acquire the credentials is the credential means less and Therefore you are it really is very much like the fallacy of composition of saying everyone can stand if everyone stands up Everyone to see better if college becomes more affordable and easier for people to do Of course more people do it, but at the same time there is the indirect effect of raising expectations for employers Now if our college were indeed giving people a lot of useful job skills Then you say well mean people go or get more money. You know people acquire more job skills They're better at doing stuff. They get paid more societies richer make sense on the signaling model though Education is primarily redistributive The main thing you're doing is not actually increasing how much you're going to contribute to the economy The main thing that you're changing college rather is your slice of the pie You are changing how seriously people take you you are may you are going to get your if you have talent You know you are more likely to get rewarded for that talent But in terms of what you actually deliver the world not changing, right? So then what is changing like how is it possible if a bunch of be a bunch of extra people go to college total production doesn't rise But all the extra college goers get a raise. How can that be? The answer has to be redistribution It has to be that other people are getting less because other people look bad in comparison to you when you get more education All right, so this brings me then to my hack if the main problem with Call you know what's really going on the college is that people are showing off to employers If throwing money on the system just increases the amount of showing off without really having much effect on what people can do Or what or what or or their contributions Then the obvious solution is to go backwards and rather than trying to make college more accessible cheaper easier Instead try to make it more expensive harder Right to mail you know it basically to turn back the clock to a time when going to college was something that was unusual The interesting will that would be terrible than a lot of people couldn't afford to go That's actually the whole point of my hack Right the whole point is to discourage people from going on the theory which could be wrong But which I am very happy to offend that what that it is not enriching society to any significant extent one more People to go to college, but rather what we're doing is just raising the amount of education You have to have so the way that I often explain this to my students is if people listen to me a lot of you Wouldn't be here. However, you also wouldn't need to be here So you would be saving years of your life and you know, of course if you love listening to me, that's great But I know a lot of you don't really love listening to me Wouldn't it be nice if you could just start your lives two years earlier four years earlier? Now the way that I finally to bring this around a hack so hack is normally supposed to be a very clever and creative idea My idea isn't I would say is neither clever nor creative. It's just super. It's something that is so straightforward So ham-fisted so kind of along the lines of being in You know in being in pre-Columbian Central America and saying, you know how we use wheels on toys How about we use wheels on bigger things? That's my hack. All right So similarly what I'm saying is, you know how we don't subsidize things that are socially wasteful usually All right. Well, why don't we cut back the subsidies on the socially wasteful thing? Now again, you may say well, that's not very constructive Well, when you see someone who is wasting their money Should you really need to have to go to package your advice to stop wasting their money with something constructive? If you see someone spending $1,000 a week in astrology, should you also say you'd say stop spending money on astrology? And here's something else you should spend the $1,000 on Seems to me that there's a great deal of value in just saying stop spending money on astrology and that's my hack Do we do Q&A or do I just Thanks Brian and now we are Moving on to our second hack Which is cracking the credit hour And this is going to be presented by Amy Leighton in who is the works with Kevin as the deputy director here at New America Of our education policy program Amy That's a fun presentation to follow So I will say that my hack is probably Similar but completely different I think I agree with a lot of the The diagnosis of the problem and around learning, but it's really the solution that I think is a problem I do think that higher education has become too much of an empty signaling mechanism And it's becoming one that's increasingly necessary and too expensive But I don't think the answer is to have the government stop paying for education I think the real issue is trying to get the government and then other payers to actually pay for learning Rather than seat time. So if we're talking about paying for the same old stuff agreed We don't need to pay for the same old stuff. Let's pay for something new Let's actually pay for learning right now. The federal government spends about 150 billion dollars a year in federal financial aid That's Pell grants loans to help students go to college This is the lifeblood of colleges and universities if that money were turned off tomorrow The majority the vast majority of colleges would shutter their doors But as with anything you get what you're paying for and right now We're paying for time and we're not paying for learning and we're paying for time in the form of the credit hour Now I assume we have lots of people in the room who have experienced credit hours taking credit hours. Yes Yeah, all right credit hours good So it seems innocuous enough you collect a certain amount you pass go you turn in your 120 you get your degree and you Go on your way Seems harmless enough, but actually I think the credit hour really Has contributed to some of the larger quality issues that we have in higher education But in order to sort of understand how the seemingly innocuous Credit hour has you know has affected higher education We have to go back to the original purpose of the credit hour So we have to go back to the turn of the 20th century to Andrew Carnegie The philanthropist steel magnet who was really worried about the fact that professors couldn't save enough money for retirement so he did what anybody else would do and He took ten million dollars and he created a free pension fund and he sort of set it up But in order even though he was very generous and that's a lot of money free pensions is a very generous offer He wasn't just going to give it out to anyone there had to be standards for who would qualify So the way that they determined who was going to qualify were full-time faculty and full-time faculty were defined as Faculty who taught 12 credit units which each unit being equivalent to that to one hour of faculty student contact a week And that was a full-time faculty so 12 credit hours For those of you who graduated or went to college more recently than I did. Do you know how many? Credit hours you need to take to be a full-time student Anybody remember 12 12 credit hours is full-time student It was never meant to be about students if you are a full-time student and you take 12 credit hours a semester It will take you five years to graduate. It was not supposed to be for students It was supposed to be for anything except for determining faculty workloads, but We took this very specific faculty workload measure and we turned it into all of these other things because it was easy and One of the most dangerous things is it's become a proxy for learning and in the very beginning the Carnegie Foundation said don't do that There will be a temptation. Please please please this is not about learning, but it's standardized It's easy. It's easy to count and so we ended up using it for a bunch of things But it isn't standardized. It has this illusion of being standardized But if it were really standardized you would be able to transfer credits fully amongst colleges between colleges across state lines Because an hour in DC should be the same as an hour in Alaska, but it's not colleges routinely reject credits Taken at other at other colleges they even reject credits in their own college if you take Harvard's summer school courses You can't transfer those to Harvard If a higher education doesn't trust its own credits, why should anybody else? We probably shouldn't I mean I really appreciate some of the comments earlier and Brian's comments about the quality of higher education I think we Study after study is showing that students graduates have learned shocking live little there was a recent not recent maybe the last six Years studied by the US Department of Education that showed that 70% seven well 69 almost 70% of college graduates Couldn't not college graduates couldn't do basic tasks like comparing opposing editorials. These are college graduates There's lots and lots of studies the findings are echoed by employers I think Jeff said earlier 87% of CEOs are like, what are we getting with these college graduates? so I think it's pretty clear that there is the correlation between Time-served and learning achieved isn't really as high as we'd like to think so we have a credit crisis We have students who've earned credits who can't cash them in we have students who have credits who haven't learned a lot and Then on the flip side we have millions of people who've learned a ton But because they've learned it in the wrong place or the wrong time it doesn't count So they might have taken a MOOC they might have earned a badge They might have gone to Code Academy. Maybe they went to cut They took some online classes at Khan Academy, but this learning doesn't count We need to stop counting time and we need to start counting learning So that sounds sort of simple in practice and you know, we have all these little pieces. How do we put them together? Well, I think it's gonna look the future is gonna look different in five and ten years But right now there's some emerging models where you can sort of take it all in one program in an institution One example is Southern, New Hampshire University's College for America. This is a fully online competency-based program aimed right now at working adults Oh, no, okay Well, it may not always be but there's nothing public yet. So So this is an extremely low-cost program. It's like $1,200 for six months and in that six months It's all you can it's like a buffet. It's all you can eat all you can learn in six months And there was a woman earlier who talked about courses and why are we thinking about courses as sort of being the you know, the the vehicle or the Container, thank you that we put things in And College for America doesn't have courses. I don't have any courses at all What they do is they take they basically said okay We're doing an associate of arts degree and we want to figure out what does that mean like forget how many credits you need What do we expect somebody who has this degree to know and be able to do and then we're gonna sort of map backwards And we're gonna say okay so how do we how do we set up some tasks and Projects for you to be able to demonstrate competency in those areas and so that's what they did There are no courses and this is where the sort of really fun and interesting part that's really enabled by technology comes in This allows the learning to be individualized and self-paced, so you can go in and As soon as you demonstrate your mastery of the competency you move on no matter if it takes you a week or a year and This is a really critical difference between some of the competency based models and the time-based models is that in Traditional time-based higher education time is held constant We are all taking the 15-week course and we're sort of you know sitting there for 15 weeks texting doing whatever And the learning is variable, so I may come in I may already know this stuff And I don't really learn a lot or I may be so in over my head that I'm learning Just barely the minimum in order to pass that course or you know It could be that there's sort of some combination of the two whereas I'm thinking about graduate school The amount of time I mean people learn at very different rates the amount of time it spent it took me to really understand econometrics Some of the econometrics course some of my like quantitatively gifted friends could have taken ten courses in that period of time But they had to sit and slog through it with me, so in this model we have Time is variable and learning is held constant So lots of exciting things happening there But the problem is that these types of models don't fit in well with the credit hour again, which everything is based on and It makes it really hard for these types of programs to receive federal financial aid and again without federal financial aid things sort of fall apart So unless we have that these are these programs are going to remain one-offs They're going to be really hard to scale, but the good news is this hack, which is cracking the credit hour Is it's starting to crack so just last year and I see how plot came from the US Department of Education here He'll be on a panel later the US Department of Education gave Southern New Hampshire's College for America They gave them basically a waiver from the credit hour and said you can give financial aid based on learning first in the country to do that Since then there are several other programs have been approved and more in the pipeline That's really exciting the president of the United States said he wants to create these sort of experimental Laboratories where more colleges can come and sort of play with the idea of Paying for learning with financial aid rather than time Congress has been introducing bills I don't know not left and right, but it's been introducing bills and talking about introducing bills left and right that would create more room for Experimentation and competency based education. So this is all very exciting So moving away from the time-based credit hour opens up huge potential for the scale Distance and cost issues that Kevin was talking about earlier But I think most importantly, I mean and I think the conversations around tech and ed tech tend to focus on those issues But I think the most important issue here is quality if as Kevin said making learning visible is one of the key challenges here I think this is where competency based education has a real advantage if we want higher education Not to be about empty signaling as Brian was talking about then we need much more transparency about what courses degrees and Credentials actually mean and that is why we need to hack and crack the credit hour Thank You Amy And as a former editorial writer, I love that the study you reference where comparing contrasting at a 12 was considered a basic task I love that so now we're going to have a conversation We're going to unbundle a little bit this theme of unbundling that we have been discussing all day in terms of Catherine if you want to if you're in the next conversation wanting to start getting mic'd up But there's been a lot of discussion about what's happening in terms of the unbundling of Courses credit hours degrees the intermediary institutions To what extent can we continue to unbundle or should? Education continue to unbundle given the expectations and needs of the employers who who as Brian mentioned in some In some ways continue to be the drivers of the system if college is seen as a series of hoops that Perspective employees have to jump through so to help us with the unbundling task We have a discussion that's going to be moderated by Catherine mango ward Catherine is a future tense fellow here at New America as well as the managing editor of Reason magazine Catherine So We're just going to kind of have a an open discussion here about about the question of whether or not a degree Still matters in the tech economy a quick introductions Brian Kaplan has already made himself known to you as a person who shies away from controversy and generally Does not like to provoke people. He's also professor of economics at George Mason. I Think we mentioned his book the case against education He is also the author of the myth of the rational voter and selfish reasons to have more kids So again very shy don't you know don't don't you know let him get upset with the controversy Michael Gibson Langley is the head of the of operations of Code Academy And Michael Gibson is the vice president for grants at the teal foundation and a policy associate clarion capital management I will note that Brian and Michael have both written for me and we've written about you So, you know if you want to you want to get on the bandwagon you can talk to me afterward about reason So let's just start with a very very fast lightning round I promise you get to use as many words as you want later But first each of you Does a degree still matter? Yes, no absolutely degrees Absolutely Yes, it no cheating For professions where we can measure performance most directly the degree will become increasingly irrelevant Should a degree still matter? should And if we in a in a perfect world it wouldn't matter very much I mean the game it like if I were advising an employer about whether or not they should hire on the basis of credentials I would probably say Yeah, you have to keep doing it because there's going you're probably gonna have some serious problems If you don't a given the way that you're getting you know given given the way that good workers currently behave It depends on the preferences of the individuals who want to make the decision whether or not Well, how they want their life to unfold and depends on the preferences of the employers on terms of what kind of skills or kind of Employees they want employees they want I Think it shouldn't matter All right, let's start there. Why shouldn't a degree matter? Well, just because it seems to be an indirect measurement of a bundle of skills attitudes and dispositions and it's very imperfect in that way, so if we can somehow Not just unbundle education, but unbundle our way of measuring these things or or even improving them I think that would be more important. So yes obedience matters Yes, you know sitting in a seat from nine to five without disrupting others matters But maybe there's a cheaper way to do it than 60 K a year, right? Brian, can you talk a little bit about? Sort of more broadly obviously we've already had your hack there, but could you talk a little more broadly about? Why these the sort of signaling? Function is so important is so irreplaceable or or difficult to replace at least right well So the easy answer is that government at all levels put say trillion dollars on the scale of the status quo every year So that probably has some effect in locking in the system as we know it But you know, but you know on a deeper level, so you know, actually even without any government money I think we would still see a system that is much smaller, but still fairly closely resembles the one that we have today You know big part of the reason is that part of what you're signaling is conformity conformity is based on convention and Conventions are really hard to change like why is it that the suit is but is the high status thing to wear to a business meeting? Why couldn't be kimonos? Well, I don't know there's no really good answer to that other than that other people don't do it We haven't done it that way for a long time, and it's not going to change And I think that college is very much like that it's something that Even more than before in our society something that people are supposed to do this people understand that this is socially expected Once that expectation is around Employers are very nervous about hiring someone who seems promising who doesn't actually meet those standards or again more likely It's not so much that employers aren't getting nervous as they throw away your application before they even talk to you So you don't even get your foot in the door to get a chance to as I said put your foot in your mouth We have angry head shaking which is always a good sign not angry head shaking first say I'd say two things I think on the demand side for labor in tech I think what my Michael's saying on this side is that what we look at ultimately in Technology jobs isn't ultimately about credentials and degrees when you say that you know a lot of degrees get a lot of CVs Get tossed aside before because we don't meet the paper requirement in tech It's not really true. The first thing we look at actually is what is your github? What that's the repository for code that people have if you're a designer We look at your design portfolio Those are the true things that really matter and the true signals that we care about and the second point in terms of our conformity Again, you know, I think to some degree that's true Yeah, we do want people with a work ethic who will turn up to work and who won't you know Toss the chairs and go crazy, but in technology as well I think you'll find that a lot of the big innovators are people who have historically been non-conformists There've been people who have gone outside, you know the realm of you know Conventional thinking and have had those extraordinary gains and stuff So I think to sort of say that that's the best signal It's limited. There's actually there's a little ambiguity in the name of this panel Right because it's in the tech economy and the question is does that mean you know in the tech industry Or does that mean in our tech dominated economy? I mean my sense is that people in who work in tech are kind of proud of the fact that they Would rather look at what you've done than what your credential is that this is something that they consider themselves sort of exceptional for Would you and would you say that's true? And what about the broader economy? Look, I'd say that you know for the food in our first up with the technique. Obviously, that's where you know I come from we ultimately Care about productivity ultimately care about trying to predict and find the employees Which will do the best work for us and whichever mechanism provides that best signal be it an MIT degree or be it You know your contribution to open source projects for the last 10 years or whatever whatever that you know predictors is We'll take so I think you know if it's good enough for Google You know if you sort of read Tom Friedman recently been talking about how Google have changed their approach to hiring and where The signal for college degrees historically which was important to them now is a lot less important They're looking at people who come by alternative mechanisms That's because increasingly important for us in the tech industry because of the shortages And I think those shortages have shown us that traditional predictors of talent and productivity Had not been the best way and that there are alternative predictors, which are as good if not better for the broader economy I think it's going to be an evolutionary process, right? I think what the tech industry has shown is that you can find ways to Evaluate with that a degree and if that's sort of can you know slowly transform to other industries that could be a good thing If you look at some of the other parts of the economy or actually maybe another way to say this is look at the top 10 schools and What their graduates go on to do by and large they're all becoming management consultants or iBankers and these are the jobs where Imagination is not a virtue Conformism is and so I think yes as that path will hold for graduates of Harvard who aren't working in startups I don't know maybe that will continue for years to come one thing. I'd like to ask Brian is Shouldn't you given your arguments? Shouldn't you suggest that we tax people who go to college? That is a great question and the answer is you know if If higher education were 100% signaling then that absolutely follows The only concern whether you know the two main concerns are first of all you would wind up taxing some some genuine learning you wind up taxing learning computer science or engineering along with taxing philosophy or political science or sociology You know, but then you know the deeper problem is just that I think government has messed things up enough and to say Well, just go and mess it up in a different way I think it's you know This is a case where it's better just to separate government from the industry rather than telling them to go and take it over in a Different way, so yes, but you know that that would actually follow just in terms of You know usual economics You know, I'm very happy with the idea or you know, very very open the idea that the tech industries are very different from most From the rest of the economy This is certainly the idea that my dad instilled in me So he's a PhD in engineering and his whole worldview was you know, there are two kinds of people in the world You know PhDs in engineering and taxi cab drivers Which one do you want to be? Still very confused at how I managed to pull this off, but However, in any case Out of all the people that I've ever talked to in the tech industry when I really get them off the record to find it Well, how does your industry really work? The main things that I hear from them are twofold. First of all We have become more and more credential silver time It's really in the 70s and 80s that you could get a good job in computer science without it without well being a high school drop-out That's the that is much more the usual story So it's much more expected now that a good computer scientist will get a regular undergraduate degree and show that he is a Successful normal assesses successful person who also does computer science rather than just Something rather than say special kind of thing He's just computer scientist and furthermore when I went with the other the other thing that I've said that I've heard from people Who are in the industry is yes They're all these they're all they're all that all these alternate routes of getting great jobs at high-tech firms But the bar is vastly higher if you want to get hired at Google by winning a programming contest Get to be like one of the five best-come people in the country Whereas if you want to get a job at Google by having a Bachelor's degree in computer science, then maybe only need to be one of one of a few maybe 300 best people in the country So it's the bar. So all while taking a tech does have these backdoor approaches and that's great They are not realistic for most people and they're not in there even today by most accounts They're not an important part of the market. You may have seen a different side of it But what a fraction of people that you actually ever personally worked with did not go to college? Oh, you know again it like you know in NCS not so actually just to kind of add to that question Isn't part of what code of that code Academy does offer just a different kind of a credential, right? It's not a degree in the sense that we were used to thinking of it But can you can you just talk a little bit about? How credentialing might still be part of it, but function Yeah So I think the notion of credentialing obviously comes from a direct or indirect measure as Mark was referring before About the quality of what you can do all the quality of your skill So we rely a lot on indirect measures of credentialing based on you know Harvard or your university for being a trusted source authority that you know Brian or Michael Lang did the work or turned up Enough over four years and though we should trust you know that they're they're good for co Academy I think the main thing that we're trying to do is I want to take the risk out of learning for people and you've taken the investment people There's no money up front. You come to the site. It's free to learn do whatever you want learn as much as you can get Some skills, but the true proof of whether or not you have and learn anything or can do anything is your portfolio Is what code you have written what sites you have built what applications you can deliver to the marketplace? And so ultimately what we're trying to do is show that you know No cost upfront get some real skills get some real proof of your Abilities based on your we can produce and use that as the best signal to the employee employers I'd say just to follow up on Brian's comment. It's tricky to think about the past Yes, I have a college degree, but I also used to use Windows 95 and a phone attached to a wall So I think technology will change things in the future more in the direction So you know my story about technology is if technology was going to disrupt higher education It would have happened in the 70s when the VCR came along The VCR videotape is an excellent substitute for most professors and yet that did not happen Sometimes professor will take a day off but would take a day off by putting a videotape into a machine and letting the students watch it While he would read in his paper But the VCR did not have any significant effect on higher education And I honestly think that the other innovations people are talking about are not going to change much either I'm hoping the idea that there's going to be niche markets or that there may be people who currently don't go to Normal colleges that will wind up doing the alternatives, but it's not going to bring the system down It's not going to be like an abster or anything like that You know like you so I want to say I wish you were right. Well, there's you know as a philosopher I wish you were right right as a as a tenure professor at a public university. I don't really wish you're right So I don't I don't really I don't really I don't really I That since I don't help you know selfishly speaking. I don't know what happens But just when you know when I just look around and see the how I'll read you know how rigid the system is and especially how harshly employers judge someone who doesn't go to college Right, you know ending it like the harsh judgment is not to the point Not not where the employer that looks you in the eye and says you're no good It's where they look at a piece of paper and throw it away before even giving you a chance Again, if you understand the time constraints that they're under it's obvious why they do it if you get 300 applications for one job You're not going to carefully read three inter applications they're going to be looking for reasons to throw them away and You know right now the first people who get in line to do something unconventional are shooting themselves in the foot You know of course it might be that the unconventional thing is better than nothing in which case in which case that might still be good For you and there might be a market for them But if you can get into a traditional four-year college and you're likely to succeed If you say well should I go and do this on you'll just go and do some you know some thing online that people haven't heard of yet I would say no actually one of the things so my my colleague my colleague Alex Tabrock has actually spent the last ten years Worrying that technology is going to put us out of a job and my big answer to him is so Alex What are you going to say when your son says I want to go to an online college? And I know he's gonna say no you're not gonna you're gonna do the normal thing because that's what's high status And that's what's gonna open doors and this other thing maybe some time in the distant future It's gonna be just gonna change but like by the time that your kid is ready to go to college Yeah, I didn't think so and he didn't you know what I know that I've got it But I've got Alex beat when he doesn't respond so I can use Michael you one of the things that you do one of the things that the Teal Foundation does is I guess on Brian's side of the ledger is a trillion federal dollars, but You do occasionally try to kind of The other choice Yeah, we run a program called the Teal Fellowship. We give hundred thousand dollar grants to 20 individuals under the age of 20 to leave school and work on Projects some people start companies. I think maybe that's the most or that's a Important side of the tech economy that we haven't really addressed. Yes, it may be hard to Even get a job at Google without a college degree But you can start a company without anyone's permission and without a degree so startups generate a lot of innovation in the tech economy and Startup founders do not need a degree to start a business and we're gonna see more and more of that I think because It's just in the last ten years So that that's become a viable career path and more and more people seem to be pursuing it Let's take some questions from the audience We have one eager beaver all the way in the back. So I guess maybe we get that guy like Hi, is this working? Yes, my name is Kevin McClure I'm an assistant professor of higher education and I'm interested to learn how the signaling model Accounts for a lot of well documented research showing that there are positive externalities to universities So this idea of it being socially wasteful is interesting to me Because it has huge public policy ramifications, right? So we know that 80% of our students are attending public higher education institutions and when we're talking about learning here We're not just learning about coding. We're teaching students how to write I mean, we're talking about some very rudimentary skills here that are necessary To be good citizens to participate in democracy So I was wondering if you could answer that very specific question about the model the signaling model But then also comment on this bigger idea of learning In the tape of learners that we have in higher education. Thank you so much Well Brian's Yeah, go everybody go for it lane first. Okay, so in regards to your bigger question, sure We're a co-academy. We only teach coding. There are a lot of other parts of education Which are very important for the reading the lifelong learning the great classics all that sort of stuff no doubt What I would say is this though if you go to college and you do you know a degree and then you come out like 50% Of college graduates and you're unemployed or underemployed You don't really in a great state of position to do continue with lifelong learning What I'd say the best condition that creates and facilitates lifelong learning is you're actually in a job Which is you find meaningful and that you enjoy and that you know challenges you so I'd say that you know We all hold this ideal notion I'm guessing a lot of us here enjoyed great college educations and we all have benefited from You know the classics and reading things that have expand our minds and helped us in our professional jobs But for the large majority of people who went to college I think there's a great self-selection here that we hear say college is really great But we're pretty so presupposing that this is the one sort of path for everyone and we've got to recognize the heterogeneity that exists within the Population that for a lot of people that's not the main game We'll let them not the main way for them to engage and be a better citizen or get those social valuable things Yeah, I think a lot of colleges and universities are hedge funds with sports sports fields and dating sites And those are extremely valuable country clubs have positive externality effects But remember that they depend on exclusivity for their the good they provide and I guess not none of us up here Have really addressed this issue, but I don't think technology will disrupt the envy market I think that will continue and colleges are going to provide the good that allows that Yes, so in response to your question first of all how can the signaling model account for positive externalities? The answer is it's quite possible the signaling model is true But education also has some positive externalities So that is entirely possible. So, you know, for example, it could be that The same the reason why students are going is it is to signal labor market and that's why it pays and yet Maybe it makes them to better maybe education turns you into a better voter and thereby gives you a better society So that's perfectly possible Essentially with the signaling model saying is that there's a big negative externality Against which we should be weighing this against whatever the positive externalities other people are pointing to You'd also say though that I have read very widely in the literature on the externalities of education And I'm not convinced that the positive externalities are there In fact, I would say there's you know, so some of the best evidence I think is if you just take a look at the payoff to the pay off that nations get from education versus the payoff that it pay off that individuals get and There in general what you see is that the payoff of the national level seems much smaller than the payoff at the individual level Just as the signaling model would predict so if you take a look at The work on when you what's on the Seves now so it's a little angle, but you know the work on what's called the macro mince return Which basically thinks about countries as being analogous to individuals and sees how much does GDP go up when I get when they're Average education the citizens go up usually there you get a pay you get something like a 2% increase in income versus a 10% for 2% for countries versus 10% for individuals and what's striking You may have heard about land purchase stuff on how little learning goes on in third-world countries So third-world schools are terrible They fail to teach basic stuff and yet you can also see that in the third world the private payoff to education if anything is larger than it is here Which again fits very well with the signaling model on terms of learning Here I would say that I'm you know, I'm interested that you are a professor of higher education It's been a lot of time trying to get economists to read more and research on you know by education researchers Because economists generally just take a look and see people go to college make more money Therefore they must be learning a ton of useful job skills I'm saying well, why don't we actually go and read the people who measure what people learn and find out what they're learning So you might take on the actual empirical literature on what people are learning at most levels is what I call my three iron laws of pedagogy First of all students actually learn very little So if you give students a final exam, you will notice my god I talked about the stuff for hours and a lot of students still don't understand it even at the end of the semester Like right you know like the very day when it matters most in their life to understand labor economics They still have a best a very rudimentary understanding of labor economics So first iron law students actually don't learn very much Second iron law is that students forget what they learn very rapidly So it is totally standard for someone to knows the material on the day the final exam to barely remember a year later And the third finding which to me is is the most striking Is that is that people are very bad at applying what they what they learn in class to practical situations So there's this whole literature in educational psychology on transfer of learning where they actually teach people a skill and then They give them a problem which is which is structurally the same but superficially different and People are very bad at actually applying what they learned unless of course you go and say Use what I just taught you on problem a to solve problem B And this is striking because in the real world you don't have voiceover telling you to go and apply trigonometry from 10th grade So people are actually very bad very bad at applying what they learn in school Here's the biggest question. How is the people know and how is people can do their jobs at all? They're learning so little the answer is learning is highly specific and P actual people most people learn by doing not by hearing lectures People learn how to do their jobs by being given a job and then copying people That's the actual way most people learn how to do a job It's not by sitting listening to lectures from someone who doesn't know anything about the job. You're ever going to do another question Yeah Well, I have a this was a very stimulating Conversation and give it what you just said shouldn't we be changing the model and what we call a degree? Really instead of just saying really does a degree still matters and shouldn't the Education system or the colleges or the academia Change how we really define a degree and what is the purpose of the degree and how we teach? I'm curious because the last panel and this panel seems still to think that the professor is the source of knowledge and It's a very interesting that I'm sorry I'm probably surrounded by scholars here and and I'm not trying to offend anybody But it's very curious to me to see that I think that the Role is not evolving and maybe that's where we should start this conversation. I Don't know the toss well I think the big elephant in the room is that I think we all acknowledge the definition of a university the definition of degree Conferring institutions has radically changed, you know over the last 20 30 50 years right institutions which previously were not Called colleges or called, you know tertiary educations has changed massively and so you know your point about well What does a degree actually represent? What does it actually signal? Who knows right, you know, I think it's a great book called what a university is for and so to look to track it through the history of You know how certain bodies which were previously allowed to confer degrees and how that's really changed It's really then sort of in some ways, you know devalued as a secret supply in the market for what a degree means You know, I would say is if you may make me the definitions are I will redefine education very quickly Unfortunately, there is no like there is no such person and it well, maybe it's fortunate There's no such person, but it's unfortunate. It's not me So I it is not it is not in my power to redefine education. You know, it's something that is out there You know people and really the definition is common property. Everyone has their idea of what it is right now We have converged on this convention of thinking of formal traditional schooling as being what education is And I think it I think it does matter that government all levels Puts a trillion dollars on the scales of the standard system So I think that we would have a more open system if there were not such a big bias in favor of what we have But so, you know, just just to you know, we really seem like just become more realistic about what education really really is about For most students, it's not primarily about learning right rather It's about you know having a good time and getting a job after you graduate to fall upon this point as well I think you know if you look at countries like say Germany where there are very strict definitions of what it means to be a teacher To qualify and you know at a professor level and all those sorts of things I'm not so sure though, you know having a definitions are Brian Kaplan would be the right way as well It's a regulatory approach either. So it's a difficult mix. I think and that's actually I'm gonna let you jump in a second but just quickly that's something that Code Academy has actually struggled with a little bit right that well just the idea that you know Who who qualifies as an instructor in that environment and can you talk about how you've solved that or how that Shook out. Yeah, exactly. So, you know Code Academy. We're actually a platform, right? So that means I'm not only can people just come to the site and do the courses We have a tool a course credit where anyone can come and produce content and teach stuff And so the our idea is that well, you know, why is it limited to people who defines who should be the instructor? Like you were saying our professors really the only source of this knowledge Why can't there be a wide range of other people who can potentially teach others and we've had over a hundred thousand people? You know start creating content to share with their fellow learners Yeah, just one further thought is college is an industry like any other and What drives innovation is trial and error and that's brought about by new entry in the market But right now there are a lot of barriers to entry to creating new colleges Just look at the accreditation process. It takes years and a lot of money. So Policy-wise, yeah, it would be great if we could lower those barriers I would say that we don't actually have to create new colleges or new institutions, right? I think what you know what we're trying to do at Code Academy. I think you know all the other online education systems It's not a really about trying to compete with college fields and dating sites and that sort of stuff It's alternative ways people can get educated learn skills For free and then you know, this will be a way that we can sort of take away some people who perhaps Recognize that you know going to college there, you know the investment doesn't make sense for them It's definitely an alternative. Did I see a story in the last month or two about? Places like like Code Academy facing stricter regulatory oversight. That wasn't go Academy. It was on like death boot camps Okay training programs. Yeah, although that is I mean that is an interesting kind of Relevant question right that I think it was in California. They wound up with a situation where As soon as an entity tried to offer something that looked a bit like it might be a formal credential in the way that colleges offer formal credentials Regulators did get nervous about it. And they said, you know, well, we need you to register all your professors and make sure they meet our definitions for the state and so there definitely is I think a Sort of a pushback, but not just the sort of subsidy side, but also the regulatory side But Michael mean do you really think that education is in industry like any other? I mean, I would say someone said is the suit industry like any other say no the suit industry It's quite different from other industries because a lot of the reason why people wearing the suits is to impress other people It's not primarily people are not primarily mirroring suits for their own comfort I know there there is actually there are some distinctive reasons why People buy suits that are not common to a lot of other kinds of clothing and I'd say you know And you know education is also very distinctive in that you could have something that was better and better in a long list of ways But if it was not recognized if it was unusual people would be very reluctant to be reluctant to do it So mean like say like, you know, here are some unusual things about education that I have noticed You might go say well, you know, just doesn't look like so first of all, uh, students seek out easy a's All right now. What's what's so weird about that? Well, they prefer for they prefer professors who I'll give easy a's professors who teach them a lot of job skills You can even go to rate my professor calm and you see they don't have any rating for usefulness of them of the content They don't write they rate you for you know, you know, interesting this hotness. You got chili peppers, but there's no actual Last time I checked maybe you need a sharper suit That would help So, you know, like when you look at this you so like, you know, you tell a student look you'll learn a ton of this in this course But the professor will give you an F. Do you want to do it? No I don't I would rather go and give the professor will give me an a who doesn't ask anything me I'm doesn't in any way enhance my job skills. So that you know, that's a sign. There's something different about this so although my favorite that one is students cheer when you cancel class If you were hiring someone to rebuild your roof and they said, hey, you know what? We're gonna take your money today. We're not gonna work on your roof. You would not go. Yay And yet students do actually cheer when you take their tuition money you don't get a refund the professor cancels class and Goes and it goes to Hawaii and then gives a talk and you don't get you pay your tuition You don't get the learning and yet the students are happy Why not why are they happy because they know that if the professor teaches less You don't have to know as much for final exam and all the counts is your relative ranking But yeah, even my you know So my my sons have known this since second grade when you know, they cheer for snow days But our paranoid about missing school and I well, you know, I didn't want to lead the witness I said so why what's the difference and they said well, you don't get penalized if ever if no one goes to school Then it doesn't matter whether you go to school Aha, so you understand the signaling model just as I think you know I think actually the signaling model is the out of all the social science I know it's the thing that I believe from the earliest age So I think from five years old I realize that there's a whole lot of stupid stuff that they make me do and if I don't do them do these things Then I will suffer and if I go along and pretend to care then I'll have a great life and it's worked out just as I expected Unfortunately, we are out of time. I think the least surprising revelation from this panel is that Brian's kids understand signaling Thank you very much and thank you