 Let me welcome you. Let me welcome everybody to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see and looking forward to hearing from you all today. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator. I'm the moderator. I'm also the Chief Caterer of the day. Over the past few weeks, we've pulled the forum audience and asked people, what do they think? What does the community think about the forum so far? What are your opinions about our different programs? And what are your suggestions about different experiments and tweaks that we have been doing and are considering? And the results have been really, really rich. I just wanted to share them with you. Just go to tinyurl.com slash forumreflects and you'll see a link. It's my blog post and a whole bunch of charts. What people think, which is really, really interesting. Which social media platform people are most comfortable using to discuss forum issues? What kind of new program efforts they'd like to try? As well as what guests in those teams would like to explore? So please check that out and explore. Really grateful to everybody who has filled out the forum so far. Now, that's it for where this all comes from. That's where all the different technology is and how it works. What I'd like to do right now is welcome our guest. Michael Horn is a fantastic writer and consultant, well-known in the higher education space. And you know him because he was a guest about a year and a half ago. He's terrific talking about the labor market's connection to higher education. He's the author of a brand new book, which is just coming out today, Taking Education World by Storm, called Choosing College, which is a new look at how students should think about college and how they should think about their path through college as well as what college can do for them. It's an incredibly accessible book. It shows the efforts of a lifetime of thinking about education and where it could go. I wish I'd had this when I was a bright young 18-year-old and I wish I'd had it when my kids were 18. Let me just welcome Michael Horn. Michael, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Oh, it's our pleasure. Our pleasure. I'm really glad to see you here. Listen, normally I ask guests, I say, well, what are you going to be doing for the next year? And I know your first thing is going to be saying, I'm going to be going all over the place talking about this book. And in fact, you're doing it right now today, not just in our forum, but you're going somewhere else in just a little while. But let me ask you, if I could, what are some of the responses you've been getting to this book? I mean, besides my own finish in this, what are some of the resonances that this book has had with people? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, it's obviously, I think this is officially the launch day that Amazon is shipping. So we're just starting to find out. But I'll tell you maybe some of the positive ones and then I'll tell you one negative one that I think is interesting because it's so. The positive ones, I think a lot of people are digging in and saying, hey, wow, you know, similar to you, this just opened my eyes about how to think about this process. A lot of parents have come to us and said, oh my goodness, this is giving me a language to talk to my kids about this decision. The third one that's really gratifying is that as parents are reading it, they're realizing, wait a second, this isn't just about my kid. This is about me now because we're all lifelong learners and we're actually going to continue to learn in formal education settings to continue to scale up. And this is giving me a roadmap and way to think about the decisions that I have in front of me right now or that I should be thinking about. And I didn't realize that happened. So some people said choosing college is a very misleading title. Guilty and encouraged. But I think it's kind of neat that people are saying, hey, this is actually, I bought it for my kid or I read it because I thought it would help my kid. And yeah, I'm doing that, but it's actually going to help me. Now the negative, one of the negative reactions I think is less a reaction on the book and more of some of what we found in the book as we'll dig into, we looked at why students choose college to get at the causal mechanism that's actually driving them to make the choice. There are a whole bunch of students who go for reasons that colleges are probably not thrilled that they're going to them under. And so certain admissions officers or past admissions officers when they read the book, they said, I hate reason number X. You should be telling kids not to do that. And it's like, but that wasn't sort of the role of the book. The role of the book was to expose why they're going whether we like it or not and then give advice about what you do or not do once you find yourself in that situation. Well, it's often a good sign of a successful book that you managed to irritate people in just the right way. Well, that's, I mean, if I can grant you some success here, if I can grant you a broad readership and some influence, what would happen over calendar year, academic year 2019, 2020 if thousands and thousands of students would be students and their families took heed of your advice? What are some of the changes that you expect to see in the world? Yeah. So I think the big one is that we'd like to see students stepping back from the college rat race that we've seen drive the varsity blues scandal and parents disowning their children to get financial aid packages and all sorts of craziness that's happened and just say like, why am I going? What's my reason? And it doesn't have to be some magnanimous. I know the rest of my life. I mean, that's unrealistic. But once they understood why they were going to make a more informed choice that really protected them from the downsides of not completing college, for example, and led them to make more productive choices. I think secondly, as a result, you'd start to see and this wouldn't be in one year. This would be in several years. You'd start to see the actual academic outcomes from colleges going up because you'd have better matchmaking going on in the front end from students. I think as you saw them becoming savvier consumers, you'd start to see colleges innovate to actually better serve these students because they would actually be making decisions more in accordance with their purpose and what's driving them and what's likely to be a good match. And when they don't see something that's out there that reflects where they are, they would be making savvier decisions. And then the last thing I would say is I think you'd see many more students actually taking a gap year before they went to college, recognizing that they're just not quite ready to consume that college experience. And I want to say this clearly. It's not that they won't go to college at some point. It's just that they might not be ready right now in their lives because they don't have enough clarity about their purpose, passion, strengths, abilities and things of that nature. That's a really powerful argument. I saw that at the end of the book where you were having recommendations and I couldn't tell if that was a recommendation for students and parents or for educators to support it. Yeah, it's great. And I think it's both, right? So that's the other side of it. What do we hope schools will do? I hope schools will design better front end experiences that, A, are more honest with students about when their campus is not likely to be a good match for what the student is trying to accomplish in their lives or where they are in their lives, but also actually partner to offer gap year type programs. And by the way, when I say gap year, I don't mean just backpacking around Europe and sort of taking a vacation for a year, but going through a series of immersive experiences, very experiential, where you get to be on the ground in a variety of jobs. You get to try out some things. You get to take some courses. You get to maybe do some apprenticeships or internships and you learn about yourself at each stage. And wouldn't it be great if colleges would actually offer that experience or partner to offer that experience? On the front end, maybe even given financial aid or even some college credit for what you learned during that experience. And then you'd come into the college, really fired up, really aware of what you want to do, why you're there and eager to learn. There is some research out there that suggests when you control for GPA, when you control for SAT scores and control for socioeconomic status that students who take a gap year and then go to college, they do better. Why not make that part of college and sort of replace the then ed start of a lot of colleges? So maybe it's 2021, I get accepted to college X and say that's great, but I'm going to spend the next year learning French and trying to write a novel in French. I'm going to be doing that maybe in Alsace. And then in 2022, I'll show up on campus and either I'll be a French major or I'll learn that I never want to be a French major. And what a great thing. I mean, I think, you know, something we didn't write about in the book that maybe it's another book or maybe it's I'm not sure which, but the, you know, the schools I think need to do a much better job of actually building in some of those experiences so students can learn more about themselves, right? Like you just described, I think high school over the last several years has narrowed significantly in terms of focusing on test scores and things of that nature and actually dropped a lot of the extracurricular activities or diversity of courses. And some of that pairing back was probably good, but I think we've gone overboard and denied students the opportunity to really learn who am I, right? And start to get a deeper sense of what turns you on and actually build passions. So you go into college super fired up about that learning experience in front of you and if it's French that's turning you on and writing novels, that's awesome, right? That you know that. And if after three months you're like, oh my goodness, this is the worst thing ever. Step back, evaluate what that means and try something else, right? In some ways it's almost like a series of gap burst. It's not an entire year. Like how can you quickly prototype design thinking and some thinking from how to design your life, that great book out of Stanford. How do you quickly prototype a few different fields and pathways so you say like, hey, this is something that really excites me but I don't like X about it. What are other areas that have those things about it that I might want to invest in myself? That's a great idea. Gap bursts. This is neat. Friends, I have all kinds of questions based on my reading of Michael's book but the idea of the forum here is for you to ask your questions, for you to put comments and thoughts to our author. And so again, if you look at the bottom of the screen, click that raised hand if you want to join us in video or click the question mark if you've got a question that you want to type in and share. And just to get you going, we had a couple of questions from people who couldn't make it today and I just want to mention these really quickly. On Twitter, Dave W. asks, if you could speak really quickly through both 21st century apprenticeship models for students and also to nano degrees. Yeah, great questions. So I think that one of the statements that comes out of the book is that College for All doesn't probably make sense at least as we have traditionally thought of that, right? That sort of statement. And that ultimately we need to be creating different pathways to match students where they are. And so I think whether, I don't know if it's boot camps or nano degrees or what, but the point is that we should be encouraging a flourishing of different educational pathways that students can come into and out of throughout their lives in a variety of ways based on where they are in their life right now. And the key finding from the book is that certain students are going to college to do what's expected of them, for example, because someone else demanded that they go to college. It turns out that that's not a great reason to go to college. They tend to be very apathetic about the decision. They don't enjoy the experience. And at least in our small data set, 74% of them dropped out or transferred from the college when they came there. That's not a good outcome for the college. It's not a good outcome for the students. Are there other things that they could have done to learn more about themselves, to learn more, to invest in themselves? And maybe college will be in the future, but maybe boot camp is the way that they start out, right? Or getting a nano degree, getting a taste of something, getting some credit for that, and then being able to move into a fuller education experience. That's a good answer. Dave W., thank you very much for the question. There's a lot to be said for that. And we've got one more question also from Twitter. The awesome Michael Berman, California State says that the usual expectation is that college equals a job. You go to college to get a job. But he says that according to you, the research shows that this isn't necessarily true. Can you speak to that? Yeah, I'm glad he asked the question. I think he heard me earlier this week. Talk about the book. So it's a very informed question. So there's a narrative right now out there that the reason people, students, choose school is to get a job, right? According to UCLA freshman survey, roughly 90% of students are selecting their school to get a job from roughly two thirds, maybe 30, 40 years ago. And the reality is we dug into it and actually looked at what students did, not what they say, but what they actually do, what they actually prioritize, the trade-offs that they actually make. Going to school to get a job is not at all what students are prioritizing for the most part. It may be part of their decision-making, but to say that it's the main driver is woefully incomplete. Students are really, and I'll just tell your audience the five main reasons that we saw students go to school. We're calling it, the first one is, help me get into my best school. So these are students that just want to get into the best for its own sake, right? And it's all about getting in, what they'll do on the other side. And yeah, best has some connotation of there has to be the network and the ability to get a good job later. But it's not really the job right now because particularly for this group who are often teenagers, the lowest percentage of teenagers in our nation's history right now have participated in the labor force. So most teenagers don't even know what a job is to be able to make a statement like that, like, oh yeah, I'm going to get a job in business. They just don't know what they don't know yet. Second was, help me do what's expected of me. So these are students who are growing because someone else demanded it. Third was, help me get away. So these are students who are running from something, but not necessarily toward something and college is something socially acceptable that they can say that they're doing with their time. The fourth was, help me step it up. So these are often students who are looking to get a better job. And then the last one was, help me extend myself. And this is sort of the students who are going for learning's sake. They want to learn more, challenge themselves. They've always yearned to be or do something more. And now they have the time and money to do it. These reasons you'll hear, like, job is sort of implicitly in some of them, but it is not the overriding reason. And I think we need to really buck that trend and present a counter narrative because I think colleges have a big role in helping students just discover who they are in the first place. And that actually feels a lot more comfortable. I think it's closer to the original purpose. I think many of us think about, when we think about a college experience for a student, I'm just not sure in as productive a way as we could be. Well, that's a really traditional view, isn't it? You go to college at 18 because you don't know what you're going to do next and you have that supported space where you can really explore them. I think that's exactly right. I think what we have to acknowledge is that some people aren't even entering college with that mindset. And so how do we put the scaffolding and structure around those students so that they can have those range of experiences on the front end that they need to start to be able to make those sorts of decisions and learn more about themselves. And it's not clear that a credit hour course sort of mentality or design is going to be the best way to accomplish that in certain cases. I think for certain students, it works really well, right? And we see that. And something that we have right now around college, maybe we're a little too angsty in some ways. You mentioned one particular campus, the two-year school. Is it Wayfarer or Wayfaring? Yeah, Wayfarer, yeah. And that's its whole job, is take you for two years and show you yourself at where you should go. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's a school. It's a startup college. They have Oregon State approval, but not yet accreditation, where the school grants associates degrees that is essentially in self-discovery. And it's a two-year journey in learning about who am I? What do I like? What's my purpose and helping you identify that? And all the courses are really built around that. I think it's an interesting question. Is two years too long time? Is that a right time span? But in terms of an experiment to say, hey, we've been getting this all wrong. We sort of, we accept you into your major. We accept you through a course sequence, and then we spit you out on the other end. And then you're like, whoa, is this actually what I want to be doing? Let's help you discover on the front end and then let you select your major and so forth so that you can really drive down on what you really want to go deep in. And so they've really rethought the college experience in some very neat ways to give you those formative experiences up front. Just a quick clarifying question, and then I want to poke the audience a bit more. What are you, is your book mostly targeted at traditional age? Would be undergraduates and 18-year-olds, or are you looking at the entire spectrum of adult learners and senior learners and teenagers? Yeah, we're looking at the entire spectrum. I mean, the name of the college is very clearly aimed at that 18-year-old demographic and the parents in particular. But the hope is that as parents read it, they'll say, oh my goodness, this applies to me with decisions I have right now. And the reality is when we did the research, we interviewed students all the way from age 17 all the way up to age 60. And if you look at the percentage breakdown of how it breaks down, we're pretty close to that 40% figure of over 25. And so in other words, our sample looks very similar to the sample of who actually goes to American higher education today and doesn't fit into these buckets of traditional and non-traditional students and the like. I hear that. In fact, just over on Twitter, we had a quick comment from Dave McCool who suggests, this isn't a question, it's a comment, maybe there's a business opportunity to create some materials to support some of these gap year bursts. Yeah, I think there is. You know, it's interesting, I learned about in the course of researching the book that there's this whole world of programs starting to emerge that offer curated gap year experiences. So there's something that I talk about in the book are Winterline or Global Citizen Year and there's an organization called the Gap Year Association that curates and helps people understand what the options are and whether there's financial aid available and so forth. And then there's, the other piece of this is that they're gap year fairs where people actually come to high school campuses or a place where high school seniors are and help them understand other options that are out there. It's a growing trend right now in American education but I don't think most people have conceptualized it as these bursts, if you will. And I think there's huge opportunity there because a lot of the folks offering gap years I think are still stuck in the notion that it has to be something that's international that it has to be, you know, it stretches your boundary and makes you ask, you know, sort of community service oriented questions and not that those are not important things. I think, you know, international travel is great but it might not be what every single student needs in every circumstance. I think there's definitely a place for these gap bursts and people could probably do it in intentional ways that I think would help very quickly build people's muscle around who they are. I think there's a huge opportunity there, I agree. Oh, this is great. Thank you, Dave. Well, friends, let me ask you to think of one of two questions opposed to our hardworking author guest. One of them is to think what advice he would give you or your family or people that you're thinking about who are starting to either apply to college the first time or who are thinking about going back or think instead about what advice he would give to colleges and universities who are trying to grapple with a student body that they seem maybe they may not be fully understanding but also when they have new tools like gap years and so on to try and respond to them. So, pose one of these questions and again, either use your you know, use video to join us on stage or post a question and as I say that, the excellent Roxanne Ruskin has a question and we just quickly put this up on screen so everyone can hear it and see it. So, Roxanne asks are you seeing a need for financial literacy skills for the students and what are the responsibilities of the student parents and also what's the university's responsibility for that? Great question, Roxanne. Terrific question and I did a podcast with Tim Renzetta just last Friday in fact where it was all about this question of financial literacy and digging into it, that's his passion and he runs a non-profit around this so certainly encourage you to listen to him and what he might say on the topic. I would say certainly that there is a void of financial literacy understanding among many of the students and it's actually kind of hard to understand what debt they did or did not take out as you sort of dig into their story and figure out what ended up happening but I think the other piece that we see is that a long times we in higher education and around higher education on the supply side if you will we view this as an investment and so therefore financial literacy is really important. A lot of students view it as a benefit not an investment. It's something the next logical step in their life it's something that they're just going to do it's all about the upside and so it's not entirely clear to me that if you offered the financial literacy data or courses or whatever else that they would know how to consume it. My takeaway was there's actually a lot of data that's out there that's not being consumed because it doesn't align with how students are in fact receiving their life questions and the progress that they're trying to make and the context the circumstance that they're actually in and context is everything, context gives meaning and so it's not just a question I think of financial literacy but it's couching whatever you do that against the circumstance in which a student is in so they can actually relate it to them and make sense of that information when they're ready to benefit from it. Wow that's a bit of a surprise and that sounds like it's going to be a lot more work. We have to really rethink in that kind of financial literacy we haven't gotten to mentioning debt yet but we have a question from a long-term friend of the program Tom Riley was a question about a different kind of debt, a larger scale of one. Tom are you there? I'm a technical guy and the future work that's going to be available is going to be heavily technical stuff to the point of jobs falling away that aren't and so you have a great problem of training people for jobs that aren't going to be there. If you give the technical guys a year off you'll never see them again because they're going to go try to make the million but what I don't see is how this year off is going to pay for it how are you going to keep them out of the military whose job is to change people's heads and just turn them into soldiers which is one way to do before you do them college but I just don't see that you're talking a realistic situation for what we're headed into as opposed to what we did 20 years ago. Let's push back, what do you think Michael? Thanks for the question, I think there may be a misunderstanding on my language when I say coding boot camp I mean a program that teaches you technical skills not the military and so and Tom tell me if I misunderstood your question but what I'm talking about is a series of experiences in and around the future of work that gets you to start to build an understanding of do I like this and do I want to invest in myself to really double down on these technical skills and other skills and so forth so that you could dig in I'm not talking about the military or anything approaching that I think that's a good option for a subset but that's not what I have in mind when I say this in fact many of the students for example that we talked to who are trying to run away from a situation help me get away so they're running from a bad hometown a bad family situation an abusive stepfather something like that for your college at that point probably not a great option because it's all about running away from something not necessarily toward something but the military is not a good option there either because it's also a several year commitment that is out of step with where they are right now in their lives and so we're talking about a much more a much shorter burst of investment in yourself where you're actually getting to work some jobs and make money so you're actually not losing money by spending on college but you're making money while learning about yourself you're doing these coding programs these technical skills programs these last mile training programs and the like and when I say boot camps all I mean is it's short cheaper education programs I don't mean military one other thing I want to make sure Tom you have a chance to say if I've understood your question right but the other thing I will say I think there's a bit of a debate on what skills will be valued in the future and the only reason I say that is there's no question that technical skills and automation and AI and so forth are becoming a greater part of the future of work and we'll replace wholesale jobs but I think it's also true that if you talk to a lot of the people studying this question that that actually could at some point work in the opposite way such that you will need the literacy to engage with say coding but that there will actually need to be far fewer coders because some of these because the productivity from far fewer thanks to the technology that's going to come in is going to greatly amplify them and actually a lot of the soft skills and critical thinking skills and so forth in the liberal arts curriculum will be in great demand and those humanity skills around that will be in great demand you will need the technical literacies to be able to interface and understand what's driving this it won't be like we've I think traditionally had the liberal arts in some ways but I think it's not the case that a lot of those skills will be going away in fact the things that are not routine, not rules-based, not research pattern recognition but are much more intuitive based on developing expertise in other fields I think will become greatly valued I'm saying on the military I've went through this period in the during NAMM with a forced military situation and it really messed people's heads up on the technical guy part of it most of your high-level technical people will have been drilled on such stuff in high school that they would be bored to tears with introductory stuff and you put them in the real world for a while and they'll swing or swim and the ones you really would like to teach better are going to swim and they'll be gone and it really doesn't matter it matters in getting the high-level technical job particularly during the 80s it meant more to be able to drink large amounts of alcohol and still and it did to write an English sentence and so fortunately that went nutsy but and the powerful discrimination against women and all kinds of things like that but I don't see that the year off is financially viable nor is it consistent with the type of the work situation we're headed into and I would be happy to argue that with you but now I understand the question better let's say one more thing on it and then we can find another question to continue to debate on so I'm certainly not encouraging military we're on the same page there for some people I think it's a great way to step it up and for them to learn about themselves but I don't think it's not my recommendation so I want to be clear on that the second thing in terms of the year off I do disagree with you I think there's more colleges that are starting to partner with gap year programs like financial aid for this there's an opportunity to earn money while you learn there's increasingly opportunities with on-ramp programs that the guests on this Future Trends Forum last week Michelle Wise just wrote about where you actually learn you get placed into an agency that will actually get you work right away and place you into a job and so there's actually huge opportunities for it to be a value creating step not a value destruction step and actually far more affordable than a college where you're going to take on a lot of debt and perhaps not graduate again this isn't to say you're not going to then take that experience and then invest in yourself and go to college it's just our research was extraordinarily clear that when you see these students there are whole sets of students who are not ready for the college experience and they shouldn't be going to a traditional one I'd love to see colleges frankly innovate with more experiential learning well in the front end but in the absence of that I think many more students are going to have to look at these discovery years and what I say to them is that they have no vision of the future because all they see is global warming and it's killing them and without a vision of the future you don't do that stuff I appreciate your time absolutely absolutely I really appreciate it friends if you're new to the forum that easy to climb up on stage and interrogate you can just beam right up it is really quick and easy to do so if you're in a spot where you can switch your camera on give it a try in the meantime we have a stack of questions piling in and so let me just put up a couple of these really quickly and this is one from Don Bartel who says does much of the discussion apply to those with means of family support to explore is great if it could apply to all economic quartiles how do you address it? this is a tremendously important question I'm really glad you asked it it's something that we're learning a lot about frankly right now and so if others out there have perspective or colleges can get into this I think it's really important let me give a couple other stats about people who take gap years so I said that they do better than those who don't but the flip side of it is that if you're in the low the bottom economic quintile or quartile a lot of students who take a gap year don't ever actually get into college and so then they don't actually benefit from the experience and all that it brings you and so I think a large part of that reason is exactly what you said that they can't afford these experiences and so they end up the job in Burger King or wherever and they just sort of stay there and never get out of that and so one I think that colleges one of the recommendations in the book is that if colleges can partner with these experiences up front then you could use L.A. to support it and allow many more people to take advantage of it rather than just those from the wealthier strata of society. The second thing I will say is that folks like Global Citizen Year and I encourage you all to check it out Abby the leader of it would be great to have on your form at some point Brian they actively have fundraised so that they can offer financial aid scholarships for students who are not in the upper strata of American society as well and reach down into the lower ones and then the last thing I will say is we actually in our book we talked to a lot of first gen students a lot of students came from the bottom 60% so each of the quintiles basically and actually our sample in the book is over represented among the lowest income students in we are relatively equally represented in other ways across American higher education but we are over represented on low income students in the book from the bottom three quintiles and actually we saw several of these students take what amounted to gap year type experiences but without that language around it so they would say I didn't get into my school I had to work but my parents put bounds around the experience so they were working they continued to do some learning on the side and then they reapplied to college and I just think we need to do a better job of creating clear pathways so that doesn't just become the exception that's reserved for the elite it's much easier for people from any walk of life to get into and then get out of and into college after that so they don't get stuck that's a great answer and I want to follow up with you Michael afterwards about Abbey and other people on this Dan what a terrific question I'm really really glad you asked and we have more question the stack is beginning to teeter it's getting high this is great we have a question from the excellent Lisa Durf who asks what experiences to educators in early childhood education need to provide to their students at the beginning of formal education to help our society rethink the college experience thank you for asking Lisa Lisa that is an outstanding question I admit I have not thought nearly deeply enough about this I did a podcast that I think came out today actually with the folks at the Highlander Institute Nick and Christina where they started to see some of these connections their basic argument was that the process and that the theory we haven't talked so much about that but the theory that underlie the research about what progress are you trying to make in this circumstance that we used would be something that would be really good to teach students who are much much younger to start to build the capacity in them for them to have the metacognition and develop agency that they could understand where they were in life and what they were trying to do next not sort of your master plan but in much more incremental ways and that if you could help students build that muscle much earlier and so sort of in my head I said well gosh I'm missing the book as we didn't address what high school should do and she was like no no no the bigger thing is that like you didn't even like you mentioned that but you didn't even think about what elementary and middle school should be doing let alone early education and so all I guess I would say is I think my thinking is super early on this and I don't know that I have a great answer but the process that we use to help people understand where they are that relies on understanding what they're prioritizing and helping them see themselves from afar if you will is a skill set that she thought a lot of people would benefit and I suspect learning how to ask questions in the right way so you could distill that from others in your lives and then educators could help bring those to the surface for students that they could understand them and then council them appropriately would be an enormous set of tools to help them. The last thing I would say is part of what I took away from the book is you know there's these students who go to college to get into their best school and there's these students that go into college to do what's expected of them and for both of those students it's sort of two sides of the same coin they're going because it's the next logical step at some point in their life it's just sort of like what they're supposed to do they're playing the game and they're just going along to get along and I'll be totally honest like I was one of those students I was getting I was going to get into my best school I thought when I went to business school later that I was going to step it up I was also going to get into my best school there and the reality of the situation is that I think we have misled students into thinking about the game as opposed to the process of learning itself and to enjoy the process not just necessarily seek the outcome and focus on getting into things it should be much more about the process of learning and the beauty and joy and learning and so forth so that they become much more engaged and have that growth mindset around what they can do I think those would be tremendous takeaways as well that's a really really great response thank you Michael and you can tell we are people I would say actually if you want to prepare the pre-k kids we should put them on the forum because people here are definitely definitely skilled at asking great questions and speaking of which we have one from molly butler we flashed this on the screen molly asks do you think your suggestions are somewhat similar to just going into college undecided yeah it's a great it's a great question and so what I would say is there's no question a lot of students are going into college undecided and I would say I think that's okay I don't think that's a problem my recommendation is not necessarily that people who help me get into my best school but don't know what field they want to go into shouldn't go to college I think they should there's excellent success rates they learn a lot about themselves and in our data set 83% of them were thrilled with the experience that they had had I was thrilled with my experience it's more if you're in these jobs of help me do what's expected of me or help me get away that there I think it's not so much that you're undecided it's like you're actually unexcited about college itself and that's a different circumstance of a situation so it's not that you don't know what major you want to be or what you want to be when you leave I think plenty of people are in that and I actually would say we need to be more honest about that as a society and say that's okay and college is a great place for you to figure it out in some cases that's sort of where I think we need to tamp down some of the well you're going to go and you're going to pick your major and you're going to go get your you know degree I think we need to tamp that down and but if you're going to get away from something a four-year experience with a lot of debt is probably not going to end well is the point and that's very different from just being undecided I will say like if you're in help me step it up those students tended to have great clarity about what they want to next up it's when they didn't but there you know a guided pathway program where there's no choice in the course sequence you're just going in you're going to take your courses and you're going to get out and go do what you want to do that makes a heck of a lot of sense there I think in a lot of the other jobs it doesn't make a lot of sense and I think it might explain why I guided pathway programs on average work better than traditional community college sequences but they're clearly not working for every single student and I think that entering motivation and understanding of why could help community colleges maybe tailor their programs a little bit better based on based on those entering motivations and understanding of where you are that's a really really rich answer and I can see there's a lot of dice there for quite a few institutions to heed we have one question actually that comes up actually from myself and this is for your help me get away students and that's kind of one of our stereotypes of higher education is that students like to go far away to change up their lives but I'm wondering is this population shrinking Americans are moving less within the country than we ever have we have access to more technology to get away virtually and also one of your get away points is people who want to get away from their job well we have the gig economy rising our people are actually having multiple jobs I'm wondering is that sector just starting to shrink or is there life in it yet yeah it's a great question so I'll say the help me get away job surprised me because I thought get away would be a part of something but I didn't think it would be the entirety of something if you will so students can help me get into my best school for example reinventing themselves with new people was a very clear part of it help me get away was literally all about getting away it was like none of this is working for me none of my life is working for me right now and I just run as fast as possible and it wasn't necessarily geographic right it was it might just be getting out of a bad situation in college it was sort of the rip cord or the escape valve that I've even said it was also the smallest percentage that we saw at least in our data set and I don't think our data set is representative it's also not longitudinal right we don't know if it's growing or shrinking over time it's just what you know we happen to see among the 200 plus stories that we chronicled and then the thousand plus survey items or people we've surveyed but it so it doesn't seem to me to be the dominant I think your hypothesis is a really interesting one which is we do see way less geographic mobility than we did in the United States and we know that students despite the New York Times perception they tend to enroll in a place that's within 50 miles maybe a hundred miles at most of where they grew up and so I guess the question I'm more asked out of it was if these students need to get away are we giving them the proper pathways to be able to do that or are we forcing them to actually attend does not actually giving them that escape that they need to fulfill their job and then allowing them to pivot to something that I would say is more productive and future oriented well I'm glad to hear that I'm not completely wrong on this but I mean I've and you know I would say and I hope everyone hears this you know I hope people read this book in this group and then they ask a lot more questions and do a lot more research and poke some holes and find some things that we didn't think about and sharpen the recommendations because this is sort of our first draft of that right and I view it as an ongoing dialogue and the jobs to be done that people have when they hire an experience it's they're not static right like they can evolve over time as the context and circumstances of people's individual lives to what colleges actually offer to the state of the nation and the world change those things will evolve as well and so this isn't a static view of like 50 years from now people will still be going for these five reasons I would I would expect it to evolve and I think that's a good thing well that's actually a terrific transition to a really deep question we have from Charles Finley they put this up on the screen he's at northeast and he asks if we're talking about life long continuous learning as the goal for our AI work future why educate for a four-year college experience it's a terrific question Brian your own book coming out in next year grapples a lot with this question having read it and enjoyed it so you know I think it's an interesting question so part of the statement I hope is that yes learning is lifelong and actually one of the central we make three points for students in the conclusion one of them is just this that learning is lifelong and then a lot of reporters have asked me are you saving for you know college for your kids you hypocrisy pathways and my answer is yes because they might go to four-year college but they might also have many educational experiences throughout their life that overall adds up to the same cost of college it just might take place over a much longer time horizon and in bursts that come at different times in their life as as they're living and taking you turns and different pathways and still and so forth right and that would be a tremendously wonderful thing I think for that to happen and I would hope that they would have a nest egg to be able to afford them that so that's sort of my thought I will say one conclusion I left with that maybe counterintuitive for the disruptive innovation guys me and Clay who you know everyone associates us with the prediction of how many colleges are going to close or merge in the next couple decades I will say you know I took strongly away from the research that for a certain slice of America anyway not everyone but a certain slice of America the stereotypical residential four-year experience is not going away because what they want like the job that they have is that experience itself like they want the classic four-year experience in a beautiful brick and mortar campus at a place with a great ranking and prestige where they can reinvent themselves with new people that's what they're looking to do and there are other ways to have that experience there's no question we could curate some of them and I sort of float a couple of those ideas in the book and you float many more in your book but the I did take away from it that for a certain set of students that experience this they want that experience and so it's not going away anytime soon despite what some of us futurists might say. Well that's a really brave thing to do a few people would admit to that and be that flexible appreciate the honesty and the candor there speaking of which we're down to the last couple of minutes of the session so I'm going to offer a little twist here on the interface you should see on the right edge of the screen a little teal colored box the podium on it so if you've got video capability simply press that little button and you'll appear on screen right away I can't stop you so it'll be just out of control for this thing think more about this future Charles asked a really really good question about you know how our how things will change in the impact of one particular technology under a other other changes in the future that that you see or that you've seen in the forum over the past three plus years that us to draw attention to you do you see changes based on say open education open access are there the technologies that are changing things what do you see is the impact of demographics on the model that Michael is sketched out when you see the future you know sees the podium or type another question that was your chance right and we have Tom back hello Tom all right on a I very soon the AI chip sets will be out and AI will shrink my orders of magnitude and they'll be all over the place very soon all workers will be there there will be a human being with their AI just as now I have a whoops calculated of course I bumped the damn screen all right right that's a very very different educational system work system everything changes when the AIs get serious just it's coming at you like a freight train look out thank you Tom thank you Tom that's something again we keep coming back to and we may do something more with that in the future the series of sessions we have another question has come up from the awesome Sonya straw who asks do you think the availability of financial aid for structured gap your experiences might help widen this opportunity to others who might not have the means or support for doing this I do I think this is a central recommendation that I hope colleges take away is that they almost have an obligation to figure out how to how to work in those experiences and not just the financial aid potentially giving credit for those experiences in the learning that you have in them as well so that they actually count towards something and reduce your load on the back end I think it's a really it's a really important thing that I that I see where otherwise will be will be unequally giving that benefit in society and others will be benefiting from it and learning about themselves and low income students might not be good question Sonya and I hate to say it Michael but this is really brought us to the end of the hour we've raced through a top speed through your book and you've been enormously generous with just showing us so much so so clearly and so candidly about your thinking let's ask first where are you going to be for the next month you're going to be on the road showing your book off to a wide variety of audiences yeah I'll be on the road September is a little quiet outside of some travel within my home state of Massachusetts so if you're in Massachusetts come by on Lexington and some events there and so forth and then once October hits October and November I will be every single week somewhere else so it'll be great fun and hopefully I'll be learning a lot well excellent excellent when you're doing all of this what's the best way for people to keep up with you so at Michael B. Horn Twitter account or go to MichaelBHorn.com sign up for my newsletter there and then I'm starting to make better use of Instagram and learning how to use that but my wife still says I'm terrible at it I'll keep going it's always good to learn well thank you thank you very much I really appreciate this and good luck with your book it's an important book and I strongly recommend it to everybody thank you so much I appreciate you having me and your guests next week are great as well oh thanks for saying that we know it let's talk about that and thanks again Michael friends don't go away let me just tell you about what we're up to for the next week next week we return back to unism that's that powerful organization that's been growing very very quietly and the forum has been one of the few places where people actually be able to learn about this we're going to have Jill Bouban there talking about their work which is fascinating and along with her is going to be Michael London who is going to be speaking about a particular partnership they've done with a very very interesting project called examity so this is your chance to dive into unism look under the hood and see where that's going it's important stuff now at the same time if you want to go back and catch some of these previous episodes going back almost four years head again to the FTF Archive on YouTube just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF Archive and if you'd like to keep talking about all this we're all over social media so keep talking on Slack, LinkedIn Facebook and of course Twitter in the meantime thank you all for terrific questions terrific comments I think this is really this week's subject was really important our guest was terrific we'll see you online otherwise we'll see you next week take care bye bye