Who Needs College Anymore?

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Kathleen deLaski Will Change How You Plan Your Future

It’s graduation season! As I write this, my nephew has just finished high school and he’s sleeping on the pull-out couch in the study. He’s visiting New York to celebrate his graduation. In a couple months, he’ll start college at Ole Miss.

To listen to him talk about college is to be reminded that I came up in a different time. I didn’t know what I wanted to do at 18…or 22…and the adults in my life reassured me that this was a good thing. In 1997, my college English degree was a ticket to a stable career, even with the college loans I needed to pay back.

By contrast, my nephew is practical in thinking about what college will unlock for his future. He wants to be a dentist. He sees it as a practical area that he hopes will give him a stable, lucrative career. He has made choices already so that he’ll incur as little debt as possible, choosing to attend a state school and applying for scholarships.

His perspective has been shaped by his parents’ generation. We have been telling him and he can plainly see that college can be a trap if you don’t manage it right. It can sink you into debt while preparing you for…what exactly? Careers that are changing so fast we don’t always know how to train people for them.

All of this begs the question: what’s the purpose of college today? Who needs it?

This week on Hello Monday, I’m talking with Kathleen deLaski, author of Who Needs College Anymore? and founder of the Education Design Lab. Kathleen’s work focuses on what comes after the traditional four-year degree, and on the 62% of people who either don’t go to college or don’t finish.

It turns out, we don’t actually have good data on what happens to them. Most of the advice we give people like my nephew is based on an incomplete and often outdated picture. But understanding alternative paths into the workforce is a critical step to planning for the future.

On this week’s episode, I grill Kathleen about what I should be considering for my own kids, who are just six and four. We’ll talk a bit about what’s happening on college campuses across the United States, particularly at elite colleges like Harvard. She shares some surprises about where learning is actually happening, and how employers respond to this type of training. And she’ll get really crisp on exactly who should go to college, and how we define the value proposition.

Hello Monday is LinkedIn News’ weekly podcast about the changing nature of work—and how we must change to keep up. It's hosted by me, Jessi Hempel. Subscribe to the show's newsletter.

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