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Presumably because nothing says academic excellence like a revolving restaurant, University of South Carolina’s 18-story Capstone House has a revolving restaurant on top. The revolving platform was purchased from an exhibit at the 1964 New York World’s Fair by a USC alumnus who knew a thing or two about revolving (he went on to invent the chicken roasting machines you see at supermarkets). The restaurant, called Top of Carolina – the first and only revolving restaurant on a college or university campus – provides great views of the Columbia metropolitan area and is open during the academic year for Friday BBQ dinner as well as a renowned Sunday brunch.
Revolving restaurants aim to do two jobs simultaneously: marvelous meals + varying vistas. Of course, it’s hard to do both jobs well. For example, a restaurant revolving at 33 RPM would be far more interesting than Top of Carolina, which rotates but once per hour. But you can imagine how 33 RPM would complicate the dining experience.
The same is true in postsecondary education. Bachelor’s degrees ostensibly prepare students for their first job while also providing the fundamental cognitive skills they’ll need to live productive and socially valuable lives. Yet underemployment of new college grads in a full-employment economy demonstrates the degree of difficulty of doing both jobs simultaneously.
But unlike revolving restaurants, where it really doesn’t matter where you start, it matters a great deal for bachelor’s degrees – particularly for those students in greatest need of a leg up. At four-year institutions with effectively open admissions, only 31% of students completed degrees within six years. And since about half of all dropouts leave by the end of their first year – often for financial or family reasons – course sequencing determines the actual postsecondary education received by millions of students who don’t make it beyond the first year.
In response, a potentially revolutionary idea has begun making waves: start degree programs with industry-recognized certifications. Turning degrees upside down by starting with certifications while delaying general education has the potential to do two jobs: provide students with marketable skills off-the-bat (hopefully with a credential that will be intelligible to employers) while saving the degree.
As Goldie Blumenstyk wrote last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education, upside down degrees should be a no-brainer – a benevolent way to save the degree bundle. But as far as I’m aware, only one four-year institution has attempted upside down in a major way: BYU-Idaho via its online arm, BYU-Pathway Worldwide. BYU-Pathway online degrees require students to earn a certificate in their first year. There are 31 certificates, all five course sequences. According to J.D. Griffith, VP of Administration for BYU-Pathway Worldwide, the certificate-first approach allows students to avoid the trap of leaving higher education “with nothing but a lot of credits and debt.”
Not surprisingly, BYU-Idaho says turning its online degrees upside down has contributed to higher retention rates, particularly for adult learners. But despite the hullabaloo, don’t count on many – or any – colleges and universities following in its footsteps in 2020, or in this new decade. Here’s a 2020 New Year’s countdown of the top 20 reasons why colleges and universities won’t be turning their degree programs upside down anytime soon, ranked from least to most justifiable.
20. Inertia. U.S. colleges and universities have always started with general education before asking students to specialize. It’s always been this way.
19. Left-to-right. America’s entire educational system is built left-to-right i.e., each stage built on the prior stage. And it was decided long ago that 100-level lectures introducing students to broad fields of study are the natural next step after high school.
18. Easy. Because most faculty have been delivering the same 100-level lecture courses for years (decades in many cases), they’re easy to teach.
17. Fun. General education lectures are often eloquent and fun. Faculty enjoy dazzling large audiences of freshmen and sophomores, and students enjoy being dazzled.
16. Prestige. Certifications are seen as less prestigious credentials than degrees.
15. Degrees are Forever. Unlike degrees, certifications may expire; they’re not forever.
14. Employment Outcomes. No colleges and universities track graduate employment outcomes with any rigor, and they’re not required to do so by accreditors or regulators.
13. Completion. There’s no universally accepted metric for student retention and completion, which keeps completion on the back burner (relatively speaking, given the critical importance of the issue) and makes it easier for high-churn schools to avoid taking dramatic action.
12. Faculty Incentives. College and university faculty are not incentivized based on any student outcomes (completion or employment).
11. Passive Boards. Trustees – who are selected relatively arbitrarily – have become accustomed to following management recommendations; few are interested in rocking the boat.
10. Inexpert Boards. Only rarely do trustees have directly relevant experience to the management of colleges and universities e.g., teaching and learning, employability and the labor market, data analytics, education technology.
9. Profits. General education is the economic engine for institutions with large undergraduate populations. One faculty member delivering lectures to hundreds of students (often supported by dozens of low-cost graduate students) produces surplus to fund upper-level seminars and other activities.
8. Expensive Certifications. As Goldie noted in her Chronicle article, the exam for the PMP (project management) certification costs $555; one from the Society of Human Resource Management is about $350.
7. Unknown Certifications. Few academics are attuned to industry-recognized certifications.
6. Lack of Industry Outreach. Academia’s lack of awareness stems, in part, from the fact that industries and employers don't do good job of publicizing these certifications.
5. Employers Don’t Track. One reason employers don’t do a better job of raising awareness of certifications is that few track how strongly they correlate with employee performance. The People Analytics revolution remains a distant dream for the vast majority of employers.
4. Limiting Discovery. Asking students to select a certification immediately (or worse, assigning them one) may limit serendipity and discovery, which is antithetical to the “journey” trope espoused by so many faculty, administrators, and alumni who travelled through higher education in a simpler era.
3. Shared Governance. Faculty control of curriculum perpetuates archaic departmental structures and makes it harder to win agreement for major curricular changes.
2. Hard Work. Overhauling academic programs is incredibly difficult, involving all departments and faculty. Revisions on this scale are exceedingly rare.
1. Lack of Obvious Certifications. The most important reason why turning degrees upside down is so difficult is that few industry-recognized certifications are obvious fits for programs outside business and technology, and in particular for the liberal arts and humanities. When BYU-Idaho undertook a certificate-first approach, it was unable to identify a critical mass of relevant industry certifications (or perhaps wasn’t interested in paying for them). As result, BYU-Idaho’s 31 certificates are sui generis and may not be intelligible or relevant to employers at all. And if so, what’s the point, exactly? Liberal arts and humanities complicate the task by an order of magnitude. Where are the relevant certifications for English, History, and Political Science programs? And if every student in these programs starts with a PMP certification, should liberal arts colleges just give up the ghost and become subsidiaries of the Project Management Institute.
While I could not be more enthusiastic about turning degrees upside down and their potential to improve employment outcomes – and about stackable credentials in general – and while EMSI or Burning Glass could help colleges and universities identify relevant certifications, I’m skeptical about adoption. If other schools follow in BYU-Idaho’s footsteps, it’s likely to occur much the same way: in separate divisions or units, or for new programs only. By my estimate, in going certificate-first with new online programs, BYU-Idaho probably avoided about half of the afore-ranked barriers. Colleges and universities have largely adopted the same model (separate division, new programs) for competency-based education. And for some of the same reasons, CBE hasn’t exactly spread like wildfire.
So don’t expect college degrees to be turned upside down anytime soon. As a defensive strategy to protect the degree bundle, upside down or certificate-first may only gain as much traction on college and university campuses as revolving restaurants. And because no one has ever gone broke betting against the speed of innovation in American education, what’s much more likely is that colleges and universities remain stuck in a revolving restaurant of curricular reform, rotating at a glacial pace while students remain out in the cold.