3 Takeaways - An Expert On Higher Education Talks About Critical Skills Not Being Taught At Universities (#172)

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

There’s great debate these days about the merits of a college education. Here, an expert on the topic, Harvard’s David Deming, weighs in with facts and insights on how colleges fail and succeed, the essential skills universities need to teach, how a college education fights inequality, the true usefulness of college, and more.

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hey, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Hey, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another Three Takeaways episode.

Today, I'm excited to be with Harvard's David Deming. David's an expert on education, and I'm excited to find out what people need to learn to have successful lives and careers. Welcome, David, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today. Thank you for having me, Lynn. I'm excited to talk with you today. It is my pleasure. David, as you've pointed out, a truck driver in the United States earns about $50,000 a year, and that's about what a graduate of a four-year college earns a few years after college graduation. That similar salary is the reason some young people decide against going to college. What do you think?

Well, I think that that is a sensible decision if one is only going to work for one year. But if one wants to think about salary over the course of an entire career, I think it's a mistaken decision for somebody with a college degree. And the reason, Lynn, is because even though salaries, as you said, are about $50,000 for new college graduates and for truck drivers, which is a job that is high skilled in some sense, but does not require a college degree, that's similar salary when folks are about age 25 or so. By the time you're 50 years old, in most jobs that require a college degree, you're earning double that. You're earning about $100,000 a year in a job like, let's say, if you work in marketing or if you work in sales or if you're a

business analyst, you typically double your salary over the course of a lifetime. Whereas if you're working in a job like truck driving or some other service industry job, there are fewer pathways to mobility. There are fewer management opportunities, fewer opportunities for learning on the job. And so salaries tend to be much flatter over the course of a career for people without college degrees. And so one way to think about that is the payoff to a college degree increases as you age. So you don't just want to think about earnings at age 25, you want to think about it all over your entire life. Fascinating. There's no agreement on what students are expected to learn in college. There are no required classes or subjects a student is expected to master.

The current education system was developed during the 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution. Is it outdated? What is the goal of schooling? Great question, Lynn. A deep question. I think it's possible to hold two ideas about college in your mind at the same time. The first is that a college degree is a good investment for most people who are academically prepared. Second one is colleges could do a much better job than they currently do of educating people who attend them. I think both those things are true. I think it's right what you say that the educational model in colleges was developed a long time ago and things have changed a lot and colleges haven't responded as much as they should. I think learning could be much more hands-on. It could be much more interactive. It could be tied much

more directly to the way that work has changed over the last century. However, it still turns out that people who go to college do pretty well. And I think that's because the things you do learn, even though you don't have a required particular course that's common across all colleges, all of them teach you thinking tools, teach you habits of mind, teach you ways of organizing yourself and understanding yourself and your purpose in the world that make you a better learner, that make you more willing to invest in learning on the job, invest in your own skills to comport yourself in the workplace. It's kind of like a learning how to learn environment in a lot of colleges when it's done well. And again, I agree it could be done better. But I think that's one reason why people look back and they say, well, there's

nothing I learned in a classroom that I use on the job. And in one sense, that's true if you're thinking about facts and dates and learning how to use particular software programs or whatever. But that's not really the purpose of college. The purpose of college is to teach you how to be a lifelong learner, teach you how to be a problem solver, teach you how to understand the perspectives of others and work with them. So I think that's what a good college is doing when the education succeeds. Can you explain that a little more? What do you think that students should actually learn in school or college? Well, one way to think about it is that jobs change a lot from the time when someone graduates college to the time when they retire. It's hard to think of a person who's basically doing the same thing for 40 years on the job. And so the question is, what kind of

education do you want if you know that the thing you're going to be doing on a day-to-day basis at work is going to change many, many times over the course of your life? You want an education that's flexible. You don't want an education that teaches you how to use some machine that everyone's using at work, like, for example, a laptop computer or an iPad or something. We could teach people all the keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Word at college. And in a narrow sense, that would be very useful if you wanted to go work in investment banking or something. But we don't do that because those shortcuts are going to change and people probably won't use keyboards in a few years because of advances in AI. And so the challenge is how to educate people for an uncertain future. And what that implies is that we ought to be teaching people how to learn, how to think, how to work with each other. Timeless, durable, flexible skills. And again, I don't think colleges do a perfect job of it, but I think that's what we ought to be doing. Author and teacher Yuval Noah Harari says that traditionally life has been divided into two parts, a period of learning followed by a period of working, where in the first part,

people build a stable identity and acquire personal and professional skills. And then the second part of their lives, they rely on that identity and skills to navigate the world, earn a living and contribute to society. But he believes that if you try to hold on to some stable identity, a stable job, a stable worldview, that you will be left behind and the world will fly by. What do you think? I very much agree with the first part, diagnosis, that life is divided into those two phases. There's another analogy. If you're a computer science person or a technical person, it's the explore-exploit dynamic. So you spend some time exploring a situation, figuring out what works for you, what is a

good match for your skills. And then once you figure that out, you press forward and become more goal-oriented. I think that's been true for, it's certainly been true for me in my own life. Once I found out that I wanted to be a scholar, it was go, go, but it took me a while to get there. And I imagine that's true for many other people. So I very much agree with the diagnosis. I don't know what it means to always be shifting your identity or to be thinking. I think it's possible to work at a job for a long time, but not do it the same way or to have the same identity, but allow it to evolve on the margins in response to changes in society. So I'm not really sure how to take that

last statement, because it sort of depends on how flexible you need to be. Sometimes you're fortunate to live in a period of relative stability. And sometimes you live in periods of tremendous upheaval, and nobody knows what the future holds. And so I do think a good education prepares you for either eventuality. But so I do think a good education prepares you for either eventuality, but I don't think it's necessarily true that you need to end up going down one or the other path. I think it very much depends on circumstance. And how do you see resilience, soft skills, and emotional balance? Well, I think they're tremendously important, Lynn. And I actually think that we're just at the dawn of understanding how important those skills are and how to measure them and how

to build them. And part of what I do in my own research is try to take the soft out of soft skills by developing testable, quantifiable, like concrete measures of soft skills. Things like, how do we know whether someone's good in a team? How do we know whether someone makes good decisions about resource allocation consistently across settings? Would they be a good manager? And I try to make those things testable. And if we can measure them, then we know how to build them. We know whether people can change and how they can change. And so I think it's a high priority because if you ask employers, what are the kinds of things they're looking for? It's all the things you mentioned, resilience, emotional stability, problem solving, teamwork, et cetera. And yet we don't really do

a good job of measuring them or taking them seriously in high stakes settings, like choosing who goes to college or choosing who's going to get hired. We kind of just wave our hands and say, well, I think somebody has resilience because they told me they were resilient or because I did a 30 minute job interview with them and they seemed resilient. But I think we could become much more serious about soft skills. And that's what I intend to do in my own work. Is there anything right now about those soft skills? What conclusions have you come to? I'll be concrete about one of them.

The element of the soft skills paradigm that I've spent the most time thinking about and working on is the idea of teamwork and social skills, I would call them. I wrote a paper a few years ago showing that over the last few decades, jobs that require high levels of teamwork and social interaction have grown by more than 10 percentage points as a share of all jobs in the US economy. So they're becoming much more common as the kind of jobs that people hold, and they're paying relatively higher wages. So these are jobs that are an increasingly greater share of high earning, high status jobs in society. It's becoming harder and harder to just be a good technical person. You also have to understand

how to work with others. And the reason for that is technological. It's as we develop tools that automate physical tasks, but also information processing tasks, what's left of the human things and the things that require complexity and interaction and what economists call comparative advantage, which is like, you know, if Lynn and I were going to work on a project together, there's some things Lynn's really good at. There's some things I'm really good at. Can we figure out who's going to do what? And in order for me to work well with Lynn, I have to know not only my own skills and weaknesses, but also hers. We have to understand each other in order to arrive at a division of labor on some project that makes sense. And that I think shows, you can see

evidence in the economy that that skill is becoming more important. And then I've also done some work on the very micro side, developing a way to figure out whether some people are good contributors to groups. And it's basically like, how do you figure out if three people are in a team and the team does really well? Is it because Lynn made the great contribution, because David made the great contribution, or because Alex made the great contribution? You can't figure it out in any one instance. So you have to put people on a bunch of different teams and figure out whether they consistently add to the team. And so we found evidence that that was true as well. Interesting. How do you think that artificial intelligence and large language models like chat GPT will change education and careers? It's really hard to make predictions,

especially about the future, as Yogi Berra said, but I'll try, Lynn. I think that AI is, I think of it as not something fundamentally different, but something much more accelerated relative to previous digital technologies in that it's really commodifying people's access to and ability to analyze and synthesize digital information. So what AI is doing is it's taking all of the corpus of text on the web, if he's chat, GBT programs and others, and it's making it easy to translate it into like, I want to write a recommendation letter, or I need to write a memo or something. And it's helping you do other things and ask questions and basically interact with digital information really easily.

And so you might ask, well, what's left for people to do? I think it's a lot of the work that's about meaning. So working together to figure out what are our goals, either as individuals or as an organization and decision-making. So AI is a tool that gives you access to tremendous amounts of information. You can also analyze it, but it doesn't tell you what to do because that has to do with not just predictions about what's likely to happen, but also values. What are our organization's values?

And being a leader is not just about having all the information at your fingertips. It's knowing what you stand for and what you don't. And so I think those skills are going to become even more important as AI makes it easier to do all the other stuff. The U.S. spends billions of dollars every year on job training programs, and yet most rigorous analysis of the results of these programs don't show much or any benefit at all. What do we know about job training and what works? You're right. The U.S. spends a ton of money. I think it's important to say, though, that we spend a lot less as a share of GDP than most other wealthy countries. We spend about 20%

of the OECD average on active labor market policies. That's things like apprenticeships, wage subsidies, job training of various sorts. So we don't actually take it that seriously as a country, but we should. I think most of the studies that you mentioned have studied kind of small programs that work in isolation, and they tend to target a very hard to reach population, which is workers who have been displaced by trade or technology, typically older people who have families who have been in a job for a long time, and nobody has quite figured out how to address workforce issues for those workers. But there is good news. There's a very promising set of programs studied in part by my colleague, Larry Katz, here at Harvard, which is programs that take younger people who don't have college degrees and bring them in, often in a residential setting for a year or so, and combine soft skills training. So teaching them the importance of working actively

with a supervisor, the importance of connecting with fellow teammates on the job, soft skills, basically. And then they also train them for a specific industry and they partner with employers who are local to those settings. So for example, these are programs like Europe is one. And what they do is in New York, they might have a bunch of employers who hire in finance. And so they say, well, look, we need some people who don't necessarily need to have college degrees. We want them to work in the bank. And so Europe will partner with these companies and the companies will either in a soft way or in a hard way, commit to hiring a certain number of graduates. And they bring these folks in and get a sense of whether they're a good fit for the company, et cetera, et cetera.

And at the same time, they're also learning soft skills. And those evaluations of those programs have been extremely successful. So that's a really, I think, promising path for taking people who don't have college degrees and preparing them for work in high demand fields. And I'm very excited about that. And a lot of other people are too. You mentioned other countries. How is U.S. education different from other countries? A couple of ways. So at the higher levels, the U.S. system is much more open and forgiving than most other countries. So if you live in a European country, for example, you typically,

not always, but typically will take some type of test when you're a teenager that tracks you into vocational education or into university education. And it's much harder to, it's not impossible depending on the country, but it's much harder to reverse that. So if you score below some threshold, you're basically tracked into more blue collar jobs, vocational jobs, sub-baccalaureate programs. And if you get higher score on the test, you go to, sub-baccalaureate programs. And if you get higher score on the test, you go to university. There are costs and benefits to that. The benefits

are these countries take those tracks much more seriously because they're sending sort of forcibly a lot of people into them. And so there's a lot of money spent on, well, if you're in the vocational education, we have a very serious apprenticeship program. We connect with those industry councils and people from the technical institutes that sit on boards together and jointly determine the curriculum and think about job placement. That's much more structured than the US. That's the benefit of it. The cost is that nobody gets a second chance or fewer people get a second chance. So the US will allow you to like not do with a lot of people who don't do that well in high school, maybe work for a couple of years, go to community college, get motivated, transfer to a four-year college. And those are success stories we all like to talk about that actually aren't possible

in the same way in other countries. So obviously, you want a system that's both, that has well-developed vocational education, but also allows for second chances. And that's hard to do. So that's a general sense of how at least the education and training system differs in the U.S. relative to other advanced economies. There are rankings of countries in terms of students' knowledge. Who are the top countries and why?

There are rankings of knowledge for young people. So tests of people age 10, 12, 14, 17. There are international literacy assessments as well. Those are less common. The U.S. tends to rank in the middle of the pack among OECD countries and East Asian countries as well. So not as high as countries like, or cities like Singapore, countries like Korea. It doesn't rank as high as Scandinavian countries. However, one of the reasons for that, for good or for ill, is that we have a ton of variation in this country. So

one thing that people may not know is that if Massachusetts were a country, it would rank as high as Singapore on international assessments of mathematics and literacy. So Massachusetts is the highest scoring state in the union. But there's a ton of variation across the country. We have as many high achievers in the U.S. as anywhere else in the world, but we also have some very low achievers. So it's just a country that's filled with inequality and academic achievement. And so that means we have a lot of work to do.

And college attendance rates in the U.S. have been dropping. How does college attendance rates in the U.S. compare to other countries? It is true that the share of young people going to any type of college has decreased over the last decade. However, all of that decline is in community colleges. So the share of people going to a four-year college has actually been increasing slowly but steadily for 30 years or more. And the reason is that community colleges, people often go to them for reasons of retraining. That's highly counter-cyclical. So like right after the great recession, when the economy lost tons of jobs and people were unemployed, people went back to community college in very high numbers. And now

we're in a kind of historic economic boom. And so community college enrollment is very low. And so it kind of looks like people are giving up on college, but actually what's happening is people are just responding to economic incentives at the two-year college level. So I think that's an important thing to know. You see a lot of articles out there these days saying that people have lost faith in college. I don't actually think that's true. That's the first point on that. A generation ago, the US led the world more or less in college attendance and completion. And our college attendance rates are higher than they were a generation ago, but only by a little bit, five to 10 percentage points. Other countries have caught up substantially. And now we're not in the middle of the pack globally, but in the middle of

among advanced economies in rates of college attendance. I believe the country with the highest college attendance rate is Korea, South Korea, but other countries have leapt ahead of the U.S., have spent more money on tertiary or college education than the U.S. does today. David, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? My first takeaway, Lynn, is that even though college is unpopular among many Americans these days, possibly for understandable reasons, it's still the very best method we have of increasing economic mobility, especially across generations.

It's still a good deal for most people. And I believe it's something that we want more of as we become richer, we live longer, we become more prosperous. I think education is something that people value. And so I believe in the long run, many, many more people than do today will want a four-year college degree. And I believe that as a society, we should be investing in more education for more people. And I'm very open to how that looks. So I don't pretend to think that the current model of college education is optimized. I think a lot of changes are required. So I guess my second takeaway is I think college should be much more work-based

and applied in the way that we learn than it currently is. I don't necessarily mean that people ought to be doing internships all the time. What I mean is that people learn best when they learn in a hands-on way. And so I think classrooms, especially with the advent of generative AI, ought to focus much more on interaction between students in the classroom, interactions between the professor and faculty, giving people much more opportunity for feedback and assessment of their work in real time. So I think there's some institutional challenges, but I think we could make college much more engaging. And I think that would be a really good thing for students across the country. And then my third takeaway is that I think in the US right now, higher education is one of the most important contributors to rising economic inequality in this country. If you look at the patterns of the return to college over the last half century, rising overall economic inequality and the patterns of it have

coincided almost exactly with the growing gaps in earnings between people with a college degree and people without. So those two time series just line up perfectly. And you might say, well, that's because of disparities in achievement earlier in life. But actually, test score gaps at age 17 have narrowed slightly over the same period. And the reason is that we've committed as a society to relatively equal funding for K-12 schooling. Rich districts and poor districts actually spend about the same amount of money per student. But in colleges, the richest kids go to the most selective schools, which spend like a place like Harvard or Columbia, they spend upwards of $100,000 per student per year on an education. And at a community college, we're spending like $10,000 to $15,000 a year. So you've got the highest income students receiving the most resources.

And so it's an inequality machine. So I believe higher education needs reform to create more shared prosperity for people in this country. And I think that's a major place I would look if I was someone who cared about inequality, which I am. David, this has been terrific. Thank you so much. My pleasure, Lynn. Thanks so much for having me. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new fresh weekly episodes, be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3takeaways.com or follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

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