If We’re Truly in the Knowledge Age, Why Is Higher Education in Crisis?

Achieving this depth of understanding entails a long and often tedious cycle of guided self-discovery that includes observation, investigation, ideation, action, and validation. This aims to restore the rapidly diminishing practice of learning how to learn, focusing on the who, the individual learner, in addition to the what, why, and how. No more Industrial Age “one-size-fits-all” mindsets. Rather, it’s developing an innate capacity to sense and respond. To anticipate, plan, and adjust. To practice agile, deep systems thinking. All while keeping in mind the empathy mentioned earlier. Anyone up for AI-augmented realworld simulations?

And let’s not forget the importance of tacit knowledge. The crisis in education includes knowledge lost through the departure of experienced faculty, either through retirement or transition into other occupations. While generative AI continues to work its way into the classroom, it doesn’t come close to serving as a replacement. It’s more like a huge industrial vacuum ingesting the world’s explicit, published, academic knowledge along with just about every other type of content. But it’s often lacking in deeply embedded personal insights and experience that aren’t found in textbooks or publications. This includes unpublished knowledge exchanged on a daily basis through social discourse inside the laboratories, breakout rooms, and cafeterias of universities and research institutes. The bottom line: We need to shift our approach to education from a program/ degree-driven model to one based on capabilities and outcomes.

Possible Futures

Clearly, both traditional college degrees and specialized trade certifications are too narrow and fragmented to fully prepare students for what lies ahead. One refinement suggested by Mintz integrates different yet related topics into a single course. For example, instead of taking a course in ethics as a separate elective in addition to a machine learning course, universities could develop a course in which philosophers, sociologists, and computer scientists co-teach students using various interdisciplinary approaches. This might include analyzing bias in training data, formulating fairness metrics in automated decision making, and understanding the effects of power dynamics in platform design.

For now, a hybrid system is emerging that balances the arts and the sciences, augmented by one or more areas of specialization. The rapidly emerging global alternative credentials market reflects this new model. Currently standing at around $4.2 billion, it’s expected to rise to more than $14 billion by 2033. According to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (aacsb.edu/insights/articles/2024/10/how-microcredentials-are-changing-higher-education), more than 50% of higher-education leaders are integrating micro-credentials into their curricula, and 82% plan to offer them for academic credit within the next 5 years.

Think in terms of learning at progressively deeper levels through a guided self-discovery process. McGraw Hill’s ALEKS platform (aleks.com) does this extremely well. In mathematics courses, for example, it generates a knowledge graph of topics for a particular grade level. Students visually separate topics with which they are unfamiliar or uncomfortable from those they know well. Then AI, in conjunction with a human mentor, guides them in mastering the more difficult topics in a self-paced, individualized program.

This has resulted in dramatic improvements, especially in traditionally underserved communities. When learned in this way, mathematics is not gradually forgotten as students continue to pile on other, sometimes unrelated, credits toward a degree. Rather, it’s smoothly woven into other subjects, providing a more well-rounded foundation to build upon during the course of a lifetime.

KM’s multidisciplinary nature gives us a distinct advantage in helping to make this transformation happen. The trick is knowing when to work inside and when to work outside the formal system. In helping students prepare for a future that combines frightening uncertainty with the possibility of truly amazing breakthroughs, it’s definitely worth the effort.

[This is Art’s 20th year of contributing to KMWorld and his 125th column. Happy anniversary, Art! —Ed.]