Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is Bloomberg Business
Speaker 1: Week with Carol Masser and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: Hey Nora, Sometimes I think about how much college is
Speaker 2: going to cost my kids when they're old enough. I
Speaker 2: think about this when I want to be depressed.
Speaker 3: Okay, understandable.
Speaker 2: Okay, So four hundred thousand dollars a year. That's how
Speaker 2: much a private college is estimated to cost my daughter, well,
Speaker 2: in state tuition it fees at a public school would
Speaker 2: cost about one hundred and seventy two thousand dollars. These
Speaker 2: are just estimates from NEFA dot org. It's a calculator online,
Speaker 2: the Massachusetts Educational Financial Authority, And I did that. What's
Speaker 2: an estimate, but you know, hopefully, hopefully that's not what
Speaker 2: it is number, But it does raise the question will
Speaker 2: college be necessary in fifteen years? Is it necessary right now?
Speaker 2: I mean, look how much the workforce has shifted in
Speaker 2: just the last few years. We've got with us at
Speaker 2: Kathleen d'laski. She's the founder of the Education Design Lab.
Speaker 2: It's a nonprofit organization that, in its own words, works
Speaker 2: with colleges, states, and employee to design shorter, more targeted
Speaker 2: forms of higher education. She's also the author of Who
Speaker 2: Needs College Anymore, imagining a future where degrees won't matter.
Speaker 2: She joins us from McLean, Virginia. Kathleen, good to have
Speaker 2: you with us. Who does need college right now?
Speaker 4: Well, I still tell any eighteen year old, I'm not
Speaker 4: sure about how old your children are.
Speaker 2: Two and six, two and six, So maybe the robots
Speaker 2: will rule by the time there and there, we may have.
Speaker 4: The new system wired. But yeah, for your children to
Speaker 4: see that they have other options, because that's the problem,
Speaker 4: even for eighteen year olds right now, is that is
Speaker 4: that they really see still a kind of college or
Speaker 4: bust narrative going on in the country. We have we
Speaker 4: say college is too expensive, it's it's maybe not worth it,
Speaker 4: and so we have a lot of people. You know,
Speaker 4: enrollment is down in the degree form and it's to
Speaker 4: drop pretty quite a lot since twenty ten. It's starting
Speaker 4: to it's starting to shift up a little bit. But
Speaker 4: what's interesting is the way that enrollment is improving right
Speaker 4: now is because of short term certificates and other forms
Speaker 4: of enrollment that colleges are starting to offer. You know,
Speaker 4: they're competing with like the boot camps and apprenticeships that
Speaker 4: are that are having trouble getting to scale, and colleges
Speaker 4: themselves are starting to offer alternatives, and so I wrote
Speaker 4: I wrote the book really to kind of raise the
Speaker 4: argument that we need more, we need a better fund,
Speaker 4: and remove the stigmas from alternatives to college, because only
Speaker 4: thirty eight percent of Americans have a four year degree,
Speaker 4: and yet we tell all of our kids, you know,
Speaker 4: that they have to either go into debt or figure
Speaker 4: out how to get that four year degree. And as
Speaker 4: you said at the beginning, that's starting to change. It
Speaker 4: hasn't changed yet, So I still, you know, I think
Speaker 4: you have to give a lot of caveats when you're
Speaker 4: giving advice.
Speaker 3: Today you speak a bit more to those alternatives in
Speaker 3: terms of we think about a traditional four year university
Speaker 3: or maybe a two year community college. Can you just
Speaker 3: dive a bit deeper into what those alternatives could look
Speaker 3: like and what that could mean like for the could
Speaker 3: mean for the future.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, And I describe in the book that probably the
Speaker 4: two most successful alternatives right now, I mean, if you're
Speaker 4: looking to go for a professional pathway career would be
Speaker 4: apprenticeships and industry certifications and the problem, the problem with
Speaker 4: these two you know, wonderful alternatives to a four year
Speaker 4: degree is that they are not not evenly available, Like
Speaker 4: you can find them in some cities and states and
Speaker 4: some professions, but not not widely. But they are being
Speaker 4: looked to as as as sort of the models that
Speaker 4: we need to create, that we need to create more
Speaker 4: of and either colleges can develop and offer them or
Speaker 4: you know, independent organizations. A lot of entrepreneurs have been
Speaker 4: you know, looking in these spaces too, But we have
Speaker 4: to we have to get off this idea that that
Speaker 4: that it's only that the government should only fund the
Speaker 4: degree programs for people who were going, you know, at
Speaker 4: least half time into a degree program. That's how the
Speaker 4: funding follows. You. Now, if you want to do one
Speaker 4: of these other kind of programs, you know, you're usually
Speaker 4: not funded. And that has got to change.
Speaker 2: How disruptive do you think AI is going to be
Speaker 2: to the workforce?
Speaker 4: That's a great that's a great, that's a great question.
Speaker 4: There's already reports coming out that AI is starting to
Speaker 4: impinge on and UH and and and shrink the number
Speaker 4: of entry level white collar jobs. Right because expertise UH
Speaker 4: that that you can you know, use chat GBT or
Speaker 4: other other other options to to try to get answers
Speaker 4: to questions that may not be within your realm of expertise,
Speaker 4: those that it tends to wipe out a an entry
Speaker 4: level white collar job, you know, that doesn't that doesn't
Speaker 4: require a physical interaction. And so we're we're already seeing
Speaker 4: some of that new reports are coming out. Uh but
Speaker 4: where where I think on the flip side, for a
Speaker 4: college student or a learner or a job up again,
Speaker 4: there's also they're also able to use AI to to
Speaker 4: uh find out about more jobs, to help them write
Speaker 4: their resume, to potentially uh learn learn the bits of
Speaker 4: expertise that they need to even you know, sound good
Speaker 4: in their job interview. So, you know, it's a there's
Speaker 4: a there's a positive and negative side to AI from
Speaker 4: the standpoint of of of the future of work. But
Speaker 4: you know, probably the nature of jobs and the speed
Speaker 4: at which they'll change will continue to accelerate.
Speaker 3: As we're thinking about AI. Just more broadly, we have
Speaker 3: a lot of students who are sitting here, you know,
Speaker 3: everyone's looking at chat GPT. But it's also a really
Speaker 3: good tool for teachers and people in the education field.
Speaker 3: To utilize AI to better uh, you know, educate the youth.
Speaker 3: What has been your take on AI and just what
Speaker 3: the implications can be from a teaching perspective.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I teach at the college level at George Mason
Speaker 4: University here in Virginia, and I you know, I've tried
Speaker 4: to It's interesting. We haven't been given a lot of
Speaker 4: you know, policies about how we're supposed to, uh, you know,
Speaker 4: whether whether we're supposed to allow students to use it
Speaker 4: to write their papers, for example, and so a lot
Speaker 4: of us are just kind of you know, we're just
Speaker 4: kind of forging into our own territory and deciding how
Speaker 4: to use it. And I've I have been treating it
Speaker 4: as my friend right to say, to have students use
Speaker 4: it to basically like pressure test the ideas that we
Speaker 4: might come up with the in the classroom. I teach
Speaker 4: design thinking, and so I have the students use it
Speaker 4: to pressure test the ideas that we do live in
Speaker 4: the classroom. And then they're supposed to you know, go
Speaker 4: and and see, well, you know what, what is what
Speaker 4: does the rest of the landscape say about this about
Speaker 4: this point? That's one example. But it does mean that
Speaker 4: we can't really assign papers in the way that we
Speaker 4: used to. You know, we have to figure out how
Speaker 4: to project tie things that are that that create unique
Speaker 4: responses from the students or require unique responses from the students.
Speaker 4: And that's been that's been really difficult, but kind of exhilarating.
Speaker 4: Really Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, I just I might be old or a
Speaker 2: lud Eite or I don't know. I don't know. I
Speaker 2: just I worry about what this does to critical thinking.
Speaker 2: I mean, I remember when I was in college and
Speaker 2: I would be working on a paper and I would
Speaker 2: have some sort of breakthrough with the thesis, and it
Speaker 2: would have required me to sort of go through all
Speaker 2: the notes and really come to a conclusion and distill
Speaker 2: an argument. And I don't and and I learned so
Speaker 2: much by doing that, And it required me exercising a
Speaker 2: part of my brain that I don't know would need
Speaker 2: to be exercised if I had chat GPT, right.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's the same. I mean, I'm old enough
Speaker 4: to remember when the calculator came out and we were
Speaker 4: worried about, you know that doing the math problem and
Speaker 4: if you're not doing your like, do you learn do
Speaker 4: you learn enough? And I think the you know, the
Speaker 4: argument now is okay, the calculator like, yes, we don't
Speaker 4: have to no long division anymore, but you still, you know,
Speaker 4: so you have to use math in different you know,
Speaker 4: you have to learn it in different ways or learn
Speaker 4: the applied version of it. So what I try and
Speaker 4: do in my classroom is force those aha moments that
Speaker 4: you had writing your paper. I forced them in a
Speaker 4: live setting, in a you know where we're where, we're
Speaker 4: creatively problem solving together, and that that does help. I mean,
Speaker 4: it doesn't work for a history paper, but it works
Speaker 4: if you take the history lesson and try to apply
Speaker 4: it to a real world situation that you have your
Speaker 4: students work on together. Because they want, you know this today,
Speaker 4: they want they want school or college to be an
Speaker 4: engaging experience, not a you know, not if it's something
Speaker 4: they can read and learn or even write a paper about.
Speaker 4: They they want to be able to get that at
Speaker 4: the you know, drop of a hat. So learning has
Speaker 4: to become a whole lot more of an engagement practice
Speaker 4: experience for students to even care or stay engaged. That's
Speaker 4: what I'm seeing in my classroom and many of my
Speaker 4: colleagues too.
Speaker 3: I really want to just keep an eye on. There's
Speaker 3: been this conversation about AI picking up plagiarism in about
Speaker 3: thirty seconds or less. I'm curious what is your standpoint
Speaker 3: as a teacher as to how to actually figure out
Speaker 3: if students are plagiarizing using AI. But there's also been
Speaker 3: some situations where AI falsely detects plagiarism from students.
Speaker 4: Falsely to text. I have heard a little bit, a
Speaker 4: little bit about that there are apps that that you know,
Speaker 4: usually most colleges and schools are you are you know
Speaker 4: where you can you know, run you run the kids
Speaker 4: papers through theirs and through these these applications. Yes, I
Speaker 4: mean I think that's happening maybe a little bit. But
Speaker 4: you know, there are ways to check up on or
Speaker 4: have your student. I mean you can usually tell without
Speaker 4: the without the apps, whether whether the students came up
Speaker 4: with the argument right not necessarily supporting facts. I mean,
Speaker 4: I don't I don't hear my colleagues having much trouble
Speaker 4: in that regard. But but yeah, I mean, can you
Speaker 4: can go back to the student and use prompts, you know,
Speaker 4: live prompts, right, he prompts to figure that out.
Speaker 2: Kathleen, we got to get you back. We got to
Speaker 2: go everywhere with you at the end of our program,
Speaker 2: and we do really appreciate it. Kathleen's Alaski. She's the
Speaker 2: founder of the Education Design Lab. She's a teacher. She's
Speaker 2: also the author of Who Needs College Anymore, imagining a
Speaker 2: future where degrees won't matter.