Higher Education GPS: Time to Recalculate the Route to Student Success

Higher education in America was originally designed to service an unpaved, one-lane road leading to a few select professional destinations appropriate to an agrarian economy.  No map was necessary; students simply followed the straight, simple path of liberal education to a basic set of predetermined roles in society.

But America has evolved into a post-industrial, knowledge-based, and technologically sophisticated society. Higher education now needs to service a multi-lane super highway with many off ramps leading to a variety of professional destinations that demand more intricate knowledge and complex skills than the simple agrarian culture of previous centuries.

Yet today traditional higher education continues to plod down a dusty, narrow track strewn with largely outdated four-year degree programs.  Meanwhile, students are increasingly finding the fast lane to success with alternative credentials and boot camps. From its rut, higher education can see the super highway, and it acknowledges that students are moving toward a more efficacious mode of transportation to personal and professional attainment. And still it plods on.


If traditional higher education is to remain relevant, it must abandon its monolithic approach.  It is time to plug education into the GPS of America and recalculate the best route to student success.  In the next posts we’ll look at some of these routes, starting with “vocational” education.

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