“Everything is changing so quickly,” Dr. Debra Chromy said. “There are job titles that haven’t even been identified today that are going to be there when someone completes their associates degree or certification or four year degree. We don’t even know what they are yet, it’s all changing so fast.”
Chromy, the President and CEO of Trellis Strategies, a national nonprofit that supports postsecondary educational institutions in their transformations to support modern learners, was speaking on the “Leading Through Change” podcast with Calbright President and CEO Ajita Talkwalker Menon.
Calbright was designed to be a better kind of learning and workforce development system for modern adult learners, who are often working or parental caregivers, and can’t access the traditional higher education system. It was created by the state of California to understand how to support these adult learners, and to develop best practices that other California colleges can use.
Menon’s advice in this time of change: “Higher ed has generally been an individual sport when it really needs to be a team activity.” Our education systems are designed to see what students are struggling with as personal failures, when in fact “they’re systems failures.” Systems are not setting students up for success. But they can.
“We have long since known that there is a structural problem in postsecondary education and in traditional models,” Menon said. “We know they’re not designed structurally for the needs of working adults or caregiving parents or career pivoters, so everything needs to be rethought and redesigned. The systems themselves, the models, the content, the curriculum, the way we think about what support is. And I do think we have to embrace that now in higher education.”
That task can be overwhelming – but it’s achievable when the needs of the students are kept at the center of the process.
“The more we can stay grounded in the needs of our learners and look at it as a structural problem to solve, the more likely we will be to spend our time, energy, effort, intellectual curiosity, towards what this next set of solutions look like,” Menon said. “I don’t think this is a moment where tweaking around the edges will ever be sufficient. I think it is much more of a significant rethinking of the delivery system themselves, of the purpose themselves, and the measurement of the value that we’re creating for learners.”
Watch the full conversation of the “Leading Through Change” podcast.
