Employers finally starting to drop college degree requirements - ETCH Weekly Update 7/25

Jul 25, 2023

I hope that many of you enjoyed Sunday’s edition of Weekend Reading. This newsletter includes thoughts on China’s for-profit tutoring ban, courseware use in higher education, and employers finally starting to drop the college degree as a requirement for entry-level roles.

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With that, on to the update!

1. Most clicked link from Weekend Reading: China’s $100B tutoring ban backfires

Context: 2 years ago China banned for-profit tutoring companies. Perhaps even more importantly, the government also placed specific restrictions on the services that the leftover non-profit tutoring companies could offer - including 30-minute session limits, a 9PM curfew, and prohibitions on sessions offered over weekends, holidays, and school breaks.

In fairness, this Bloomberg article presents no actual data regarding the “backfire” or emergent black market for tutoring services, just anecdata from several Chinese parents citing higher fees in an emerging black market. But the story sounds right because a “backfire” is the predictable ending to this story. While education is a public good, we know that parents will always act in the best interests of their individual children.1 Taking away one of the most tried-and-true paths to improving your child’s educational standing seems destined to fail.

The Bloomberg article posits that this trend may lead to a re-opening of the private tutoring market in China, but that “analysts” are skeptical. I was not included in the analyst survey (I am told that my invite was lost in the mail), but share their skepticism.

It is notable that of the 210 venture funding rounds with institutional backers that I’ve tracked this year, just 59 have been in the US (and 1 in China).2 Regardless of what happens, China’s governmental moves over the past 2 years provide an extreme example of the risks EdTech investors need to account for as they increase investment in new international markets.

2. Courseware use in Higher Education

Context: The Chronicle of Higher Education produced a 3-part series on how digital curriculum support materials, colloquially called “courseware”, are being used across higher education. The first part details perceived flaws in the instructional model that come from leaning too heavily on courseware. The second covers the cost of courseware to students. The third discusses how publishers leverage data collected from courseware products.

What’s frustrating about this series of stories from the Chronicle is that they started with an assumption - that courseware is bad - rather than a question - like “How did we get to a place where courseware use is so pervasive across higher education?”

To try and answer my own question, I’m not sure what option instructors - and, thus, universities - have but to use courseware providers and other outsourced academic services providers. If the course is leveraging publisher courseware, it is almost certainly a lower-level course being taught by an adjunct or a TA. Is an adjunct instructor supposed to write their own 12-week course content and homework for each of the 4 courses they are teaching (often on multiple campuses)?

Being an adjunct is already one of the most brutal and thankless positions in education. I can neither imagine a university expecting every instructor to build custom, subject-matter-specific content for each of their courses, nor can I envision a university building custom content in-house for every course they offer.

Furthermore, why would we want them to? There is no secret sauce to teaching calculus. It defies logic to expect a different implementation of introductory courses at each of the 3,896 accredited universities in the US. Even if there was a secret sauce, who would you expect to produce a better result: a publisher with $1B+ in revenue whose only mission in this world is to produce content, or an adjunct making $2,700 per semester?

There is an important story buried in the Chronicle’s reporting, which is that universities are struggling to figure out what their role should be in a shifting educational landscape. Publishers, OPMs, and other industry services providers have absolutely benefitted from this. But these players are not the root cause of universities’ problems; they are just providing services to help these institutions survive.

3. Employers finally giving up on the college degree

Context: Cengage, one of the big US education publishers, conducted their third annual survey of 1,000 college graduates and 1,000 employers to see how the workforce is changing. Questions covered AI, workforce preparedness, hiring habits, and skills development, among other topics.

Since 2014, the most cited statistic (in my circles) in workforce development has been that 96% of university Chief Academic Officers believe they are doing a good job preparing students for the workforce, while just 11% of business leaders believe that college graduates have the skills to succeed in the workforce.

In addition to being sort of dated at this point, it always bugged me that we never saw a corollary statistic showing employers were looking at something - anything! - other than the college degree to inform hiring.

This Cengage survey has lots of fun data points, but the one that stuck out to me is that 50% of employers surveyed had dropped the college degree as a requirement for entry-level jobs. This is partly out of necessity, as an even greater number of employers surveyed (53%) said they couldn’t find qualified candidates for many positions.

But the optimist in me thinks some meaningful amount of this behavior change comes from an improvement in the means to assess non-traditional job candidates and, even more importantly, the desire to do so. The open question now is what other non-degree proxies - apprenticeships? simulations? - will start getting adopted more broadly by employers to evaluate candidates.

Not a Hot Take

Last week I wrote about how I was not a fan of the Gallup surveys measuring “confidence in higher education.” It turns out, Jill Barshay at the Hechinger Report had similar misgivings AND did the homework needed to flesh the concept out into a full story.

Question of the Week

Results of last week’s poll: 2 is exactly where I would have put the betting odds if FanDuel sponsored this newsletter. I think I would take the under, but it is close.