Do we need to rethink the bachelor’s degree?

The 1.7 million students who graduated with a bachelor’s degree from American colleges and universities this year joined millions of other young adults who are trying to find their way in a new economy.

But this is not a great time to be a recent college graduate. The average student-loan debt is $33,000, up by some 30 percent in the last five years. Theunderemployment rate is 44 percent for graduates ages 22 to 27, meaning the jobs they hold don’t require bachelor’s degrees. And the average age of financial independence for college graduates these days is 30.

Such statistics have given rise to the narrative that a college degree is no longer worthwhile, although volumes of economic studies on lifetime earnings prove otherwise. Still, given the number of college graduates struggling to start their careers, it’s clear a wide gap has emerged between what the workforce needs and what colleges are producing.

Part of the problem is that we have high expectations for the bachelor’s degree today. We demand that skills training move in tandem with broad-based learning and expect both to be completed in the four years of an undergraduate education. We also expect students to get outside the classroom experiences, such as internships and study abroad, even as more of them come to college not academically prepared or need to work while attending school.

The result is a 20th-century higher education system out of sync with a 21st-century economy.

My big idea for 2015 is that we rethink the bachelor’s degree from a box that students enter three months after high-school graduation and exit four years later to a platform for lifelong learning that is flexible and personalized. Think of it as “University for Life.”

A 20th-century higher education system out of sync with a 21st-century economy.

Here’s how a system might work: 18-year-olds would be given a choice to take various “pathways” for their post-high-school education. Once on these pathways, they can switch directions or exit at virtually any point. Among the potential pathways:

• A gap-year pathway set up by colleges to collect valuable work experience while students try to figure out what problem they want to solve in life.
• A combination work-education pathway where students toggle between a campus for a few weeks at a time and a real-world job.
• An easy-on/easy-off pathway where students might exit 12 months or 24 months into the experience to take a job, only to re-enter a few years later when their skills need an upgrade before going back to the workforce and repeating the pathway again.
• And, of course, the traditional pathway that 20 percent of students today pursue by going directly to a residential four-year college and exiting four years later.

Such a system might sound chaotic compared to today’s perceived straight pathway to a degree. But students are already swirling through college. One out of three undergraduates transfer institutions at least once before earning a college degree and only about half of students who enter college actually graduate in four years. So we already have multiple pathways to a degree, but most come without the mentoring support needed or lead to a dead end.

At “University for Life,” learning will be documented in “digital backpacks” that allow lifelong students to carry portfolios showcasing their achievements throughout their careers no matter where and when they were earned. The bachelor’s degree will still exist, but there will be many more signals to employers that someone is ready to do a job beyond the traditional diploma that we use now.

Sound like a crazy idea? In many respects it’s the design for the undergraduate experience that the d.school at Stanford University dreamed up this summer when asked to rethink the future of higher education. The students in that exercise called their platform the “open loop university,” which would enroll students and give them access to six years of education to use throughout their lifetimes, allowing them to “loop” in and out of the traditional undergraduate experience.

A third of children born today might live to see their 100th birthday. The idea of a bachelor’s degree being earned at one physical place, one time in our life at age is largely cultural and rooted in a different era.

While the economy’s needs have never perfectly aligned with higher education graduates’ skills, the mismatch has reached a critical point. Our post-secondary education system worked for an era when most jobs didn’t need a college degree and most workers stayed with one company for their entire careers. But in today’s global economy, obtaining a particular credential at one place, at one time in our life simply isn’t flexible enough.

This article is published in collaboration with LinkedIn. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

To keep up with Forum:Agenda subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Author: Jeff Selingo is a writer & speaker on the future of higher education.

Image: Profile of students taking their seats for the diploma ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge REUTERS/Brian Snyder.