Higher ed in the United States faces well-known challenges. Student-loan debt has ballooned in the last 20 years. Many students earn a degree only to find they are underprepared for work. And many employers have recently dropped degree requirements, signaling that degrees may not be meeting workforce needs.
Moreover, people increasingly need help with career navigation. And they need agile ways to learn skills continually—to grow throughout a career and to adapt to change.
To solve these and other problems, an interdisciplinary team of MIT professors, led by Sanjay Sarma, recently set out to invent “a new educational institution” (or NEI). The NEI is a new kind of school designed for affordability and career and life preparation.
In a white paper released in Sept. 2022, Sarma’s team offered 13 recommendations for an NEI. Since the proposed NEI could make undergraduate education more affordable and workforce oriented, we overview some of the team’s principal recommendations.
Build degrees from stackable microcredentials
As much as 36 percent of undergraduates start but do not finish a bachelor’s degree within 6-years. And when students leave school before they earn a degree, they leave without a certificate verifying skills gained. Furthermore, degrees only show that a student has graduated. They do not certify specific job skills that students gain through their studies.
As a solution, Sarma and his team propose that degrees be composed from stackable microcredentials. When a student passes a course or set of courses, the NEI would give both academic credit and a standalone certificate. That way, whether or not the student completes their degree, they can still show certificates that verify skills learned.
The microcredential model makes skills more visible in general. The team suggests that microcredentials could be listed on résumés and displayed on social network sites like LinkedIn.
“Today, the transcript is a single document controlled by institutions,” write Sarma and his team. “In the future, with digital credentials, substantive achievements can be referenced individually in [the student’s] résumé.”
Microcredentials might also promote continuing education. Students could have “living transcripts,” which update when students earn additional credentials, beyond a degree program.
Promote active and individualized learning with help from online courses
Much of the proposal for an NEI aims to foster institutional conditions that could improve teaching and learning while also reducing cost. Foremost among these proposals is to exploit advantages of online courses.
Sarma and his team point out that students tend to learn best through active and individualized learning. But colleges have struggled to deliver such learning at scale. Small classes and personalized instruction, requiring low faculty-to-student ratios, have simply been too expensive.
To solve this problem, Sarma’s team recommends that the NEI use “small private online courses” (SPOCs), online courses that are specifically adapted to local institutions and administered by local faculty.
SPOCs have a few advantages. They can provide high-quality course content developed at leading universities, and because much of this content has already been developed, it can be reproduced and adapted inexpensively. SPOCs can also allow classes to be “flipped,” meaning students watch lectures at home and, then, learn actively in class. And by eliminating lecture prep, SPOCs could free faculty to spend more time guiding students individually.
Partner with outside organizations and offer students cooperative education
Cooperative education (or co-op), in which students learn on the job at partner organizations, can offer learning experiences uniquely suited to improving job readiness and might make college more affordable. For these reasons, Sarma and his team “recommend that the NEI incorporate a significant co-op component into the degree.”
In addition to providing valuable learning, co-ops could allow students to gain academic credit while they get paid to work. Co-ops would therefore, the team writes, “go a long way toward reducing the financial burden on students.”
But Sarma’s team emphasizes that co-ops need to be designed and managed well. Co-ops need to be monitored to ensure that, during them, students achieve meaningful learning. Mentors at partner organizations need to be trained in their new roles as educators and guides at the co-op site. Students must be prepared to succeed through professionalization courses. And a broad range of partnerships—with organizations ranging from government agencies to art galleries—should be cultivated.
Redefine faculty roles to prioritize teaching
Much of the proposal for an NEI redefines faculty roles to save on costs and improve student learning. Perhaps most importantly, faculty at an NEI would focus on teaching, not research. But there would be other changes too, like increased team teaching and elimination of the tenure- and non-tenure-track distinction.
Teaching “should be the 80 percent focus,” write Sarma and coauthors. Faculty would still do research, but research would occupy less time and would need to have “low overhead.”
Promotions would be consistent with the new educational priority. “Promotions and titles will be much more closely tied to educational performance,” the team writes, “than to research outcomes.”
Less research could make the NEI more financially efficient and thus reduce tuition. Compared to research institutions, the NEI would be less “complex,” write Sarma and his team. Staff, facilities, and activities not directly tied to education—all that makes a research institution complex and expensive to operate—would consume fewer resources.
Finally, because classrooms would be flipped at an NEI, Sarma’s team proposes an identity change for professors. Faculty would be guides on the side, not sages on stages (as the saying goes). At the NEI, faculty would serve as “mentoring experts.” As such, faculty too would teach more than just subject content. They would guide students to develop “deliberate practice and deeper mastery,” but they would also help students develop life skills, like “grit and resilience.”
Caveats and the future
The white paper makes many recommendations not covered. Some get into the fine-grained details of college administration—like academic calendars, sabbaticals, and facilities. Others focus on ensuring the NEI teaches habits of mind often associated with humanities, arts, and social science—like creativity and empathy.
The team cautions that they designed the NEI for computer science and business, though they suggest the NEI model could extend to engineering. They make no promises that the NEI would work in other fields, like the humanities or social sciences.
What might be most interesting about these proposals is their feasibility. Despite the proposal’s emphasis on novelty—on a new educational institution—it builds on an extensive body of educational literature. The proposals are not radical but practical and well-supported. In this way, the NEI offers hope for a more equitable future in higher ed.