One of the most interesting things I saw during a recent visit to South Korea was the Seoul Robotics High School, a public vocational school where students specialize in manufacturing and maintaining robots. The school has 455 students—95 percent of them male, 5 percent female—and is one of seventy-nine vocational schools in the nation’s capital that produce skilled technicians through courses proposed by some of the nation’s largest companies. When young South Koreans are ready for high school, they can choose between public schools with a more academic orientation, or public schools with a more vocational focus. About 35 percent opt for the latter, South Korean officials told me.
According to Shin Sang-yeol, the school’s principal, these programs are funded by the government to help solve the country’s labor shortages. In South Korea, he explained, “our population is getting older, and we’re having fewer children, so the government needs to invest in vocational schools to meet the demand from companies for qualified workers.” It’s the same problem many other nations have: a shortage of technical personnel for manufacturing industries and an overproduction of college graduates who can’t get a job because they don’t have technical skills. So the government is subsidizing vocational schools and giving tax breaks to companies to offer internships to their students in order to turn out more and more technicians, he said.
Seoul Robotics High School is the crown jewel among South Korean vocational schools. It has seventy teachers and thirty teaching assistants, which amounts to roughly one educator for every five students. During my tour of the school, I saw groups of young students in their blue uniforms working in labs with computers and robots of all shapes and sizes. The principal proudly told me that 93 percent of seniors have a job lined up on the day they graduate, which is a much higher percentage than traditional high schools. Parents send their children to the robotics school because they know they’ll have internships and a much better chance of landing a good job, he said. And for the 7 percent of students who aren’t offered a job by the companies for which they interned, the school has a career services department to help them. That department, he told me, was the most important in the school.
I STUDY AN AVERAGE OF SIXTEEN HOURS A DAY
In one of the classrooms, I asked Surim Kim, a seventeen-year-old senior who was close to graduation, what an average day in her life looked like. The young lady, sitting in front of a computer in her blue uniform, told me that she lives on campus because her family is a long way away in the countryside. The school has dorm facilities for students like her, and both lodging and meals are covered by the state. “I get up at six-thirty in the morning for breakfast, and class begins at eight,” she told me. “I’m in class until four in the afternoon, and after that, from Monday through Thursday, I go to a private institute to get my national certificate of competence in math.” I followed up by asking her if she needed that certificate to graduate. “No,” she replied, “but it will be a lot easier to get a job with it.”
So when do you do your homework? I asked. “At night,” she replied. “Usually after dinner, usually until eleven at night, but sometimes I’m up till one in the morning.” Seeing the look of astonishment on my face, she shrugged and said, “That’s pretty normal here. We all study like that. I average about sixteen hours a day.” And when do you go home to visit your parents? I asked, still somewhat perplexed. “One weekend a month,” she replied, “and for summer vacation.”
While I have heard stories like this many times from students in China, Japan, Singapore, and several other Asian nations, they never cease to amaze me. Not only do these young people study many more hours per day than Americans, Europeans, or Latin Americans, but they’re also in class many more days a year. In most parts of the United States and Latin America, the school year lasts 180 days; in South Korea, it’s 220 days. It should come as no surprise, then, that students in Shanghai, China, Singapore, and other Asian countries are among the top scorers on standardized tests like the PISA exam of fifteen-year-olds around the world. These Asian countries have a family culture of education—and often a national obsession with it—that simply doesn’t exist in many Western nations.
THE UNIVERSITY CRISIS
It’s no secret that universities—and the traditional careers they teach—are at risk of becoming irrelevant in a world where technology is advancing so rapidly that much of the “hard” knowledge students learn is instantly worthless the minute they graduate. But Salim Ismail, the former head of Brickhouse, Yahoo’s internal incubator, and founding executive director of Singularity University, surprised me with a prediction that when I first heard it seemed rather extreme: “Universities are going to implode,” he told me over dinner in Miami one night in 2017. Ismail was devoting a good part of his time to a number of educational projects, and from what I could see in his face, he was not kidding.
Seeing my skeptical reaction to what I thought was an exaggerated statement, Ismail pointed to the example of what’s happening in Silicon Valley with college graduates who have majored in computer science. “The value of a college degree has fallen to zero, because start-ups are much more interested in a 100 rating on GitHub than a programming degree from even one of the most prestigious universities in the world,” he said.
“GitHub?” I asked, admitting that I’d never heard of it. Ismail explained that it’s an Internet platform that programmers use for posting their projects to the cloud and getting feedback from their peers. It has more than 12 million registered users, who evaluate one another, and many of the top-scoring programmers—those most admired by their peers—never graduated from college. “Today, your rating on GitHub is worth much more than a college degree,” he told me.
So how do you picture higher education in coming years? I asked. Ismail said that the future of education will be “project-based” learning. There will be a practical training system in which students will be asked to take mini-courses, and over the course of four years, they’ll complete a specific project that has real-world application, he said. And this system may or may not be run by a school, he added. It’s quite likely that we’ll be seeing new institutions popping up in the margins of traditional universities: institutions like Singularity University or the TED conferences, which serve as tutors in this new learning environment. He claims that conventional universities have become so stagnant and reluctant to change that there’s no way they can keep up with the latest technological advances. “Currently, if you want to be an expert in blockchain, you don’t go to a university, you go to the best guy you can find who’s an expert in blockchain,” he said. “We’re going to see more and more of that: institutes that provide apprenticeship-style tutoring and mentoring.”
THE MYTH OF THE SUCCESSFUL COLLEGE DROPOUT
Ismail may well be right when he says that many universities run the risk of becoming irrelevant because of their failure to update their courses and keep up with technological changes. But while it may be true that start-ups in Silicon Valley often prefer to hire a computer expert with a 100-point GitHub rating rather than a Harvard graduate, the same does not happen in the labor market as a whole. On the contrary, I believe that a college or master’s degree will become an increasingly more important requirement for getting a good job, especially for those looking for their first jobs in well-paying occupations.
The much-publicized cases of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg—both of whom dropped out of Harvard and never graduated—are the exceptions to the rule, rather than examples to be followed. A study of 11,745 professional success stories in the United States, conducted by Jonathan Wai of Duke University in North Carolina and Heiner Rindermann of the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany, looked into the educational backgrounds of leaders in several fields—from CEOs and entrepreneurs to federal judges, politicians, multimillionaires, and billionaires—and found that the vast majority of them have college degrees, if not master’s degrees. There are many more succes
s stories like those of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who graduated from Princeton, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who graduated from Harvard, than cases of successful dropouts like Gates and Zuckerberg, the researchers found.
“While it’s true there are successful college dropouts, statistically speaking, they are not the norm. As researchers in education and talent, we found that the vast majority of the country’s success stories are college graduates,” the authors wrote. “If you’re a student thinking about not going to college or considering dropping out, remember that even Gates and Zuckerberg got into college. Even if you’re not aiming for mega success, doing the work to get into and graduate from college today may open important doors.”
And that is likely to continue being the case in the future, according to a 2018 study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an economic research group for most of the world’s thirty-five richest countries. The higher academic degrees people have, the lower their chances of being displaced by automation will be, the study says. “The occupations with the highest estimated automatability typically only require basic to low level education,” it says, citing the case of manufacturing and agricultural jobs, as well as some service jobs such as postal workers or food attendants. “At the other end of the spectrum, the least automatable occupations almost all require professional training and or tertiary education,” it adds. And that will continue to be the trend, because people with college or graduate degrees tend to get more on the job training or engage in lifelong learning programs, which allows them to constantly ride the waves of new technologies, it adds.
THE RISE OF ONLINE EDUCATION
But that doesn’t mean that traditional universities won’t have to change, and do so rapidly. The growing popularity of online courses is a clear indication that traditional universities—with brick-and-mortar campuses and students sitting at classrooms—are in crisis. The number of massive open online courses, better known as MOOCs, has skyrocketed in recent years, and colleges are increasingly offering not only individual classes online but also majors and master’s courses with certificates and diplomas. And while the early meteoric rise of online students has stabilized recently, there are around 78 million people taking online courses at more than 800 universities worldwide.
Coursera, the largest MOOC provider, offers classes by professors from several U.S. universities that are attended—virtually, of course—by 30 million students. Its top rival, edX, has 14 million registered users, while China’s XuetangX has over 9 million. These independent university platforms are now in direct competition with traditional universities. Coursera, which has already begun offering a master’s of business administration degree online, planned to start up to twenty new degrees by 2019. Will brick-and-mortar universities be able to compete with independent online education platforms, which have infinitely fewer expenses and can thus offer lower fees to their students? Probably not, unless they diversify and offer increasingly more of their courses online. They will have to offer a combination of virtual and physical programs.
THE FUTURE OF UNIVERSITIES: 50 PERCENT FACE-TO-FACE, 50 PERCENT ONLINE
When I interviewed Rafael Reif, president of MIT, which according to some rankings is the world’s best university, he did not dispute the assertion that traditional universities are at risk of becoming irrelevant. Reif told me that brick-and-mortar higher education institutions will have to ride the wave and offer a roughly equal number of face-to-face and online classes.
“In some fields, the ratio could be 70 percent in the classroom and 30 percent online, and in others it could be vice versa,” Reif told me. “But overall, I think it’s going to be a fifty-fifty mix.”
Not to be outdone by Coursera and other MOOCs, MIT had just started a pilot program for an Internet-based MicroMasters degree, Reif told me. After completing the online courses and passing a final exam, the school gives graduates an academic certificate. And if students want to complete a full-fledged master’s degree, they can attend physical classes for the second part of the program and obtain their master’s degree. But the biggest novelty of this MicroMasters program is that students don’t need a college diploma to be able to enroll in it. In other words, major universities are already adapting to the trend popularized by the MOOCs of allowing virtually anybody to enroll in graduate courses. It was either that or facing a gradual death.
In addition to the rise of blended education—partly online, partly physical—universities will have to rethink their four-year college programs and make them more flexible, Reif told me. “Traditional college programs will come to an end,” he said, adding that the technical knowledge that is currently passed on to students in college will end up being outdated by the time they graduate. In the future, universities will become a permanent source of education. “Instead of paying tuition for four or five years and getting a degree, you will pay to be constantly connected to your university so that you can continue learning throughout your entire life,” Reif told me. “Starting college will eventually be like subscribing to a magazine: you will take courses, and then you will have access to courses to keep you up-to-date for the rest of your life.”
WE WILL BE LIFELONG STUDENTS
Julio Frenk, president of the University of Miami and former dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, agrees that universities will have to become higher education centers for people of all ages. “There’s an educational revolution going on, created in part by the change in the nature of the labor market, which is forcing us to get out of this notion that higher education is something that happens to people during a specific time in their lives, a time when they go into a tunnel and come out with a diploma,” Frenk told me.
“Now, we’re going to have a more open structure, where people can go in and come out all the time, at every stage of life,” he said. “Not only for personal enrichment but also because of the demands of a changing job market. So we’ll have to develop the students’ analytical skills, which will give them the flexibility to adapt to a changing job market throughout their lives.” When I asked him if he agrees with MIT’s Reif that the future of higher education will involve a fifty-fifty mix of face-to-face and online learning, he said yes. “The best models are the hybrid ones,” he added.
According to Frenk, when it comes to higher education, there are three levels of learning: informational, formative, and transformative. “They are very different,” he told me. “Informational learning, which is the transmission of information and concrete skills, is the one most suited to online education. But education must also be formative, since we must develop critical thinking and create ethical frameworks, because we want people like doctors and lawyers to abide by ethical standards. And finally, education must also be transformative: it has to be able to turn people into agents of change. It has to develop leadership skills and the capacity to understand the world and transform it.” Formative and transformative learning are more difficult to teach online, and work best in face-to-face classes, he said.
“THERE WILL BE FIVE TYPES OF COLLEGE PROFESSORS”
Randy Bass, the Georgetown professor who is somewhat skeptical about teaching robots like Professor Einstein, told me that there will be five types of college professors in the future. First, there will be teachers like the ones we currently have: we can call them expert performers, or people who use their oratory skills to teach their classes in front of students. Then, there will be personal mentors or motivators, who will be in charge of helping students find their passions and develop them. Other teachers will be academic advisers, others will be evaluators, and the last group will be that of personalized class designers.
“Historically, all five of those roles have been included in what we have called a professor,” Bass said. “In the future, there will be an unbundling, a split in these functions. Some professors will be just one of these things, or some combination of them. It’s inevit
able.” When I asked him whether that will translate into a larger or smaller number of professors, he said that “it might lead to fewer professors who perform all five roles, but there may still be just as many people doing that work. They might not all be what we call professors today. They may not all need to be Ph.D.s, but could be psychologists or people with master’s degrees.”
Most likely, we will see an increase in the number of professors—all types of them—over the next few decades. That’s among other things because of the world’s population growth and the fact that more people will be studying on and off for their entire lives; it’s also because the jobs of the future will increasingly require college and graduate degrees. Not surprisingly, the 2018 OECD study on the impact of automation on jobs placed teaching professionals, alongside business managers and health workers, among the least likely to lose their jobs because of automation. But the role of professors will change, as there will be less of a need to simply impart knowledge and a greater demand for psychologists, mentors, and motivators for students, and engineers to prime and oil the robots.
Intelligent machines will play a big role in the new educational universe. Thanks to their infinite patience, unlimited time, and ability to tailor their answers to the personalized needs of each student, robotic teaching assistants will be unmatched in their ability to pass along information. But it will still take human teachers to guide, motivate, and develop their students’ ethical standards. And as time goes by and more robots take over routine jobs in factories, restaurants, and hotels, there will be an increasing demand for more highly skilled workers with university-level educations. In the future, if people don’t want to work for robots, they’ll need to learn how to manage them.
The Robots Are Coming! Page 25