Last year, I wrote about my experience of getting to 500,000 public story views on Snapchat. While fully acknowledging that I am not Snap’s target demographic, it’s been interesting to watch the rise, dip and potential rise again of this company. This is a critical time for the social media platform, as new networks like […]

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Yeah, that’s a slightly clickbait-y title, but these are scary times. Schools are cutting programs, scaling way back and in some extreme instances, closing altogether. It’s hard to go a full week without seeing an article in the news about the impending death of higher education.

Is higher ed dying? No, I don’t think so. Is it sick? Yes, I believe so.

I recently read this news story about big companies like Google, Apple and Netflix no longer requiring college degrees for its employees. This quote jumped out at me:

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said that about half of Apple’s US employment last year included people who did not have four-year degrees. Cook reasoned that many colleges do not teach the skills business leaders need most in their workforce, such as coding.

That’s worrying, but not surprising. It’s challenging to quickly pivot at enterprises as large as a university. Apple can decide tomorrow to stop making X and instead make Y. That’s a much harder thing to do for us.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as we go through the college search process with our oldest child. I’ve been focusing like never before on outcomes and cost, and what kind of experience my son will have. I wonder what the experience will be like 5 years after that for my younger son. Expect a large number of posts in the coming months about my experiences of this search process. I know how the sausage is made, so I’ve been both surprised and downright shocked at what some schools are doing to reach potential students. That’s a (series of) post(s) for another day.

I watched this video last week, and while I disagree with some o