College education is failing us all. Can we design something better? | Big Think

Fifty percent of high school students don’t go on to higher education. Of the 50 percent that do, 43 percent of them don’t graduate. Of those that do graduate, the average graduation time is six years. The average age of a current college student today is about 25. And I think 25 percent of college students today actually have a child.

So if you ask me, those statistics suggest two things. The current system is not producing what it was designed to produce for the types of people that go, the number of people that go, and what they need. And it has not kept up with the modern world in terms of how it makes itself available and what it charges students to be able to get what they need.

So it’s a combination of availability. It doesn’t seem to work for the majority of students, because the number one reason that students don’t go on to further education or drop out of college, it’s a combination of two things which essentially means the same thing: It’s too expensive, or they can’t get the classes at the time of day they’re available. And that’s because, of the 70 percent of kids that go to state schools, 40 percent of them work 30 hours a week or more.

All of this is to say that schools are no longer programmed at the right time. They take too long. They’re too expensive, and what they program is incomplete. It’s not necessarily bad. Our view is the education system needs to evolve to the way we do everything. Everything we do today comes to us (rather than us go to them).

An example, today we would never wait out in the rain for a car and hope that we can get a cab. We’ll just hail Uber, and it comes and it takes us exactly where we want to go. Today we wouldn’t go rush home to watch a TV show at eight o’clock on a Thursday night. We watch it on the device we want to watch it, when we want to watch it, when it’s convenient for us.

Only education continues to require you to come to it, pay a fortune to do it, and have it be a choice between eating or reading or learning and earning. And so what Chegg is trying to do is reverse it; try to say let’s use what the internet does best. Let’s make it online, on demand. Let’s make it personalized. You do it the way you want to do it, not the way it’s taught singularly to everybody.

Adaptive, which means when we watch what you do and we learn about you, let’s actually adjust how we teach you or what we teach you, what we give you more of, and what we give you less of based on your actual abilities. And then let’s make it exceptionally affordable. And if we do that, you’d be amazed how many students need to learn, want to learn, are willing to learn.

So we think that the modern university system has become too expensive; incomplete programming, inconvenient locations, inconvenient time of day for the modern workforce, which doesn’t have the time to do both. So even if you look at for-profit colleges, they were a mess because they became a scam for a lot of people. But if you realize 3.6 million people at one time were actually taking it, you realize the demand was there to be able to learn in your own environment, in your own way.

Why? Because the average person was a 30-year-old woman who could not leave her family or her workforce, or in some cases both. So I just think that the modern education system needs to acknowledge who the modern student is, what the demands on that modern student are—there’s more of them, they’re more broke, they have more diverse needs. They enter the system with different education, different backgrounds, different financial situations, and no “one size fits all” is going to work anymore.

And so what we’ve got is we’ve got a lot of schools – now we’re not talking about the top 50 or 100 schools. Those schools have huge endowments. They’ll be protected for a long time and they’ll probably continue to be able to teach the smaller part of the population that can take four years. But the ramifications are—well, here’s a question for you. Why is there something called a four year school? Why...