A university for your whole working life.
Higher education was built to launch people into working life once, in their early twenties. A working life now runs for decades and keeps changing along the way.
A degree covers the first four years. The working life runs another fifty.
The mistake is in the conclusion. Higher education is not ending. It was built to get a person ready for working life in four years. Now it has to keep them ready for fifty.
Today the relationship lasts about four years. A person enrolls, graduates, and moves on, and the institution rarely plays a part in the decades of work that follow.
The relationship lasts as long as the working life does. A person comes back each time the work changes, and the institution is built to expect them at forty and again at sixty.
A university was valued for two things, the knowledge it held and the degree that proved you had it. The knowledge is free now, and the degree is trusted less every year.
A university already offers far more than a degree, years of courses and training that mostly sit unused. Its value now is knowing a person well enough to give them the right course at the right time, rather than leaving them to guess.
A person commits to the price of a degree up front, often with loans. The decision is made once, long before anyone knows how a career will unfold.
Funding shifts to a learning account that fills across a career. A person pays in over time, often with an employer adding to it. The balance is there to draw on whenever the work changes.
A university already reaches people at every stage of life, from high schoolers in dual enrollment to retirees taking courses, and it stays in touch with them long after they leave. The parts are all there. They have simply never been connected to one another, or pointed at what a person needs to learn in the decades that follow.
Connected, these pieces become one institution that serves a person across a working life.
A university built for four years gets one chance at each person, and the pool it draws from keeps shrinking.
A university built for fifty has reason to reach the same person again at thirty, at forty, and at sixty. The supply of eighteen-year-olds is falling while the demand for learning across a working life is only growing.
An institution that serves the whole of a career stops fighting over a smaller freshman class each year and earns a place across the decades that follow.
This argument grew out of several years of research. Entry by entry, Nariway has traced where the practices, words, and systems of working life came from, and gathered them into The Collection. A second study, Beyond the Degree, is now underway, measuring everything American higher education offers beyond the degree.