Alex Ezat Parnia, President and CEO at Florida Coastal University
An evening course is an arrangement worked out for everyone’s alternative commitments and because of this, everyone involved knows it’s a compromise. A working professional drags themself to a university classroom at 7 PM after a full day of meetings, dealing with traffic and childcare, to sit in a class that was planned for a 22-year-old. The institution is collecting tuition from a cohort for whom they have never actually attempted to redesign the structure of their university experience, and provide the same degree design that they provide for on-campus undergraduate students with the only difference being a time shift added in. Everybody has entered the same fiction: that Higher Education can become compatible with Work Life simply because it has been moved to hours when working people should be available.
Online degrees: An alternative for evening classes
The reason that this learning model was around for so long is because the alternatives were worse. Online education has a credential penalty and was therefore risky as a professional decision. Although executive programs existed, they were more than most working adults could afford without their employers sponsoring them. Other options for those wanting to pursue additional education were through evening classes, obtaining an MBA which would require institutional support, or no further education whatsoever. Most working professionals who were interested in either developing their current skill set, transitioning to another field of work, or formalizing the knowledge and expertise they have developed over time were faced with very few options that actually suit their needs.
What has changed more than anything is that it is no longer just about the technology used to provide online education. Technology has existed for many years, prior to institutions properly utilizing that technology to deliver online education. The story of early e-learning is predominantly the story of the digitization of traditional, analog educational content by uploading that content to a digital container, and being mislabeled as “transformation.” What has changed is that the providers of online education have a much greater understanding of what working adults need from higher education compared to many institutions’ attempts to adapt a traditional, residential model and provide online education.
Education is different for professionals and students
Unlike a full-time student, a working adult learner has a different relationship to education: rather than developing a foundation, they are building upon an existing one with a professional context that most traditional educators would consider irrelevant. However, professional context is one of the educator’s most valuable raw materials for building their educational experience.
For example, a supply chain manager who is mid-career and taking operations classes does not require a description of inventory optimisation to be able to explain it by referencing first principles; they require the theoretical framework of inventory optimisation so that they can eventually explain how they currently manage inventory optimally through their own words. If an educator does not understand the difference between helping a student build a foundation versus building on an existing foundation, or if they deliver the exact same content regardless of what type of learner they are working with, they are not only wasting time and energy, they are actively wasting the best learners in the class.
Those institutions are not offering more flexibility in school calendar & class schedules; however, flexibility is important. Rather, these institutions are re-evaluating how they perceive education itself.
Competency-based education, which allows learners progress based upon their demonstration of competency vs. simply accumulating classroom hours, has a very different structure than an evening class with a relaxed attendance policy. A stackable credential program will allow an individual to accumulate enough credits towards their final degree with flexibility over many months representing working adults’ actual planning horizon. Additionally, cohort models allow individuals at the same level of experience the ability to engage in peer-to-peer learning; thus, they are using the classroom as a location of learning from each other versus just a place where instruction is received.
The credential question has a large amount of activity happening within it and shows where the greatest difference lies between what institutions have produced and what the needs are of the working adult with regard to those institutions.
In general, most of the funding provided by employers for professional development is done so according to their employer obligation which is to produce only a degree. It must be understood that a degree is based on a four-year course of study and is relevant to only those individuals who dedicated four years of their life to it and do so consecutively; not the case for most working adults. Therefore, the professional certificate, industry micro credential, and competency badge are not inferior alternatives but rather tools that, again, would provide the professional with the information required to demonstrate specific skills/abilities to a specific employer within a specific time period.
The value of this type of learning is greater than that of a degree where 3 years plus of evening work and study is required with the end product not being valid because of lack of current knowledge of their field prior to graduation.
An employer who has discovered how to work closely with universities and training providers is creating internal learning pathways as opposed to simply reimbursing employees for their tuition and hoping it works out in the end. In addition, Google’s and Amazon’s upskilling programmes or any other type of employer/university partnership created since 2020 can be viewed as something other than just corporate generosity; they see and acknowledge the direct impact the traditional learning model has had on an employee’s success rate and their ability to gain the skills necessary to succeed in a competitive labour market.
Professionals need a system designed specifically for them
What working adults deserve is much more than a better evening class; they deserve a higher education system that has been designed specifically for the needs of working adults, one that recognises professional experience as an asset rather than as a hindrance to obtaining and maintaining employment, one that evaluates ability based on what someone can do as opposed to having sat in a room long enough, and one that creates credentials recognised by the labour force without forcing the adult to take time off from work to obtain these credentials. Institutions and employers who have ceased to be patient enough for the traditional education model to reform itself are building together in pieces the solution to provide working adults with what they justly deserve. The professionals who are able to find those pieces of the solution first will no longer accept inferior quality solutions; rather, they will stop pretending that the current evening class is a sufficient solution for working adults.