Kathleen deLaski asks that question in a new book that asks how to make higher ed not only more accessible but applicable to Americans’ real lives. The post Who Needs College Anymore? appeared first on Washington Monthly.
Kathleen deLaski started her career as a TV correspondent, covering the White House and foreign affairs for ABC News. Then she worked at AOL, as chief Pentagon spokesperson, as a Sallie Mae executive, and as the founder of the influential Education Design Lab. Now she’s out with a new book, Who Needs College Anymore? Imagining a Future Where Degrees Won’t Matter (Harvard Education Press, February 2025).
DeLaski told me recently that she used to be on the “college for all” bandwagon. But she’s become persuaded that college isn’t right for everyone, that we need a much more expansive definition of college, and that we urgently need more and better alternatives for the “new majority learners” who haven’t been well-served by traditional higher education. The excerpts from our conversation below have been edited for length and clarity.
Ben Wildavsky: How did you go from being a pretty high-profile broadcast journalist to being a tech executive to becoming a higher ed policy wonk – what’s the through line?
Kathleen deLaski: I had a very fortunate, elite college experience. And, you know, I didn’t even realize I had been that lucky until I started meeting people on the other side of the divide. I took the job at Sallie Mae because they were starting a foundation, which could be whatever I wanted. So we set up a foundation that looked at “How do we help more people access higher education? And how do we help them leverage the federal entitlements that many families don’t know about?” Then I worked for a time in the charter school movement, and that helped me understand the issues around zip code-is-destiny, right? That just struck me as hugely unfair. I was swept up and moved by the college-for-all or college-is-possible movement in the 2000s.
It wasn’t until we started seeing two things that got me into what I would call the higher-ed entrepreneurial space. One of those was that for many of the lower-income folks getting into college, their journeys were difficult, and the statistics that we started to see were really not good. Forty to 50 percent of students from families that didn’t have a college-going culture were choosing to leave college. Many of us began to say, “Okay, how can we make higher ed not just accessible but more applicable and help people be more successful once they get into a college environment?” But increasingly over the 2010s, many of us also wanted to see how college could be a “product fit” for people who don’t want a four-year degree—they either can’t afford the time or money, or they have careers they want to get to, but they need training. Why can’t college be more customized to fit the needs of different populations, careers, and pocketbooks?
I should say I am pro-college and pro-university. Any 18-year-old who comes to me and says, ‘Should I go to college? Do we even need it anymore? I would say, “Absolutely, unless you’re financially constrained to the point of being anxiety-ridden by debt, or you just can’t sit in a classroom for four years, give it a try. You can always leave.”
BW: The title of your book suggests a pretty deep skepticism. What’s your diagnosis of what’s wrong with college today?
Kd: It doesn’t serve the needs of many. There’s a reason only 38 percent of American adults have a degree. I felt compelled to write the book because we’re sending these competing messages to families–one of which is that college is too expensive, and the other is that you need a college degree to get a good job.
BW: You say colleges are failing “new majority learners.” Who are they, and why is college not working out for them?
Kd: These are the majority of American adults for whom college was not originally designed. Today, if you are a low-income person, if you have to work while going to college, if you are a single mom, neurodivergent, a returning veteran, older than everybody else—these are the types of people for whom college was not designed. And that’s why we see so many not choosing to go. And so many who do try, washing out for whatever reason.
BW: One solution you propose is the “flexible step ladder approach to education.”
Kd: It’s the notion that learners can come in and out of college and build their earnings power as they go. Community colleges are starting to use “micro pathways”: let’s say six months of a training period that might be credit-bearing, where employers in the region say, “If you teach these things, we’ll hire some of these people.” What’s nice about the micro pathways is that they get stacked like Legos into a degree path. One I profile is a young woman doing an EMT program full time. She gets a job as an EMT, and then she can return and get other certifications, but she can do it part-time alongside her job.
In the more elite higher ed world, Northeastern University has the co-op model, where you come, take classes, go off to your job, and then come back. You do two of these co-ops, and after graduation, their job placement rates are in the 90th percentile by the end. I would call that a stepladder approach.
BW: You were the founder of the Education Design Lab. How did design thinking come into play as you were trying to frame a reform agenda around college or not going to college?
Kd: The first way was to create the personas, which is the term we use in design thinking, where you look at a problem through the eyes of the end user. How might we imagine the school-to-work pipeline? The end users are mostly learners, but you could also say employers to some extent because they’re the other half of the transaction at the end of college. The second thing that design thinking looks at is “extreme users,” or outliers. What are the workarounds that are working for them? So, I looked at what early-adopter employers are doing. What are early adopter colleges doing? Which high schools on the front lines are forward-looking? And what are families doing? I tell stories through 150 interviews, people showing us what the future could look like by mid-century.
BW: You note that for 25 years, you’ve advocated a “fix and disrupt” approach to higher education. But in the book, you also write, “Can the four-year degree be saved? Not for most learners.” Do you now see “disrupt” as being the main strategy?
Kd: The most important thing that needs to happen is to elevate these other kinds of pathways: apprenticeships, industrial certifications, short-term certification programs, and programs like Year Up that help lower-income people do in a year what everyone is sent to college to do. But the reason that can be a “fix or disrupt” strategy is because why can’t colleges embrace those models and develop them themselves? And you’re starting to see that happen. Year Up is working with community colleges now. Apprenticeship degrees are becoming a thing in fields like teaching and nursing. Think of all the colleges starting to bake in industry apprenticeships and colleges that are saying, “Let’s have a three-year degree.” Is that fix or disrupt? I think it’s kind of both.
BW: We now have a record number of Americans with college degrees. About 38 percent have bachelor’s degrees, and another 10 percent have community college associate degrees. Lumina released some statistics recently showing that more than 50 percent of Americans have degrees or credentials of value. The earnings gap between individuals with only a high school diploma and those with college degrees is still at an all-time high. Doesn’t the evidence suggest we should keep trying to improve college access and completion? Aren’t you giving up on something that’s a proven strategy for success?
Kd: Why is it giving up to say that we should expand the definition of college and provide the same funding structures? Why can you go off to college as an 18-year-old, maybe not knowing what you’re going to study, and be funded by the federal government, and yet if you’re a single mom and you want to do a short-term program, you’re on your own to pay for it? That’s the problem: We’re holding up college as the construct to the detriment of all others.
The research only applies to the people who finish their degrees—and a lot of people do not. The data is also retrospective. We’re in a period of great change with the success of people with degrees. With the rise of AI and the short half-life of skills, employers want you to have skills you’re not necessarily taught in college. All those things lead me to question the ROI data going forward.
College has to be a better value proposition. When you talk to millennials who came into the job market in the 2010s, they’re bitter about the jobs they could get and their student loans. It cries out for more disruption and less incremental change when you look at the value proposition that college is offering.
BW: Many employers say they want to move to skills-based hiring. But, as you say in the book, that isn’t what’s happening. What will make skills and alternative credentials more valuable than degrees in the real world?
Kd: You see it happening where employers are more desperate. Demand drives change. You saw people hired with certifications and from boot camp in the late teens and early 2020s in tech, for example. In fields where there aren’t enough people with college degrees, you’ll see the early adopters begin to get to scale.
We’ve pushed up the numbers in college graduation a bit, but we’re also losing people at the front end, choosing not to enroll or enrolling in shorter-term programs. I want us to be realistic and practical about not shutting people out of the system.
The post Who Needs College Anymore? appeared first on Washington Monthly.
