What makes a scientifically literate citizen? | Big Think

What makes a scientifically literate citizen?

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Want to hear a joke? Universities haven’t innovated in 400 years. A lot has changed since the 1600s. The average college student today is 25 years old. Approximately one-quarter of students have a child. And close to half will never graduate. The higher education model is hopelessly outdated, catering to a student type that no longer exists, at a price people can no longer afford. Dan Rosensweig, CEO of Chegg, asks: Can we design something better? Taking inspiration from industry innovators like Netfilx, Rosensweig explains why higher education must change and what that kind of future would look like. Here's a hint: less debt, less commuting, on-demand courses that you can binge-learn (four years is truly arbitrary), and highly adaptive to how you learn best. When colleges stop failing their students, society can become so much richer.

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CEO, CHEGG:

Dan Rosensweig joined Chegg in 2010 with a vision for transforming the popular textbook rental service into a leading provider of digital learning services for high school and college students. By leveraging technology, mobility, and connected networks, Chegg today offers a suite of high quality, low cost, personalized and on-demand educational resources that help students pursue, control and improve their own outcomes. As Chairman and CEO of Chegg, Dan commits the company to fulfilling its mission of putting students first and helping them save time, save money and get smarter. Under Dan’s direction, Chegg has become the Student Hub®, a connected learning platform that brings together people who want to learn with the tools and resources that accelerate the achievement of their educational and career goals. Prior to Chegg, Dan served as CEO of Guitar Hero, COO of Yahoo!, and CEO of ZDNet. Dan received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Hobart and William Smith College in Geneva, New York. When Dan isn’t attending a Springsteen concert or enjoying quality time with his wife and two daughters, he sits on the Board of Trustees of Colgate University, the Board of Directors for Adobe Systems, Inc., Rent-the-Runway, Fender Guitars, Birchbox and the Advisory Board of the nonprofit DonorsChoose.org. Dan also serves as a Senior Advisor for TPG Growth Ventures.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Dan Rosensweig: 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, is try to say let’s use what the...

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