American higher education is in crisis. Here’s a plan to revolutionize it. | Todd Mcleod | Big Think

How to fix America’s broken higher education system

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Half of all students who begin their higher education journey drop out, 68 percent of Americans never attain a higher education degree, and 73 percent of Americans go into fields unrelated to their higher education degree.

Clearly, something is wrong with how we approach higher education. In turn, this approach contributes to societal ills, like unrealized contributions to humanity, unrealized potential, debt, despair, and pessimism.

Professor and founder of Greater Commons Todd McLeod has a 12-step plan designed to revolutionize higher education in the U.S. to ensure that the higher education system can keep pace with our rapidly changing world.

In 2019, Lumina Foundation and Big Think teamed up to create the Lumina Prize, a search to find the most innovative and scalable ideas in post-secondary education. Congratulations to Greater Commons, founded by Todd McLeod, the audience choice winner of the Lumina Prize!

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TODD MCLEOD

Todd McLeod is the founder of Greater Commons, an online learning platform where individuals can learn and teach new skills. He has also worked as a tenured professor in California, teaching multiple disciplines such as business, information systems, computer science, and online education.

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TRANSCRIPT:

TODD MCLEOD: I have a plan for building a better education system, but I need your help. For 20 years, I've served as a tenured professor in California.

I've watched generations of students come to campus with hope in their eyes. They want better jobs. They want a brighter future. Yet half of them will not graduate. That's right. Half of those who begin higher education drop out.

There is even more bad news, unfortunately, about the state of higher education. If you want to understand how bad higher education is in America, you need to know three numbers -- 50, 68, 73.

We already talked about how 50% of those who begin higher education -- half of students who begin higher education -- drop out. This is a massive fail. But it gets worse.

68% of Americans never achieve a higher ed degree. The current system fails more than 2/3rds of Americans. This is another massive fail. Yet it still gets worse.

Of those that do earn a degree, 73% go into a career different than their field of study. Students come to higher ed for better jobs. Yet 73% of the time they do not directly use what they learned. This is another massive fail.

Higher education is failing Americans, and this leads to all kinds of breakdowns in our society and in the lives of young adults -- loneliness, pessimism, despair, debt, depression, opioids, suicide, lack of innovation, unrealized human potential, unrealized GDP, unrealized contributions to humanity. These are the true costs of our broken education system. This is a deeply concerning issue and a very important issue for us to solve.

This is such an important issue, the United States government has identified the breakdown in education as a national security issue. To put it plainly, ladies and gentlemen, education has not kept pace with our rapidly changing world. And this is why we are creating Greater Commons.

The first thing we've accomplished is that we've created classes that have been delivered to 312,223 students in 192 different countries. In these classes, we've tested and refined our theories on how education should be delivered in our digitally connected and rapidly changing world. We call our approach agile learning. Our courses have met with significant success, both in reviews from students and in the deliverable of getting students jobs.

The second thing we've accomplished is that we've built our own learning platform to deliver classes. We knew we wanted to create more than what's in the marketplace right now, so we went through our code debt learning curve on this step. Through this process, we focused on optimizing for cost. For instance, the market currently charges $0.04 for each minute of video encoded. But because we built our own video encoder, we can do it for one-third of a cent. That's a 12x reduction in cost.

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