The College Devaluation Crisis: Market Disruption, Diminishing ROI, and an Alternative Future of Learning

Written by Jason Wingard, PhD

Narrated by James Fouhey

The value proposition of the college degree, long the most guaranteed route to professional preparation for work, is no longer keeping pace with rapidly evolving skill needs that derive from technological advancements impacting today's work force. If the university system does not engage in responsive restructuring, more and more workplaces will bypass them entirely and, instead, identify alternative sources of training that equip learners with competencies to directly meet dynamic needs.



The College Devaluation Crisis makes the case that employers and other learning and development entities are emerging to innovate new approaches to training talent that, at times, relies on the higher education sector, but increasingly operates independently in order to satisfy talent needs more agilely and effectively.



Targeted primarily toward managers, the book focuses on case studies from leading companies, including Google, Ernst & Young, IBM, and Marriott, to illustrate their innovative strategies for talent development across varying levels of individual education, age, and background. The book also addresses professionals on the university side, urging listeners to consider the question: Will higher education pivot and adapt, or will it resist change and, therefore, be replaced?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Aug 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666185300

Reviews for The College Devaluation Crisis

[jklugman_2 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This book is an embarrassment both for the publisher (an imprint of Stanford University Press), for University of Pennslyvania (where Wingard got his PhD) and for Temple University, where Wingard was president for two years. Essentially this is a collection of press releases for organizations involved in alternative forms of adult vocational education, along with Wingard's fawning interviews with the leaders of these efforts (as well as cheesy first-person vignettes of "customers" of these models, which have the same writing style and clearly were written by Wingard or some other person providing ghost-writing assistance). He expresses no curiosity about how these alternative education models actually work, opting instead to take the organization's word at face value that these models are working out great. I would not mind a serious investigation into the failures of traditional higher education, but this is far from that.