Alternatives Won’t Replace College, but They Must Adapt (column)

Thank goodness: The tech bros of Silicon Valley are once again trying to protect young people from wasting their time on traditional higher education.

The breathless announcement last month about the creation of the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a $42 million college alternative for “the best young people in the world,” is the latest in a string of proclamations stretching back decades about new paths to success that detour around the most established providers of education and training: traditional colleges and universities.

Anybody who occasionally reads this “Tough Love” column knows by now that I think higher education has a shit ton of problems (that’s the technical term).

The news from Gallup last week that just 31 percent of Americans say that getting a college education is “very important” (down from 70 percent a decade ago) is yet another sign that colleges and universities are losing the public. Many of my columns this year have laid out my sense of the reasons why (unaffordability and arrogance) and how traditional institutions need to change to regain public confidence and actually be better (prove their value, serve more adult students, measure learning).

Believing, as I do, that colleges and universities must significantly improve how they operate and prove their value is very different from thinking that going to college is a waste of time or that the many pathways offered up as “college alternatives” are necessarily better bets for learners.

That’s been a trope since I started covering higher education in the 1980s. A lot of the early clamoring came from emerging for-profit colleges, which (rightly) criticized traditional institutions for ignoring adult learners and figured out how to serve working students by operating outside of normal business hours and starting terms more than two or three times a year.

Many for-profit colleges lost their way when they began chasing Wall Street investment and targeting traditional-age students with usurious financial aid tactics, but the best ones influenced traditional colleges and have essentially become part of higher ed.

The tech world has been the epicenter of the “higher ed sucks” crowd for the last two decades. Silicon Valley and the university that fuels it, Stanford, spawned the movement toward massive open online courses, which early fanboys like Thomas Friedman championed not so much as an alternative to higher education but as a way to remake it entirely.

Other know-it-alls have made their disdain for colleges and universities abundantly clear. Most famously, Peter Thiel followed his 1990s critiques about a lack of intellectual diversity on campuses with a fellowship in 2011 that promised six-figure sums to young people who skipped (or dropped out of) college to become entrepreneurs.

And a long line of start-ups, usually motivated more by profit and cockiness than by enmity for traditional colleges, have portrayed themselves as alternatives to, if not killers of, higher education.

The entire coding boot-camp movement of the early and mid-2010s was premised on the idea that a university computer science degree was an expensive waste and that they had a shortcut. (To be fair, most of the boot-camp providers themselves didn’t embrace anticollege rhetoric; most of the “college replacement” language came from the tech journalist cheerleaders who wrote about them.) While most of the boot-camp providers bombed out, many colleges adopted the idea of embedding skills-based learning into their curricula.

The Minerva Project and its founder, the entrepreneur Ben Nelson, in 2012 positioned the new institution not as an alternative to college but as an improvement on the elite (and elitist) Ivy League.

Minerva promised its students a higher-touch, practical education in a blended format that sent them to multiple continents. Its primary (and tiny) institution, Minerva University, won approval from a mainstream accreditor in 2021, but Minerva has arguably influenced higher education more through its affiliations with more than 30 universities around the world.

My personal favorite higher ed hater was Adam Braun, who founded MissionU in 2017 as a one-year “skills-focused” post–high school education for which students paid no up-front tuition. “I fundamentally believe that the majority of young people that are going to college nowadays are making a bad decision,” Braun said on one podcast soon after MissionU’s launch. “The problem is they really don’t have many choices, and that’s where MissionU comes in.”

A year later, MissionU was dead; WeWork hired Braun (and “bought” the carcass of MissionU) to start a chain of Montessori-style schools that never materialized. Few in higher ed shed tears, but Dartmouth’s Joshua Kim, a fellow Inside Higher Ed columnist, wrote at the time, “The worst thing that those of us in traditional higher education can do is to gloat over the demise of MissionU.”

He added, “The critique of the higher ed current model that MissionU built its business on remains valid. The hunger of many students for an alternative to the current higher ed options remains real. The fact that MissionU could not make its business work is not an indication that the existing system of higher education does not need to change.”

Which brings us back to the new Horowitz Andreessen Academy. As was true for many of the promised (or threatened) college alternatives of the past, many of the ideas behind the new initiative make sense for its purpose as an incubator for tech talent: a focus on ensuring students can use AI, develop “human” or “durable” skills, and have ambition; and a curriculum heavy on group work and collaboration.

And that’s kind of the point. As experts on innovation like to point out, improvements in different fields often come from new or alternative providers because the incumbents often lack motivation and incentive to change on their own—at least until what they’ve been doing successfully stops working.

People like to caricature higher education as unchanging (think how many quotes you’ve read about how the college classroom looks the same as it did 100 years ago), but the truth is that what we consider to be traditional higher education now incorporates community colleges that didn’t exist 60 years ago, fully online universities that didn’t exist 20 years ago and so much more.

And traditional institutions have shown a capacity to adopt the best innovations of alternative providers (and, to be fair, sometimes the worst, too) and make them their own.

The changes haven’t been anywhere near fast enough or widespread enough or fundamental enough to meet the needs of today’s learners. And I worry plenty that even now, when it seems blatantly obvious to me that Americans of all stripes (look at the demographic breakdowns in the Gallup data!) are losing faith in colleges, remarkable numbers of academics don’t believe they need to change what and how they teach, or make it easier for students to transfer, or care about whether students get jobs after college.

Over the next five, 10, 20, 50 years, the number and types of providers of postsecondary education and training will continue to grow, and traditional higher education’s share of the market will almost certainly decrease, even as the potential learner population grows because we embrace what my friend Mitchell Stevens calls a “learning society.”

If I were a betting man, I’d still bet that traditional colleges and universities will collectively adapt enough over time to remain central—if not dominant—providers of education and training for a long time to come.

But that’s only if they—their trustees, their leaders and their rank-and-file faculty and staff—take seriously enough the public’s doubts, the reality that some really good alternative providers might actually serve learners’ needs better than they do and the imperative to adapt to what individuals and society demand from them now.

Let’s not prove people like Peter Thiel and Adam Braun right.