If we view the economic value of college based solely on the direct outcomes of post-graduation performance, then perhaps we're evaluating the investment based on incongruent objectives and misaligned time horizons. That is to say, my career-based decisions should be based on my career goals. As such, I should choose the best course of action to increase my likelihood of achieving them. For some, that might mean a college degree; for others, perhaps not.
If we only measure the value of college based on immediate value realization, then we likely ignore the long-term financial benefits that college provides, like the network.
If we only measure the value of college based on immediate value realization, then we likely ignore the long-term financial benefits that college provides, like the network.
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LearningTranscript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - Hi, I'm Allie Jackson Jolly.
00:04 I'm here with Dr. Marcus Collins,
00:06 who's a clinical assistant professor of marketing
00:09 at the University of Michigan.
00:11 He is also the author of "For the Culture,
00:14 "The Power Behind What We Buy,
00:15 "What We Do, and Who We Wanna Be."
00:18 So welcome, Marcus.
00:19 - Hi, how's it going?
00:20 - Yeah, glad to talk to you.
00:22 This is the third in a series of conversations
00:24 we've been having around college
00:28 as a investment, one of the larger investments
00:32 that people will make in their lifetime,
00:34 and how they should be thinking about that return
00:37 on their investment.
00:38 It's appropriate because right around now,
00:41 if you have a student at home, a senior at home,
00:44 or if you're a parent or a professor,
00:46 you know that students are getting their applications in
00:50 right now and getting ready for those decisions to come back.
00:53 So consumers of higher education
00:57 are really thinking about this right now.
00:58 And so I wanted to ask you,
01:00 what do you think are the big things
01:05 that these students should be thinking about
01:08 in terms of making sure they get the most
01:12 out of their investment?
01:14 - If you would have asked me this 10 years ago,
01:16 I think my answer would be different.
01:18 But having been a part of academia
01:21 for almost a decade now,
01:23 and teaching at a high caliber university,
01:28 my answer is different.
01:30 So back then I would have said,
01:32 oh, you need to go to a place
01:34 where your major is really good,
01:39 that you can learn from really good professors,
01:42 and you can have a really great experience,
01:44 and you can get a job after the fact,
01:46 because people are gonna see that brand on your resume,
01:49 and it's gonna signal something about you,
01:51 and they're gonna open up more doors.
01:54 I think today my thinking is a little different,
01:57 because I feel like I have always been taught,
02:00 or had always been taught to think of college as a vocation,
02:05 as a place where I study my vocation.
02:07 Right?
02:08 If I wanna be a marketer, I study marketing.
02:11 If I want to be a writer, I go into writing, right?
02:16 Or creative writing, whatever the case may be,
02:17 or maybe English.
02:19 But what I found though,
02:20 and maybe this is a bit provocative,
02:21 I think that college is better seen
02:25 as a place to learn how to learn.
02:28 To learn how to learn,
02:29 how to develop critical thinking skills
02:34 that enable you to be able to put in almost any situation
02:38 and navigate it with some level of skill,
02:41 some acumen of know-how.
02:45 Because learning how to learn
02:46 is almost one of the most critical things to have.
02:49 And I realized that in my undergraduate experience,
02:52 that I didn't know how to learn.
02:54 So I struggled mightily
02:57 through my undergraduate experience in the early years,
02:59 'cause I didn't know how to learn.
03:00 Took me a long time to be a good learner.
03:03 And as a professor now,
03:05 what I tell my students,
03:06 that the very best thing I can give you,
03:07 the most important thing I can give you is perspective.
03:11 A way of seeing the world.
03:13 Because skills are gonna come,
03:15 things are gonna change,
03:16 you have to adapt to these new things.
03:18 But the way you see the world
03:20 would be a way by which it's framed.
03:22 So if you have the ability to widen the aperture,
03:25 to keep seeing the world in many different ways
03:27 because you know how to learn,
03:29 then you can adapt to any situation.
03:31 And that's really what's gonna give us,
03:34 that's gonna be sort of the best determinant of success,
03:38 of the job you want,
03:40 of the high salary you're going after.
03:41 All these things are byproducts of our networks,
03:45 of our opportunities,
03:46 and our ability to rise to the opportunity.
03:49 - So it is a little provocative,
03:51 but I really like that.
03:52 That's really an interesting way of thinking about it.
03:55 But let me ask you this.
03:56 Because there's all kind of parents everywhere
04:01 that know that STEM jobs are the jobs.
04:04 So is it better to learn to learn how to do STEM?
04:09 Like is there any value in learning to learn
04:13 a specific skill that we look at the economy and we say,
04:18 okay, that's where the economy is going?
04:19 Or do you think that just,
04:21 blank, you can learn to be a critical thinker
04:26 and do that in STEM or in journalism or?
04:30 - Well, say it this way.
04:31 Say I want to write code.
04:35 Okay, great.
04:36 I wanna write code.
04:37 So I'm gonna go to school to learn how to do that.
04:40 The idea then is that in four years,
04:42 I still wanna write code.
04:44 And what I've learned will be able to help me do that.
04:46 But in the world of tech, it is constantly changing.
04:49 Sorry.
04:51 In the world of tech, it's constantly changing.
04:53 Therefore, you have to be able to be nimble
04:56 and be able to be flexible to change, right?
04:59 So we'd say, oh, don't just take engineering courses.
05:02 Take some behavioral science courses.
05:04 Take some of these courses to help round you out.
05:07 And that's another way of a euphemism of saying
05:10 to see the world in many different ways
05:12 and different lenses so you can pull at these things.
05:15 So while I say, if you wanna be a doctor,
05:17 that is a vocation.
05:18 I wanna be a doctor, right?
05:19 So I'm gonna go a doctor-driven track.
05:22 But if you're like, look, I wanna be in business.
05:24 Oh, let's talk about that, right?
05:26 That's a, this is how I want to apply my skills,
05:29 the environment in which I wanna apply my skills.
05:32 Then I'd say, great.
05:33 Now we need to learn how to learn
05:35 so that you can navigate that environment well.
05:37 Think of it this way.
05:38 I teach at a business school.
05:40 Someone says, I wanna go into operations.
05:44 Great, I wanna go into supply chain management.
05:47 I have never received a phone call
05:49 from any of my classmates in the MBA program
05:53 that said, hey, what's that law,
05:55 that Littles Law thing again?
05:56 Give me that calculus again.
05:58 No, no, no.
05:58 Do you know what we call our classmates asking for?
06:01 I have a problem with my manager.
06:03 I'm having a problem with this employee
06:05 who I can't get to do a thing.
06:07 My leadership doesn't recognize.
06:09 They don't see me.
06:10 How do I break through?
06:11 These are things that aren't taught in a vocation.
06:14 They're taught, they're not taught in school as a vocation.
06:18 They're learned throughout the way.
06:20 How do we learn how to learn?
06:22 I think that the, when I,
06:24 I guess sort of focus group of one,
06:27 when I started to learn how to learn,
06:29 the world opened up for me.
06:30 When the world opened up for me,
06:32 I started to say, ooh, if I wanna do that,
06:34 I need to learn these skills.
06:35 I'm gonna learn those skills.
06:37 Ooh, if I wanna learn that,
06:37 I need to understand this idea, this concept, this theory.
06:41 So I go learn that.
06:42 And the alchemy of those things
06:43 helped me be better suited to solve the thing.
06:46 I believe that if I were doing that earlier,
06:49 I'd probably be in better places.
06:50 But I think that the notion here is that
06:52 in those early years, we are learning
06:55 how to apprehend the world and make sense of the world.
06:58 Then we say, okay, I'm ready to go do it.
07:01 And then the master's program is about being an apprentice.
07:04 I know I've learned how to learn.
07:06 I've got some skills.
07:07 I wanna be a master at this thing.
07:09 So I go into a master's program, right?
07:11 From journeyman to apprentice to mastery.
07:14 And then I go, okay, now I can apply these things
07:17 in all the many heterogeneous ways
07:20 in which they come to be.
07:21 But it starts with being able to see the world
07:23 in multiple ways.
07:24 - So I love this idea about choosing a college or a program
07:29 based on, at least from an undergrad level,
07:34 being able to learn to learn.
07:36 Does that make the old stern professor
07:41 sort of a thing of the past?
07:43 Because if you wanna teach someone to learn,
07:45 you wanna make it fun, right?
07:47 You wanna make your students have fun doing it,
07:49 feel good about it.
07:50 So in your view, is there sort of like a college professor
07:55 type that is gonna be outdated?
07:58 - Well, I think the idea of professor,
08:01 like I'm going to profess things to you
08:03 in a very professorial way.
08:05 I think that just like any media consumption habit
08:10 have been disrupted,
08:11 that people wanna have different expectations.
08:13 The same thing goes in the classroom.
08:15 I tend to get my pedagogy from a gentleman named Jean Piaget.
08:20 I'm a Piagetian kind of guy.
08:22 And he believed that people learn
08:25 when they find themselves in a state of cognitive
08:29 disequilibrium, right?
08:30 That is the world I thought I know is disrupted.
08:33 Now I have to allocate all my energy
08:36 to putting the world back together again.
08:37 This is how I tell my students.
08:39 My daughter, Georgia used to be obsessed with cows, right?
08:43 And we're on a road trip and I go,
08:44 "Hey, Georgia, look at those cows over there."
08:46 She go, "I don't see any cows."
08:48 My wife goes, "The cows right there, honey.
08:49 "What are you talking about?"
08:50 She's like, "I don't see cows."
08:52 Well, the cows we were pointing to were brown.
08:56 In Georgia's mind, cows are black and white,
08:58 say moo and eat grass.
08:59 She was like, "Dem ain't no cows."
09:01 And in that moment, Georgia found herself
09:03 in a state of cognitive disequilibrium.
09:05 And she had two choices.
09:06 She could say, "Oh, cows are black and white and brown
09:09 "and now see the world differently."
09:11 Or she could say, "Mom and dad, y'all wrong.
09:13 "That's not a cow."
09:15 She would have strengthened her current stance
09:17 in the second iteration.
09:19 But if she said, "Oh, these two things exist,"
09:22 she would have learned.
09:23 And that's how I tried to teach.
09:25 Like I think of myself as not like a professor,
09:27 but I was like your Obi-Wan Kenobi,
09:29 sort of leading you through Jedi knighthood
09:31 by providing experiences, curating an environment
09:35 where you are in cognitive disequilibrium.
09:37 And I'm giving you sort of the skills, the tools,
09:40 the provocations to help you put the world
09:42 back together again.
09:43 And I believe that my students walk out thinking like,
09:48 "I see the world differently.
09:49 "Like I've learned how to learn about the world around me.
09:53 "My schema has been broken.
09:55 "And therefore I have learned how to allocate
09:57 "cognitive energy to make sense of the world,
10:00 "to make meaning of the world.
10:01 "And I have these theories, I have these examples,
10:03 "I have these case studies to pull from
10:05 "to help me make meaning of the world
10:06 "should my world be disrupted again."
10:09 So that as a institution, we are making lifelong learners.
10:14 And when we are lifelong learners,
10:17 not only we become good standing citizens in society,
10:20 we hit that social aspect of things.
10:23 But those people typically perform better in the workforce.
10:27 They're typically more ambitious.
10:28 They typically have better ideas.
10:30 They're typically more creative, typically more innovative.
10:33 And therefore all those things that we aspire to
10:36 from a financial capital perspective,
10:39 we are laying the groundwork, the foundation
10:41 for people to get access to it.
10:44 - So if I am looking to, I just got my acceptances,
10:49 and I wanna know like which of these universities
10:52 are gonna help me do that.
10:53 But I think I hear you say like have transferable skills
10:58 and just be a good critical thinker and learner.
11:03 How do I, what do I look for?
11:05 What are the, what do you think are the sort of like
11:09 little tipping points that I know or a little tip off
11:11 that I know that this university
11:13 is gonna be good at that for me?
11:14 - So my niece, Sydney right now,
11:16 she's a senior in high school
11:18 and she's applied to all the things.
11:20 She's doing all the things right now.
11:22 And she's interested in food science.
11:23 She's always been into baking
11:24 and that's kind of what she likes.
11:26 It gets her going.
11:28 And she thinks in her mind right now
11:29 that she's gonna be in that field.
11:31 And I go, that's great.
11:32 So I say, Sid, you should look for schools
11:35 where they do that well, right?
11:38 But pick the schools where you feel like
11:40 you're gonna be able to learn best.
11:43 That is the environment is curated
11:45 so that you can become a good learner.
11:48 And you choose this major 'cause you're excited about it.
11:51 And the idea of choosing majors you're excited about
11:53 is that when it gets hard, because it's gonna get hard,
11:55 you can at least say, I at least like the subject matter.
11:58 And I didn't learn that until I was in my doctoral program.
12:02 They tell you, hey, listen,
12:03 whatever you're gonna do as your dissertation,
12:05 you better be really interested in it
12:07 because it's gonna get really sucky at some point.
12:09 It's gonna get really dark, it's gonna be really heavy
12:11 and you're gonna wanna quit.
12:13 But your affinity for the subject matter,
12:16 your affinity for the topic,
12:18 that's gonna keep pushing you.
12:19 That's gonna keep moving you forward.
12:21 So you're learning about this thing
12:23 that you're interested in while you're learning
12:26 how to learn in an undergrad experience.
12:29 And this is what I tell Sid that like Sidney,
12:31 like you wanna do food science, that's great.
12:34 Go to the schools that do that well.
12:35 But even if they don't do that,
12:36 you can have a proximal thing like chemistry, for instance.
12:39 So like you are adjacent to the thing that you want.
12:41 So you still have some interest in it,
12:43 but you go to the schools, you go to the places
12:46 where you feel like the environment is curated
12:48 to help you learn.
12:49 But also you're learning with the people
12:50 that you think you're gonna learn best from.
12:53 And then hopefully they'll open up
12:55 some financial capital for you along the way.
12:58 - Yeah, I love it.
13:00 Thank you, I actually have a senior myself
13:02 getting ready to go to college.
13:04 So I will take some of this advice home with me.
13:07 But we're out of time.
13:08 Thank you so much for being here,
13:11 making us all a little bit smarter
13:13 about how we can invest in our higher education
13:17 in a way that will serve us well
13:19 and return our investment back to us.
13:21 - Awesome, thanks for having me.
13:23 - Thank you.
13:24 (silence)
13:26 (silence)
13:28 [BLANK_AUDIO]