The document discusses problems with the current education system: rising costs resulting in student debt, lack of capacity due to underfunding, and lack of applicability of what is learned to real world jobs. It proposes that education needs to be transformed to be more accessible in terms of cost and availability, adaptive to individual students, and provide accreditation that is recognized in the job market. Online education and personalized learning are presented as ways to make education more accessible and adaptive. Accreditation alternatives to traditional degrees are suggested if they demonstrate mastery of skills valued by employers.

1. Bring on the
Education Revolution
Vicki Mach
Education & Tech Entrepreneur
http://vickimach.com I @vickimach

2. We’re facing an education crisis.
Change is critical.
Three main problems confront our
current education system:
COST
CAPACITY
APPLICABILITY

3. COST
Rising tuition and fees:
66% of American college students graduate in debt.
The total student debt ($1 trillion) surpasses the total
credit card debt ($693 billion).
(Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Grading
Student Loans)

4. CAPACITY
Overcrowding and underfunding:
Due to budget shortfalls, community colleges
nationwide cannot accommodate the number of
individuals interested in matriculating. In California
alone, an estimated 200,000 students have been
turned away in 2012 thus far.
(Sources: Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed)

5. APPLICABILITY
There’s a discrepancy between what’s learned in the
classroom vs. what’s used in the real world:
17 million Americans with college degrees are doing
jobs that require less than the skill levels associated
with a bachelor’s degree.
(Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education)

6. How to address the crisis?
We need
education opportunities that are:
 Accessible in terms of cost and capacity,
 Adaptive for the individual, and
 Accredited in the job market.

7. ACCESSIBLE
Online education serves as a transformative platform
to help alleviate cost and capacity.
Extreme impact:
“I would have to teach for 250 years to reach the
same number of students that I did in one semester
with this online course.”
-Andrew Ng, Co-Founder, Coursera

8. ADAPTIVE
What’s the point of education:
 Train the way you think?
 Prepare you for the workforce?
Adaptive education enables us to learn based
on what’s unique to our skills, interests, and
qualities. This brings out the best in us and
empowers us to do our best work.

9. “The fact is that, given the challenges we
face, education doesn’t need to be reformed-
it needs to be transformed. The key to this
transformation is not to standardize
education, but to personalize it, to build
achievement on discovering the individual
talents of each child, to put students in an
environment where they want to learn and
where they can naturally discover their true
passions.”
–Sir Ken Robinson

10. ACCREDITED
Democratized and personalized education is not
enough– we need some form of accreditation to
signal the mastery of knowledge and skills.
This doesn’t necessarily have to be equivalent to a
traditional four-year degree, but it has to be
something that society collectively place value in
as a credible marker.
Just as a traditional college degree does not
guarantee success in the job market, what’s more
important is that we focus on developing and
displaying the knowledge and skills we can put to
actual use.

11. “Universities do not have a monopoly on
learning– only credentialing. There isn't a
single job that, in reality, requires a degree to
be successfully performed; all jobs simply
require knowledge and skills.”
–Degreed

12. CONCLUSION
We’re facing an education crisis.
 COST: Rising tuition and fees.
 CAPACITY: Overcrowding and underfunding.
 APPLICABILITY: Discrepancy between what’s learned vs.
what’s used.
We need education opportunities that are:
 ACCESSIBLE in terms of cost & capacity,
 ADAPTIVE for the individual, and
 ACCREDITED in the job market.

13. Together, let’s impact education for the better.