I have been thinking a lot lately about the need for greater adaptation to lifelong learning.  I am, as you all know, generally pretty skeptical of any “Fourth-Industrial-Revolution-sky-is-falling-right-this-instant” rationales for institutional change, but that’s not a reason not to think about big change.  First, because even in the absence of radical labour market change there are ways we can do a lot better at lifelong learning than we currently do, and second because given the length of time it takes institutions to change, it’s not too soon to start thinking through what the training needs of the late 2020s and early 2030s are going to look like and what kinds of institutional adaptations will be necessary.

Post-secondary education for traditional-aged (18-24) students is not going to significantly change in format: the bachelor’s degree and the college diploma are pretty much embedded in modern culture as a kind of desirable finishing school for young adults.  The likelihood of this type of education being disrupted is pretty low.

But as undergraduate education becomes more universal, it becomes somewhat less valuable to individuals (returns to public investment may be a different matter). Master’s degrees, post-diploma certificates, what have you: this is where the increased value for individuals will lie.  And for commercial reasons alone, this makes this kind of shorter, post-baccalaureate education worth investing in for universities: if it’s valuable, people will pay for it.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as just creating programs that people will pay for.  Employees never capture the full value of the training they buy: some of it is always captured by their employers.  So, left to themselves, employees will almost certainly under-invest in skills (the same, obviously, is true for employers).  The trick to unleashing higher levels of skills formation is to try to find ways of packaging learning in ways that make maximum sense for both employers and workers.  And that means focussing on two things above all: time, and standardization.

Time is the obvious one – generally speaking, the credentials offered to mid-career workers are too long and smaller, quicker and preferably stackable credentials are  needed.  That’s nothing new.  But that’s only half the battle; I think the bigger challenge for mid-career training is the lack of reliable national and maybe even international brands.

Hear me out here.  Big firms are always going to set the pace on training.  And yet, in the corporate training market what they are provided with is either big for-profit chains (which are problematic) and a whole bunch of potentially good public local partners which nevertheless are an enormous pain in the behind because of scale issues—a national or international company needs trainers that work at a national or international level.  If you are a country with a national footprint, you want to be able to go to one source to deal with your training needs, not fifteen or twenty.

Now there are two possible ways you can try to do this.  One is to have single institutions branch out and become national players on their own.  In the US, you have Purdue University trying to so this through its purchase of Kaplan, and – to a certain extent – Northeastern trying to do this by opening campuses in various parts of the continent (including Toronto).  But there is another possibility: cross-country institutional alliances that offer consistent, branded education and training.

Imagine a group of say 15-20 universities, polytechnics and colleges from different provinces coming together and offering a *consistent* package of programming to mid-career workers.  Imagine a curriculum and a delivery system they all agreed to deliver in a harmonized way (to some degree using shared electronic resources).  A national system of stackable credentials with automatic transfer from one campus to the next.  Maybe even common standards for prior learning and competency-based education.

If you’re a national company and you want to make sure your workers get high-quality standard training, and your choice is between doing it yourself, dealing with 15 local providers, or one national provider, which would you take?  If you were a mobile worker and were considering moving from one provinces to another, which would you choose?

To be clear, this is not a question of actually merging schools: that’s actually impossible without an almost unimaginable set of legislative changes.  It is just a question of launching a shared enterprise around some common curricula and standards.  And these need not even touch on current areas of core competence (like traditional-aged students in the case of universities): it can simply be an enterprise targeted squarely at mid-career professionals.

I think the logic of this approach to what is clearly going to be a growing market in lifelong learning is pretty obvious.  It’s something university and college Presidents may want to start having conversations about sooner rather than later.