(clapping)

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I'm really happy to be here today,

and as many people have commented

just in this fantastically beautifully space,

and while we're thinking about this space,

I wanna actually ask you to consider

not just the physicality of the space, but the setting,

and the way that we're relating to each other in this space.

It's a familiar setting, it's one

that we kind of all grew up in,

where there's one person onstage,

maybe two people at a time, sharing ideas,

and the majority of people in the room are listening,

hopefully engaged, but listening,

and this kind of setting is really similar

to many lecture halls and classrooms all across

colleges and universities in this country.

Rooms like this one.

And this one.

And increasingly, sometimes like this one.

And if you look, and you think about this setting,

these spaces say a lot about some of our fundamental beliefs

about how people learn.

These rooms say that we learn while sitting down.

While listening.

Paying attention to the person, the expert,

in the front of the room, the proverbial sage on the stage.

Many of these rooms can only be arranged

in just that one configuration,

the furniture is bolted to the ground,

and designed in such a way to limit interaction

between most of the people in the room.

They encourage us to write down

and record what we're hearing for future study or reference.

And what these rooms convey, what they say about

what we believe about how people learn

and how we should teach, these ideas are very, very,

very old.

They're at least 800 years old,

clearly, they come from some place even older.

So, 800 years ago is around the time

that the first universities were emerging in Europe.

And what this means is that nearly everyone who works at

or teaches at a college or university today

was educated in this model.

And so these basic ideas have been with us for a long time,

and they're going to be very hard to change.

But we are in the middle of a debate in this country

about the value and the cost, and the form, even,

of our higher education.

So one area of scrutiny right now is the admissions process.

To get into college today, you have to have

straight As and AP classes and spectacular scores

and really evocative personal essays,

and lead a community service club, and play varsity sports,

and have a black belt in karate, and,

I could go on, I'm not even exaggerating.

And what we're essentially creating

is this extremely industrious army of high schoolers

who are trying very, very hard

to fit that one narrow definition

of what it looks like to be successful.

So, one voice in this debate is a former professor from Yale

named William Deresiewicz, and he writes about his concern

that we're essentially training a generation of young people

to be good at jumping through hoops

and conforming intellectually.

In other words, he writes, are we just producing

really excellent sheep?

Now, I want you to look at the image on the screen,

and think about your own college experience for a second.

I'm curious if anyone else sees themselves on the screen.

I do.

Did anyone else hear, Go to college

right after high school, and work really diligently

to make sure that you got through

in the right amount of time, in four years.

I did.

I, like a lot of students, was really good

and conscientious about following those rules of school,

and I never questioned, could it be different?

Now, others of you may not see yourselves in this image,

but may recognize some of your former classmates,

or your colleagues, or your kids, particularly

if they're going through the admissions process right now.

Maybe you found that the conventional model

didn't work for you, but you persisted anyway.

But this is really the kind of model that's being held up

as the brass ring that we should all aspire to

in this country.

Now, this kind of hot topic in higher ed

has been playing out in the media all summer.

Deresiewicz published an excerpt of his new book

in The New Republic that got a ton of attention,

it was called Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League,

and it showed a picture of the Harvard flag in flames,

which was not very popular at Harvard,

but it got over two million hits online,

it drew a lot of attention.

And his perspective is really controversial,

so a lot of people don't think,

and particularly, some of the students that he's describing

with this metaphor, don't think it's fair

to hold them responsible for the failings

of the overall system, or to somehow criticize them

just because they work very hard and try to achieve success

in the way that our society currently defines it.

But I believe that Deresiewicz is writing

with genuine concern for this generation of students,

whom he describes as the kid that everyone wants

at their college, but no one wants in their classroom.

The student who will have much success, but little vision,

and the kid who works very, very hard,

but rarely questions authority.

And I actually believe that this is a problem

that we should all be interested in,

because this is a generation of students

who are incredibly highly structured,

but they're gonna be entering an increasingly

ambiguous world.

It's the most complex, ambiguous world we've ever known.

This is the world of Ebola, and ISIS, and climate change,

and data security breaches.

But it's also this world of tremendous opportunity

to make really transformative change,

as many of you are doing, through technology and design,

and industry, and science.

And so, we need to be training our students

not just to expect that they will be society's leaders,

but also to be our most creative, daring, and resilient

problem solvers.

So I think it's really important to ask,

can the current system of higher education produce it?

Can the current system that we have

actually produce creative thinkers and problem solvers?

So the ecosystem in academia, and the culture,

is a really old one, it's not built to change

or adapt rapidly.

But there are these two pressures

that are happening right now that are kind of

starting to get people off-balance,

and to shake things up a little bit.

So, one is the abundance of new technology

is starting to make us ask questions about

what is the meaning of online learning,

and what does it mean to higher education?

What is it gonna mean when a student arrives

for the first day as a freshman, and she's already taken

all of the introductory classes online.

Or, even better, what if students who have learned

using some of the tools that Jake was showing earlier,

that's what they are used to in elementary school

and high school, and then they arrive,

and they come to our lecture rooms.

This is gonna happen soon, this change.

The other thing that's happening at the same time

is a real question, and a set of concerns about the cost

and the social and economic value of a college degree.

And this is a really important question for us

to grapple with, particularly because in this country,

we've always had this goal that college

is supposed to help establish social mobility.

But at the moment, most efforts around innovation

in higher ed have focused squarely around online learning,

and until very recently, particularly around MOOCs,

this idea that we could have these massive classrooms online

accessible to everyone around the world.

So at the Stanford d.school, we were really curious

to look and see what was happening in the other direction.

So over the past year, we wrestled with this question.

What is the future of the on-campus experience

in the age of online learning?

And we brought students, like some that you see here,

and faculty, and designers together at the d.school

to really look at this question together.

What is so special and important about

being in person while you're learning, being together,

living in the community where you're learning,

that students will even choose to enroll

in a residential college experience in the future?

So the first thing that we did

was we wanted to really try to understand

real students' experiences now,

and so we equipped our students with video cameras,

and we sent them out on campus to interview their peers,

and get some of these stories.

So I'm gonna show you a very short video

of a student named Becca, who was a senior

when this video was shot.

And Becca was a student who had really struggled

and felt conflicted about her choice of major.

And finally, actually, to break through

this feeling of struggle, she did something kinda radical,

she just stepped out of the system.

She took a year off, and she worked

in a professional capacity, she worked

on a political campaign.

So, this is Becca, and I just wanna say,

this video was shot by one of our students in a dorm,

I think late at night.

The quality is not great, but if you listen,

what Becca talks about in terms of her personal journey,

and this real transformation that she experienced

after coming back from her year off, is pretty interesting.

The first thing for me is that, this year, probably,

and actually, it's 'cause I took a year off from school,

and I came back, and this year's the first time

that I feel like I've actually taken control of my education

in a meaningful way, not a meaningful way

in the arc of education, but a meaningful way

in the arc of my life, in the arc of learning things

in life, so I no longer have, really, incentives

to get good grades, and my grades are better

than they've ever been, and I no longer have incentives,

really, to feel like I need to take a specific class,

and I like my classes more than I've

ever liked them before, and I do more of the work

that's assigned than I ever have before,

and I enjoy it a lot more.

Okay, so if you're an educator,

that's what you wanna hear, you wanna hear,

I do more of my work than ever before,

and I enjoy it more.

She's getting more out of it.

And we want more Beccas.

Becca is a student who stepped out of that line.

She had to figure out how to hack the system,

and we actually heard many of these stories

of students who didn't really find that reason

for their education, they didn't have that sense

of ownership until they did something

that was kinda different than the status quo,

different than the expectations.

And actually, to be honest, students who take a year off,

we call it taking a year off, right?

You're kind of thought of as maybe someone

who couldn't take it, or there's something

a little wrong with you.

So we haven't really validated that that's

an appropriate thing to do, but it's so powerful

when students do it.

So the next thing that we did is we asked our students

to go get some inspiration from beyond campus,

and in particular, from beyond formal

educational environments.

We really wanted to have them study learning

kind of in its essence, outside of school.

So we sent a group of students who went to visit SpaceX,

to try to understand how a really technical company

fosters collaboration.

And we sent a group of students

to go behind the scenes at Cirque du Soleil,

and they learned that even though the performers in the show

were really kind of at the peak of their careers

and conditioning, they were still required to take classes

and learn new things, so that they continue to learn,

and this really challenged for our students

what they had expected in terms of

what it means to be an expert in the world.

We also had a group who went down to LA,

and visited an organization called Homeboy Industries.

And Homeboy Industries helps provide services

that help rehabilitate people who have been in gangs,

and who wanna be enjoying a more productive

or mainstream life.

And, in addition to kind of tattoo removal

and job training services, the organization has

some really fundamental principles baked in.

So, for one thing, they don't do recruitment or marketing.

You really have to be ready, and to show up

when you're ready to find them.

And secondly, once you're admitted,

you have to clear a drug test, but once you're admitted,

they assign you an adviser, and then you

with your adviser decide what combination of classes

you might wanna take, what's the right path for you.

And they just don't believe that there's just one path

to navigate their offerings, or to find success.

And our students were really inspired

by both of these ideas.

Showing up when you're ready, and being able

to chart your own path.

And they wondered, Why can't some of these principles

be a bigger part of our college experience?

So, the work culminated this past spring when,

after finding lots of insights like these,

both from Stanford and beyond,

we shared our ideas with the broader Stanford community.

And these ideas were really meant to start conversations

in this very formal environment,

and to inspire people to try to think 10 or 15 years

into the future, which is a longer term

time horizon than we usually think with, in academia.

So I'm gonna share four of these provocations

with you today.

The first is an idea that we called open loop university.

So, this idea really boils down to the following concept.

If I told you that you could exercise every day

for the next four years, and then at the end

of the four years, you would be fit

for the rest of your life, you would laugh!

You might be really happy to hear that news,

but you would probably laugh.

And, essentially that's the model

that we have baked into college.

We give students one shot in early adulthood

to kinda learn what they need to know,

and then we spit them out into the outside world.

But what if college wasn't just a time in your life,

but it lasted your whole lifetime?

What if instead of four years,

you actually had six years of college to distribute

over the course of your life?

You could loop out into the working world

when you needed some real experience,

and you could loop back in to a university or college

when you needed some kind of deeper learning experience.

So, avocados don't all ripen in exactly eight days,

but we somehow expect that kids are all ready

to go to college at 18.

And this was part of the provocation,

this was an idea for what an advertisement might look like,

if Stanford decided to adopt the open loop university model.

The next idea was around what we call paced education.

What if actually, we created a system where students

could move through college at their own pace?

So right now, college is just kinda arbitrarily

structured into four years.

And we know that students show up with all different skills,

and all different levels of readiness,

but we only really offer them one rhythm.

And for a lot of students, this means that,

for instance, they have to declare a major

before they have any real concept

of what it might be like to work in that profession,

or to study that more deeply.

So...

What if college abolished the class year,

and let students explore, and focus and practice?

We think, actually, that these are the three basic phases

that students go through.

They need to explore lots of topics

in a light way to find out what's right for them,

they need to focus, and deepen, and gain expertise

in just one or two of them, and then they really need

an opportunity to practice, to try, and to fail,

and to try again.

The third idea, we call it axis flip.

So, we now live in a world where you can get

any piece of information, basically,

that you need at any time.

So what if college, in the future,

wasn't about accumulating information,

but was really about developing competencies and skills?

How would you actually share what you'd really learned

at college with the outside world?

In that scenario, could the college transcript

be as unique as a human fingerprint?

And really show and emphasize the skills

that you are prepared to use going forward,

instead of just being a record of the classes

that you've taken in the past.

The last idea that I wanna share with you today,

we call it purpose learning.

So, one of the things that is really a pleasure

about teaching at a college or university today

is that this generation is incredibly committed,

and really genuinely wants to do good in the world.

So, what if students declared missions, not majors?

Or even better, what if they applied

to the school of hunger, or the school of renewable energy?

These are real problems that society

doesn't have answers to yet.

Wouldn't that fuel their studies

with some degree of urgency and meaning and real purpose

that they don't yet have today?

And our goal is that they would feel

as inspired and full of purpose as these two students.

So we started with this question,

can higher education be redesigned?

But actually, I think that this is the wrong question.

I think that the more important,

and actually, the much harder question is to ask,

can it fundamentally be changed?

We remember the images of the lecture halls,

this is a really old model, and it will take a lot

to disrupt that paradigm.

Where there is movement starting to happen,

what's at the center of the conversation, is technology

and business models.

But I really think that to create a new model

of higher education that prepares students

for that ambiguous, uncertain world of the future,

we have to do more.

As the creative community, and I really mean

the community in this room, as designers,

I think we need to be part of putting students

at the center of that conversation.

Thank you.

(clapping)

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