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A fiscal calamity awaits public schools once pandemic-related federal assistance ends.
Imagine we’re all surfers. The ocean we’re in is the educational system, and we’re all trying to ride the wave of knowledge to the shore of understanding. Some of us have master surfers as guides – personal tutors who are right there with us, helping us manoeuvre the currents and ride high on the knowledge wave. They know our strengths, they know our fears, and they ensure we don’t wipe out. These fortunate few reach the shore faster, more smoothly and often with a lot more fun.
Then there are the rest of us. We’re in a giant surf class. There’s one instructor and dozens of us learners. The instructor is doing their best, but they can’t give us all the personalised attention we need. Some of us catch the wave, some of us don’t. This is Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem.
Brought to the fore by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom in the 1980s, the Two Sigma Problem highlights a gap in education. Personal tutoring can propel students’ performance by two standard deviations – like moving from the middle of a class right to the top 2%. The problem is, we can’t give everyone a personal tutor. It’s just not feasible. So, the question is, how do we give each student the benefits of one-on-one instruction, at scale?
Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, in particular, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. I’ve been experimenting with using ChatGPT as a tutor for my son during the revision period for his exams. It’s great at coming up with questions, marking them, and suggesting how to improve. This kind of feedback is absolutely crucial to learning. It’s also great at exploring the world and allowing curiosity to take you in new directions.
So, if we revisit the Two Sigma Problem based on what’s possible with LLMs, it looks like there’s a possible solution with multiple advantages:
No technology is a silver bullet. As an educator, I know that while curiosity and feedback is really important, there’s nothing like another human providing emotional input — including motivation. AI is here to support, not replace, our human guides.
Even though it’s early days, we’re already seeing some really interesting developments in the application of LLMs in education. I’m no fan of Microsoft, but I will acknowledge that a feature they have in development called ‘passage generation’ looks interesting. This tool reviews data to create personalised reading passages based on the words or phonics rules a student finds most challenging. Educators can customise the passage, selecting suggested practice words and generating options, then publish the passage as a new reading assignment. I find this kind of thing really useful in Duolingo for learning Spanish. Context matters.
As a former teacher, I know how important prioritisation can be for the limited amount of time you have with each student. And as a parent, I’m a big believer in the power of deliberate practice for getting better at all kinds of things. Freeing up teachers to be more like coaches than instructors has been the dream ever since someone came up with the pithy phrase “guide on the side, not sage on the stage”.
One of the main concerns I think a lot people have with AI in general is that it will “steal our jobs”. I’d point out here that the main problem here isn’t AI, it’s capitalism. Any tool or system be used for good or for ill. If you’re not sure how we can approach this post-scarcity world, I’d recommend reading Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani. Of course, regulation is and should be an issue, too.
The main issue I see with this is centralised LLMs run by companies running opaque models and beholden to shareholders. That’s why I envisage educational institutions running local LLMs, or at least within a network that only connects to the internet when it needs to. Just as Google Desktop used to allow you to search through your local machine and the web, I can imagine us all having an AI assistant that has full context, while preserving our privacy.
So the way to approach any new tool or service is to ask critical questions such as “who benefits?” but also to fully explore what’s possible with all of this. I’m hugely hopeful that AI won’t lead us into a sci-fi dystopia, but rather help to even out the playing field when it comes to human learning and flourishing.
What do you think? I’d love to hear in the comments!
Image remixed from an original on the SkillUp blog. Text written with the help of ChatGPT (it’s particularly good at coming up with metaphors, I’ve found!)
The post Using AI to help solve Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem first appeared on Open Thinkering.What does the decline of the English major mean for society at large, and university presses in particular?
The post Fallout from the Implosion of Humanities Enrollments appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Avi Staiman discusses the value that ChatGPT can bring to scholarly communication, particularly leveling the playing field for English as an Additional Language authors.
The post Guest Post — Academic Publishers Are Missing the Point on ChatGPT appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
The University of California System has announced application totals from California students for its nine undergraduate campuses for the class that will enter this coming fall. Systemwide 132,226 students from California applied to at least one of the nine campuses. Of these, 8,519 students were African Americans, making up 6 percent of all applicants.
The total number of applicants to the university system was down slightly from a year ago. That year Blacks were 7 percent of all applicants.
African Americans made up 6 percent of the applicants at the flagship Berkeley campus but the total number of Black applicants to Berkeley was down slightly from a year ago.
At the University of California at Los Angeles, Blacks made up 7 percent of all applicants, the highest level of any of the nine undergraduate campuses. But again the number of Black applicants to UCLA was down slightly from a year ago.
At all other undergraduate campuses, Blacks were either 5 or 6 percent of total applicants.
By state law, public universities in California at not permitted to consider race in admissions decisions.
There is a nonspecific gladness that envelops humanity in the first days of spring, as if kindness itself were coming abloom in the cracks of crowded sidewalks, quelling our fears, swallowing our sorrows, salving the savage loneliness. We are reminded then that spring — this insentient byproduct of the shape of our planet’s orbit and the tilt of its axis — may just be Earth’s existential superpower, the supreme affirmation of life in the face of every assault on it.
That superpower comes alive with dazzling might in a century-old poem by E.E. Cummings (October 14, 1894–September 3, 1962), originally published in his 1923 collection Tulips & Chimneys (public library) — that epochal gauntlet at the conventions of poetry, which went on to influence generations of writers, readers, and daring makers of the unexampled across the spectrum of creative work — and read at the fifth annual Universe in Verse by the polymathic creative force that is Debbie Millman, with a side of Bach.
[O SWEET SPONTANEOUS]
by e.e. cummingsO sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
dotingfingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
pokedthee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thybeauty how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing andbuffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
trueto the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
loverthou answerest
them only with
spring)
Couple with spring with Emily Dickinson, then revisit E.E. Cummings (who, contrary to popular myth, signed his name both lowercase and capitalized) on the courage to be yourself.
For other highlights from The Universe in Verse, savor Roxane Gay reading Gwendolyn Brooks’s “To the Young Who Want to Die,” Zoë Keating reading Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms,” Rebecca Solnit reading Helene Johnson’s “Trees at Night,” and a series of animated poems celebrating nature.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Craig Griffin looks at potential applications we might see for tools like ChatGPT in scholarly publishing. Also included -- a research results haiku.
The post Guest Post — ChatGPT: Applications in Scholarly Publishing appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
For the past 29 years, JBHE has collected Black student admissions data from the highest-ranked liberal arts colleges. Over this long period, there have been 14 years when Amherst College in Massachusetts reported the highest percentage of Black first-year students. On six occasions, Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, had enrolled the highest percentage of Black first-year students.
Six years ago, there were 87 Black first-year students at Amherst. They made up a whopping 18.2 percent of the first-year class. At that time, this was the largest percentage of Black first-year students at any of the high-ranking liberal arts colleges in the history of the JBHE survey. Two years ago, Amherst College sat on top of the survey and the college set a new standard. There were 81 Black students in the 2020 entering class. They make up 18.7 percent of the first-year class. This was the largest percentage of Black students in an entering class in the history of our surveys of both high-ranking liberal arts colleges and the nation’s leading research universities.
Last year, Amherst College set another new standard. There were 100 Black students in the class entering in the fall of 2021. They make up 19.5 percent of the Class of 2025. Now, for the first time in the 30-year history of the JBHE surveys, a college has enrolled a first-year class that is more than one-fifth Black. There are 96 Black students in this year’s entering class. They make up 20.6 percent of the total.
School | Total Enrollment | Black Enrollment | % Black |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amherst College | 467 | 96 | 20.6 |
| Swarthmore College | 434 | 77 | 17.7 |
| Pomona College | 414 | 56 | 13.5 |
| Harvey Mudd College | 238 | 31 | 13.0 |
| Haverford College | 363 | 46 | 12.7 |
| Bowdoin College | 508 | 56 | 11.0 |
| Wesleyan University | 753 | 77 | 10.2 |
| Mt. Holyoke College | 544 | 54 | 9.9 |
| Grinnell College | 438 | 43 | 9.8 |
| Claremont McKenna College | 322 | 28 | 8.7 |
| Vassar College | 681 | 57 | 8.4 |
| Colgate University | 814 | 61 | 7.5 |
| Oberlin College | 822 | 60 | 7.3 |
| Davidson College | 542 | 39 | 7.2 |
| Bucknell University | 1,034 | 69 | 6.7 |
| Washington & Lee Univ. | 476 | 32 | 6.7 |
| Macalester College* | 552 | 36 | 6.5 |
| Smith College* | 619 | 39 | 6.3 |
| Trinity College | 565 | 35 | 6.2 |
| Hamilton College | 481 | 29 | 6.0 |
| Bates College | 519 | 30 | 5.8 |
| Lafayette College | 757 | 39 | 5.2 |
| Bryn Mawr College | 396 | 16 | 4.0 |
Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania has 77 Black students in this year’s entering class. They make up 17.7 percent of the first-year students. This is the seventh year in a row that Swarthmore has ranked in the top 5 in our survey. A year ago there were 68 Black first-year students at the college, making up 14.9 percent of the entering class.
Six years ago, for the first time in the history of our survey, Pomona College in Claremont, California, had the highest percentage of Black students in the entering classes at the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges. There were 65 Black first-year students at Pomona College that year. They made up 15.8 percent of the entering class. Five years ago, Pomona dropped to fourth place with an entering class that was 12.6 percent Black. Four years ago, once again Pomona sat atop our rankings. Pomona had 67 Black first-year students, up from 52 the previous year. Blacks were 16.3 percent of the first-year class. Last year Pomona College ranked in fifth place with an entering class that was 13.5 percent Black. This year Pomona moves up to the third position with an entering class that is 13.5 percent Black.
While the achievements of Amherst College, Swarthmore College, and Pomona College in attracting Black students can not be overstated, an equally compelling tale has taken place at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, which bills itself as the nation’s top liberal arts college of engineering, science, and mathematics.
Thus, it may be a surprise to many readers, that Harvey Mudd College ranks fourth in our survey this year with an entering class that is 13 percent Black. A year ago, Blacks make up 17.7 percent of the entering class. Two years ago, Blacks made up 8.6 percent of the students in the entering class. In 2009, Harvey Mudd College ranked last in our survey in the Black percentage of first-year students. That year there were only three black students in the entering class. They made up just 1.4 percent of all entering students.
In 2019, Harvey Mudd College accepted only 13.7 percent of all applicants. But the acceptance rate for Black applicants was 35 percent. Blacks made up 10.7 percent of the entering class in 2019. For the past three years, the college has declined to provide JBHE with data on the acceptance rate of Black students.
Three other liberal arts colleges that responded to our survey had entering classes that were more than 10 percent Black. They are Haverford College in Pennsylvania, Bowdoin College in Maine, and Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
Mount Holyoke College had Black enrollments of just under 10 percent. A year ago, only 3.8 percent of the entering students were Black. The number of Black students in the first-year class increased from 18 last year to 54 this year.
In 2009, only three of the nation’s high-ranking liberal arts colleges had entering classes that were at least 10 percent Black. Three years ago there were nine. For the past two years, eight colleges had an entering class that is at least 10 percent Black. This year, there are seven. The fact that several leading liberal arts colleges did not respond to our survey this year may have impacted these totals.
| School | 2021 | 2022 | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mt. Holyoke College | 18 | 54 | +200.0 |
| Bucknell University | 33 | 69 | +109.1 |
| Grinnell College | 24 | 43 | +79.2 |
| Smith College | 34 | 39 | +14.7 |
| Swarthmore College | 68 | 77 | +13.2 |
| Bowdoin College | 51 | 56 | +9.8 |
| Vassar College | 54 | 57 | +5.6 |
| Davidson College | 39 | 39 | 0.0 |
| Macalester College | 36 | 36 | 0.0 |
| Amherst College | 100 | 96 | -4.0 |
| Pomona College | 61 | 56 | -8.2 |
| Lafayette College | 43 | 39 | -9.3 |
| Haverford College | 51 | 46 | -10.1 |
| Colgate University | 69 | 61 | -11.6 |
| Oberlin College | 71 | 60 | -15.5 |
| Hamilton College | 35 | 29 | -17.1 |
| Washington & Lee Univ. | 39 | 32 | -17.9 |
| Wesleyan University | 95 | 77 | -18.9 |
| Harvey Mudd College | 41 | 31 | -24.4 |
| Bates College | 59 | 30 | -49.2 |
Only three leading liberal arts colleges for which we have data have entering classes that are less than 6 percent Black. They are Lafayette College, Bates College, and Bryn Mawr College.
In 2020, enrollments were down at many liberal arts colleges due to the pandemic. So it came as no surprise that in 2021, Black enrollments were up at almost all leading liberal arts colleges. Accepted students at many colleges took a gap year resulting in abnormally large entering classes a year ago. Thus, as we have returned to a more normal admission cycle, the number of entering students – including African American students – is down at many schools.
In addition to the huge increase at Mount Holyoke mentioned earlier, there were large increases in Black students at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and Grinnell College in Iowa. One reason for the large increase at Bucknell University was that the university included all domestic and international students who identified as Black. In the past, the university only used reporting methods called for by the U.S. Department of Education. (See next paragraph.)
Before we continue with the results, it is important to mention how the U.S. Department of Education collects data on the race of undergraduates. Before a change was made several years ago, students who reported more than one race (including African American) were included in the figures for Black students. This is no longer the case. Thus, students who self-identify as biracial or multiracial with some level of African heritage are no longer classified as Black by the Department of Education.
JBHE surveys have always asked respondents to include all students who self-identify as having African American or African heritage including those who are actually from Africa. JBHE has always maintained that biracial, multiracial, and Black students from Africa add to the diversity of a college campus. And including these students in our figures offers college-bound Black students a better idea of what they can expect at a given college or university. In order that we can compare our current data to past JBHE surveys, we have continued to ask colleges and universities to include all students who identify themselves as having African American or African heritage.
Some of our responding liberal arts colleges chose to report results that correspond with official Department of Education figures. They are indicated on the table with an asterisk. It should be noted that if biracial, multiracial, and Black foreign students were included in the Black percentage of students in the first-year classes at these institutions, the overall percentage of Black students would undoubtedly be higher.
In the past, almost all leading liberal arts colleges divulged data on Black student acceptance rates. In recent years, the number of liberal arts colleges that have refused to divulge the data has grown. The recent litigation involving the admissions practices of Harvard University concerning Asian American students, which is now before the Supreme Court, appears to have struck a nerve in higher education circles. Colleges and universities increasingly seem to want to hold their cards close to their vests and not add fuel to efforts to challenge affirmative action admissions policies.
This year we have acceptance rate data on only 13 liberal arts colleges. The four colleges that have the largest percentages of Black students have not furnished acceptance rate data.
Ten years ago, for the first time in the history of the JBHE survey of liberal arts colleges, more responding colleges had a lower acceptance rate for Black students than their overall acceptance rate compared to the number of colleges that had a Black acceptance rate that was higher than their overall rate. This is the eleventh year in a row when more liberal arts colleges that chose to divulge this data showed a lower acceptance rate for Black students than the acceptance rate for students overall. In most cases the differences were small. At Claremont McKenna College in California, the Black acceptance rate was seven percentage points higher than the overall acceptance rate.
| School | Overall Acceptance Rate | Black Acceptance Rate | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claremont McKenna College | 10.4 | 17.4 | +7.0 |
| Bowdoin College | 9.2 | 11.0 | +1.8 |
| Wesleyan University | 14.4 | 15.1 | +0.7 |
| Grinnell College | 9.2 | 8.9 | -0.3 |
| Haverford College | 14.2 | 12.9 | -1.3 |
| Davidson College | 16.9 | 13.3 | -3.6 |
| Mt. Holyoke College | 39.8 | 35.4 | -4.4 |
| Bates College | 13.7 | 9.3 | -4.4 |
| Trinity College | 36.0 | 30.9 | -5.1 |
| Colgate University | 12.3 | 7.0 | -5.3 |
| Hamilton College | 11.8 | 5.8 | -6.0 |
| Bucknell University | 32.6 | 20.7 | -11.9 |
On the other extreme, at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, 32.6 percent of all students were accepted but only 20.7 percent of Black students were admitted.
While no firm conclusions can be made, the fact that for the past 11 years there are now more colleges with overall acceptance rates that are higher than Black acceptance rates, causes one to wonder if there has been some curtailment in colleges’ consideration of race in admissions decisions. Or it may be that the colleges that have a much higher acceptance rate for Black students than they do for the applicant pool as a whole, are unwilling to publicize this information in fear of litigation or do not wish to anger some contributing alumni who are not in favor of race-sensitive admissions.
A compilation of links and a video to incisive analyses of ChatGPT and what it means for the future.
The post Thinking About ChatGPT and the Future — Where Are We On AI’s Development Curve? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
This gentle essay documents Roxanne Gay’s and her wife, Debbie Millman’s, journey to Antarctica. It’s not a racy tale, just a thoughtful look at what the trip meant to them, told from their perspective. A lovely take on shared contentment.
I took a picture of Debbie, bundled in her bright red parka, eyes covered with goggles, beaming as she held the chunk of ice. There were more penguins. We pulled up to a craggy landing and stepped foot on land to . . . say we stepped foot on Antarctica. We admired the landscape, and I was struck by the fact that this really is one of the last places in the world that is largely unconquered. I found an unexpected comfort in that.
As I outlined recently in my “e-Literate’s Changing Themes for Changing Times” post, I am shifting my coverage somewhat. I’ll be developing and calling out tags I use for these themes so that you can go to an archive page on each one. This one will be listed under the “changing enrollment” tag.
Just before Christmas, The New York Times published an ostensibly feel-good story about a Syrian refugee who built a massively successful chocolate business in Canada. But the story buries the lede. The company’s CEO could have—and should have—been a doctor. He couldn’t get credit for his prior education in Syria. Canada is facing an acute healthcare crisis because of a shortage of skilled workers. Canada has figured out half the problem with the labor shortages that plague many industries there and here. They are welcoming immigrants willing to work hard and do the jobs. But they are missing the other half, enabling those immigrants, many of whom arrive with skills, to employ those skills where they are needed. This denial of economic opportunity causes a well-intentioned policy to fail to live up to its economic and humanitarian aspirations.
Canada’s labor shortages are hardly unique, as anyone who has been paying attention to the US economy knows. We are suffering real economic pain from our inability to attract, train, and retain skilled workers in various industries. Worse, in this new era of economic, geopolitical, rapid technological advancement (e.g., ChatGPT) and climate volatility, we can expect the shifts in job markets to accelerate as supply chains get rewired, industries get disrupted, and reconfigured,
Until recently, I have been a skeptic regarding Competency-Based Education (CBE) and Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) because I did not believe the economic drivers were present to force the massive reconfiguration of the higher education system. But situations change. Long-term economic forces will increasingly drive demand for more rapid reskilling than our current system can support. Meanwhile, a significant and growing percentage of U.S. colleges and universities face enrollment crises. While this problem is often framed by academia as a decrease in the supply of students—the so-called “enrollment cliff,” the hot job market, and so on—I think it is better understood as a failure to respond to changing demand and new opportunities. EdTech and venture investors have been arguing this for decades. I continue to believe that they were wrong. But, like I said, situations change.
In this post, I will argue that now is the time for CBE and PLA at scale, using the Canadian healthcare labor market as the primary example. I will also make the case by focusing on skills mainly as an additive to the degree—the degree-plus-“skills” formula promoted by Coursera, boot camps and the like—institutions are missing opportunities. We will see that well-defined paths for pre-degree career credentials exist in critical industries. By neglecting these paths and leaving them to others, traditional higher education leaves itself vulnerable while failing to serve its mission to students and the public good.
Let’s return to our story about the Syrian refugee and his Canadian chocolate empire:
Back in Syria, [Refugee Tareq] Hadhad’s father, Isam, had founded a confectioners in Damascus that eventually employed hundreds of people and shipped its chocolates throughout the Middle East. Bombing during the civil war leveled it.
The Hadhads became privately sponsored refugees in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. While the town is the home of St. Francis Xavier University, it is generally known for having an aging population rather than being economically vibrant.
Mr. Hadhad was midway through medical school when he fled Syria. But once in Canada, and with considerable help from the people of Antigonish, he vowed to re-establish his father’s business under the name Peace by Chocolate….
This month, Mr. Hadhad opened a new, bigger shop and expanded the factory that produces the company’s chocolate. In all, Mr. Hadhad told me, Peace by Chocolate now employs about 75 people and could hire 30 to 40 more workers — if they were available in Antigonish. About 1,000 stores across Canada now sell its chocolates, thanks in part to a deal with the Empire Company, the Nova Scotia-based grocer that owns the Sobeys and Canada Safeway supermarket chains.
The Syrian Family That Rebuilt a Chocolate Empire in Nova Scotia
What an incredible story. Tucked in it is a comment about labor shortages, but given the aging population of Antigonish, that makes sense. Mr. Hadhad is doing precisely what the government of Canada and the people of Antigonish hoped he would do when they invited him and his family; create jobs that would attract more young workers. “Building a business in Canada, he said, is much easier in than in Syria,” he said.
But.
he was also keen to discuss what’s become something of a personal mission for him: eliminating barriers for newcomers and showing Canadians the economic value of immigrants.
A former medical student, Mr. Hadhad is disturbed that many immigrants are unable to use their skills immediately when they come to Canada; instead, they often must undergo additional schooling, and face slow and costly certification processes.
Mr. Hadhad was told that if he wanted to pursue his medical studies, he would have to return to high school, obtain a Canadian undergraduate degree and then take medical school admission exams.
The Syrian Family That Rebuilt a Chocolate Empire in Nova Scotia
Here’s a guy who was halfway through medical school when he arrived. He was told he would have to repeat all his education starting from high school to finish his degree and become a practicing physician.
Let’s set aside the humanitarian aspect of this. Forget that most immigrants don’t arrive with the second set of skills Mr. Haddad had—running a chocolate business—or the confidence and support to reinvent themselves. Instead, let’s look at this purely from a policy perspective. Was Mr. Haddad’s career change a net gain or a net loss for Canada?
About a month before The New York Times ran the chocolateer story, it ran another one with the headline, “Alleviating Canada’s Acute Shortage of Family Doctors“. According to that article, “Nova Scotia’s latest monthly tally, released in mid-October, showed that 110,640 people, or 11 percent of the population, were on the wait list for a family doctor.”
Nova Scotia [is] not alone. The recently re-elected Coalition Avenir Québec government dropped its promise to ensure that everyone has a family doctor. More than 800,000 Quebecers are without one. In Ontario, the provincial advocacy group for family physicians estimates that 1.8 million residents do not have a family doctor and another 1.7 million people are under the care of physicians older than 65 who are nearing retirement.
The desperation to secure a physician pushed Janet Mort in British Columbia to drastic measures. She took out an ad in a local newspaper in search of a physician to fill her 82-year-old husband’s prescriptions after his physician retired, as reported by Global News. Her strategy was successful.
For others, the process to find a family doctor has meant working the phones to call individual clinics or to join growing provincial wait lists. Those who turn to the services of walk-in family doctors find longer wait room times and no continuity of care. And some people add to the congestion in overburdened hospital emergency departments.
Alleviating Canada’s Acute Shortage of Family Doctors
This is a many-faceted problem but one of the causes is that physicians are not trained in how to run a private practice as a business:
[Katherine Stringer, the head of the Department of Family Medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax,] acknowledged that while family doctors are in effect small business owners, the training they receive on how to run their business while in medical school is “very rudimentary.”
As a result, Dr. Stringer said, for many new doctors “it’s a very stressful first year.” Emulating a strategy used for new technology companies, the medical school has brought in mentors to help new doctors find their way. Dalhousie is also working with the province on establishing teams to set up all of the patient record compiling needed for a new practice.
Alleviating Canada’s Acute Shortage of Family Doctors
Guess which could-have-been-a-doctor has proven he has prodigious business-building skills? While I believe in the healing power of chocolate, I suspect that the 110,640 people waiting to get a primary care physician would have preferred another option.
Nor is primary care the only area where Nova Scotia’s health system suffers from a labor crisis. A quick search on the topic yields disturbing results. A Nova Scotia woman died on New Year’s eve while waiting for care in an emergency room. The same article notes that emergency room deaths are rising in the province while 43,000 people left Nova Scotia emergency rooms without being seen by a doctor last year.
It gets worse. One hospital closed its emergency room for a month and is not sure if it will be able to run a full emergency room in the future.
There are, of course, many reasons for Canada’s healthcare crisis. Cost-cutting measures and (often related) rise in time-consuming paperwork are significant drivers. But telling eager, trained physicians that they will have to repeat their education, starting in high school, does not help.
The obvious solution, of course, is to test the immigrant healthcare workers on what they know and train them to fill the gaps. Canada is aware of this possibility. For example, The Globe and Mail reports Ontario is implementing a “Practice-Ready Assessment” program that “could add hundreds of foreign-trained doctors to the overstretched health care system within months.” The same article states, “Some estimates put the number of foreign-trained physicians living in Ontario but not working in their field as high as 13,000. They are blocked by licensing hurdles and other barriers because their medical training was done elsewhere.”
Thirteen-thousand foreign-trained physicians are theoretically available to an overstretched system but have been blocked from practicing because they have not been given a chance to prove what they know. Ontario is one of just three Canadian provinces that are taking this approach so far. And they haven’t implemented it yet. A quick internet search will show similar mismatches with skilled nurses. Like a story in The New York Times from a few months ago entitled “‘Disaster Mode’: Emergency Rooms Across Canada Close Amid Crisis.” From the article: “Increasingly, I think many of us realize we are not going to, in the short term, train our way out of this…. We can’t produce nurses quickly, with the exception, possibly, of some foreign graduates.”
Meanwhile, here in the United States, we find another labor mismatch crisis hidden in a feel-good story. New York City is addressing equity and climate change goals by training low-income workers to service modern electrical systems like heat pumps and electric vehicle charging stations. Here’s the story of one apprentice, Robert Clark:
Before joining, he struggled to find work, in part because of a felony conviction for burglary. “It’s a no-brainer,” he said of joining the Civilian Climate Corps, which pays him $20 per hour to learn skills and receive the certifications that he needs to get work. He hopes to go back to school to become an engineer.
Green energy has a problem: There aren’t enough electricians. Here’s one solution.
Did you catch that last sentence? Mr. Clark wants to go back to school to become an engineer.
There’s only one problem. New York City’s Civilian Climate Corps is a collaboration between the municipal government and employers. No colleges or universities are mentioned in the article or on the organization’s website. When Mr. Clark is ready to go back to college and become an engineer, will he get credit for the knowledge and skills he has learned through the program? As of today, I see no evidence of any pathway to do so. New York City has a robust collection of community colleges within the CUNY system. Why are they not involved? If Mr. Clark had completed his apprenticeship in a CUNY-affiliated program and received CUNY credit, it would be natural for him to return to CUNY someday to get his engineering degree. As it stands today, CUNY means nothing to him, and his knowledge means nothing to CUNY.
We need to be able to meet students where they are and get them where they need to go. “Meeting students where they are” is often a euphemism for talking about skill deficits. There is so much more than deficits to “where students are,” including pre-existing skills. Today, we are seeing alternative skills networks being built around the edges of academia, particularly in credentialed trades like electricians and allied healthcare. Becoming certified in medical billing in the United States does not require a degree and can lead to earning a decent living. It’s an example of a relatively quick path to financial sustainability. I’m unsure whether similar pathways exist in Canada, where the medical paperwork processing explosion seems to be a newer phenomenon. Economies and job markets change.
Meanwhile, people continue to aspire. Mr. Clark wants to go “back to school” to become an engineer. Nobody has told him that, as far as the system is concerned, he never went to school. Until academia better integrates itself into this network of ever-shifting needs and skill gaps, it will continue to face shrinking enrollments and dwindling relevance.
To truly meet students where they are and get them to where they want to go, we need to assess what they already know on a granular level, give them credit for it, and help them fill in any gaps on an equally granular level. The knowledge Mr. Roberts gains working on heat pumps and electric car chargers will likely not line up neatly with traditional college course curricula. Mr. Hadhad may also have skill gaps that do not line up neatly with the courses he would have needed to take to become a Canadian physician. (For example, he would have no reason to know basic details about how the Canadian healthcare system works.) Both came from backgrounds where becoming an income earner quickly was a high priority. Both have highly valued skills that the workforce needs.
Perhaps one day, Mr. Roberts could someday create a breakthrough in heat pump efficiency or electric car charging speeds. If so, I imagine two likely paths for him to learn the skills he will need to make that contribution to society. Either he will go to college, or he will learn what he needs on the job.
In general, employers do not make good educators. If employer training becomes the dominant path, it will be a narrow and inefficient one. Some institution is needed to fill the educational role. Colleges and universities could provide this role while weaving career paths through the traditional liberal arts education that has served humanity so well for so long. But only if they build the pathways to accommodate these continuous and granular needs. If they don’t, then somebody else will.
While we’re not going to be taking a deep dive into these issues, the webinar I’ll be facilitating this week will provide some basic groundwork for understanding CBE.
It’s next Wednesday, January 18th, at 1 PM EST.
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