Change the Equation Blog

"Do it yourself" may be taking on a whole new meaning. Consider these four items:

1. "Anyone with the spark of an idea can start a company overnight, using a credit card, while accessing brains, brawn and customers anywhere." (Tom Friedman in yesterday's New York Times.)
2. "You can just take a [3-D] printer and print whatever you want.... Everything from the tools that you need to the actual objects you're working on." (National Geographic TV, via Alexander Russo.)
3. "Modeled after gyms, TechShop is attracting members who pay as little as $100 a month to use industrial strength equipment to invent whatever they can imagine." (Associated Press)
4. "From Makerbot to GE’s Ecomagination Challenge, an open source competition to find the best ideas in cleantech, opportunities abound today for anyone with the motivation and imagination to get their hands dirty and create things that can solve some of our biggest challenges." (GE, as quoted in a Wired Magazine article about the Maker Movement).

The means of production and innovation are getting much more democratic. You no longer need a cool million in venture capital and the keys to a research lab to realize your big new idea. So it has suddenly become much easier to create the next big thing.

Or has it become harder? Your neighbor can come up with the next big thing, and so can someone on the other side of the globe. The competition for good ideas will become all the stronger. In the meantime, as Friedman points out, more traditional white collar workers are facing challenges their blue collar peers have faced for more than a generation. They "have to compete with a bigger pool of cheap geniuses — some of whom are people and some are now robots, microchips and software-guided machines."

Yikes. Do it yourself may become more of a necessity than an option. And if that's the case, your grasp of math, science, engineering and technology may be what helps you stand out from the crowd.

Get a load of these college graduation rates. The New York Times reportsthat, in Texas, only about 61 percent of people who enroll in 4-year schools earn a degree within 8 years of starting. A mere 9 percent of Texans who enroll in community college graduate within four years. In Utah, the numbers are 45 percent and 20 percent.

The Times draws these data from a new report (PDF) by Complete College America, a non-profit that aims to raise the share of Americans with college degrees. The report is news, because it presents very new data, counting part-time and transfer students in its calculations. Federal data leave these students, who make up more than 40% of college enrollment, out of account.

The report doesn’t offer data for every state, because some didn’t cooperate. But it managed to get the data for 33 states, which is quite a feat.

The report's main conclusion: Time is the enemy. The longer it takes students to make their way to the finish line, the less likely they are to get there at all. Three of four college students juggle other commitments, like family or jobs. (The image of the college student as a 20 year old studying full time on a leafy campus somewhere is very out of date.) Those other commitments conspire with poor preparation in high school to keep students from graduating.

How do states and colleges turn things around? The report offers a number of recommendations. Among them: Reduce the amount of time students have to spend in class. Create predictable block schedules so that working students can plan their studies better. Allow some students to get their degrees faster by studying year round and in shorter academic terms. Embed remediation into the normal curriculum “so students don’t waste time before they start earning credits.” And give students better information on different programs costs, graduation rates and job placement track record.

The report does find some bright spots. As the Times reports, it “praises Tennessee's 27 Technology Centers, where the degree completion rate is 75 percent”:

Tech students, with an average age of 32, sign up for a program, not individual courses, and they come for seven hours a day, Monday through Friday, with classes ending by 3 p.m., allowing them to hold an evening job or care for their children after school. Instead of separate remedial courses, the centers have a required foundation course, in which each student learns skills needed for a program.”

Technical schools like Tennessee’s Technology Centers don’t really get the attention or respect they deserve, because they don't evoke traditional visions of college. If Complete College America succeeds, it might just change attitudes.

This story about a cache of very old report cards from a long defunct New York City trade school for mostly low-income, immigrant girls got Joanne Jacobs thinking:

One graduate started a business making stuffed animals and toys that’s still around.

Today, girls from low-income immigrant families are urged to go to college with little guidance on what they might do there to reach their real goal, a decent job. Most will start in remedial classes, give up on a degree and work low-skilled, low-paying jobs forever.

Jacobs's implicit question is: Are we wasting our effort pushing such girls into four-year colleges when vocational guidance might do them more good?

The usually astute Jacobs chooses an unfortunate example here. The New York City trade school taught girls trades like needlework, which required very little academic skill. It hardly needs saying that the world has changed, and that the kinds of jobs a trade school prepared you for almost 100 years ago have fled to other shores. Those that remain pay minimum wage. Even in the days of that trade school, the story of the graduate who started a business is likely the exception rather than the rule. Jobs that pay a decent wage and offer any prospect of a middle class life require more knowledge and skill than most students ever got through the old vocational model.

But Jacobs does have a point. Not every student needs to go to a four-year college. Other options, like technical school, can prepare young people for exciting high-tech careers and perhaps open the doors to a Bachelor's program down the line. Students who enroll in four-year schools unprepared for the rigors of college, or without any sense of what they can do with their lives, often end up with worse than nothing: no degree and crippling debt.

But does that mean we should stop counseling low-income immigrant kids to consider four-year colleges? In the days of that New York City trade school, the system was built to sort winners from losers, all too often on the basis of income and ethnicity or race. High-income, native born white kids went to college, and others went into basic trades. Now, a Bachelor's degree or more still pays off in lifetime wages and better employment opportunities.

We need to give all kids a better sense of what their options are for education after high school, and we need to make sure that they are prepared for all those options. We'll know we've been successful when student inclination, and not income, determines their course.

Think of it as a triumph of citizen science. Online gamers just solved a critical puzzle that had bedeviled AIDS researchers for a decade.  By playing the game Foldit, they figured out the structure of an enzyme that helps the AIDS virus reproduce. Their discovery can help researchers devise new treatments for the disease. This work is buoying the spirits of gaming advocates, who insist that games can be much more than the massive time suck many people take them for. The success of Foldit could have real implications for the future of schooling.

So what did Foldit do? It created on on-line competition to "unfold" chains of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. To quote the AFP:

Figuring out the structure of proteins is vital for understanding the causes of many diseases and developing drugs to block them.

But a microscope gives only a flat image of what to the outsider looks like a plate of one-dimensional scrunched-up spaghetti. Pharmacologists, though, need a 3-D picture that "unfolds" the molecule and rotates it in order to reveal potential targets for drugs.

The experience of Foldit offers some insight into why games might have a role to play in schools. The online tools help people visualize the problem. The game requires teamwork and can prompt a faster solution by tapping "wisdom of crowds." And the competition makes it exciting.

Of course, we shouldn't let our enthusiasm run away with us. Derek Lowe provides some perspective: "This isn't a magic technique, and Foldit gamers are not going to rampage through the structural biology world solving all the extant problems any time soon." And yet, he concludes, Foldit's success is "nothing to sneeze at, either."

In education as in medicine, there are no miracle cures. Yet gaming offers some exciting ways forward.