What does the future of student debt look like?

02/03/2020, 4:21 PMWhat does the future of student debt look like? — Quartz
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How to educate the world without
so much student debt
Michael J. Coren 6 hours ago
The nature of work has changed. Education, for the most part, has not.
The educational system was built for an economic disruption that began
in the 1800s. At the time, most people in the US and Europe still lived on
farms. Once industrialization, steam power, and railroads knit together
vast markets, opportunities and people began flooding into cities and
factories. Between 1870 and 1920, 11 million Americans moved from rural
areas to urban ones, and most of the 25 million new immigrants settled in
cities, too. By the early 20th century, the West was urbanized with an
educational system designed for the industrial age. Students, when they
finished high school—or college for the lucky few—rarely looked back
after entering the workforce.
Today, the industrial economy is being eclipsed by a digital one.
Manufacturing, once nearly a third of all US jobs, has followed farming as
a shrinking share of the economy accounting for just 8.5% of all jobs. By
2028, the BLS projects more than 85% of all Americans will be employed
in the service economy, from retail to home care. A similar transition is
bearing down on every advanced economy, and eventually developing
ones too, as automation and artificial intelligence spread to every
industry.
Countries and individuals are now trying to determine how to prepare for
this new economy. Traditionally, the answer was simple: ‘Go to college.’
Often, that made sense: the higher salaries from a degree—not to
mention a strong correlation with health, happiness, and relationship
satisfaction — outweighed the debt the average graduate incurred. For
many, it still does. A US graduate student in 2020 can expect to nearly

double their effective salary compared to what they would have earned in
1964, while workers without a college diploma have seen their real wages
plateau and then decline.
But that’s a serious oversimplification, says David Autor, a professor of
economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. College is not
the answer for everyone, and it’s not always the best one. “Our system
only has one track: go to college or bust,” said Autor in an interview. “For
a lot of people, it’s bust.”
But hundreds of millions of people will need to be retrained. A 2018 World
Economic Forum survey estimated that only 60% of skills core to today’s
jobs will remain so by 2022. The jobs of the future will demand more
creativity, systems and data analysis, programming, and design. Sending
everyone back to campus is not the answer.
The US faces a particularly large challenge in this regard. Given its
reliance on student loans, and atrophied vocational schooling options,
millions of people are trapped in debt with sub-standard training and
limited prospects. But it’s only extreme in this regard. There isn’t an
educational system in the world that won’t have to change.
Meanwhile, the internet is coming for higher education after remaking
industry after industry over the last two decades. Startups, bootcamps,
and job training programs that didn’t exist a few years ago are now
attracting a lion’s share of new tuition dollars and educational investment.
Despite accusations of shoddy teaching and questionable claims, new
schools are reducing the time, tuition, and barriers to education when
most traditional schools in the US have done the opposite, roughly
doubling tuition since 1990 despite a modest increase in aid. This
shakeup promises to train more skilled professionals in desperately
needed areas like nursing, software development, and more.
But these new models carry tremendous risks as well. One cautionary

tale is the rise and fall of the University of Phoenix. Founded in 1976 and
offering vocational training for technical workers at companies like
Honeywell, it went public in 1994. Within a decade or so, the school had
abandoned its original focus and, like many other for-profit schools,
opened its doors to almost anyone who could pay—or take out federal
loans. With lax standards and lack of oversight, the school’s ranks
swelled to 470,000 students. For a time, it was the largest in the US, and
the top recipient of federal aid dollars. But standards fell even as debt-
financed dollars flowed in. Graduation rates for online students plunged
to 5%, according to the US Department of Education. Congressional
investigations, lawsuits, and fines worth hundreds of millions of dollars
ensued. Today, the school’s enrollment has fallen by about 70%, mirroring
declines at for-profit schools across the country.
This state of play examines the principles and experiments guiding the
future of training workers who can thrive in the new global economy—not
just in the US but around the world. Its focus is on the promise of new
approaches, the risks they present, and what to expect from a world
where we’re all going back to school.
Table of contents
College isn’t what it used to be | The problem of student debt | What can
be done? | Education as a benefit | Coding bootcamps and accelerated
learning programs | Last-mile education | Competency education | The
future of education | We don’t yet know what will work
College isn’t what it used to be
Higher education, once one of several roads to a stable life, now
resembles a cliff face. High school used to be the hurdle to enter the
middle class. The average worker in the developed world once had a
reasonable expectation of leaving high school, landing a job, and earning

an income that supported a family. No longer.
The economic ladder out—affordable college tuition—is now out of reach
for many. Those unable to climb it, due to resources or circumstances,
risk becoming stuck in dead-end jobs with stagnant wages. Europe’s
safety net has buffered the blow for workers, but the impact in the US
has been worse. In 1985, the median American male worker could cover
major yearly expenditures—housing, health care, transportation,
education—for a family of four on 30 weeks of earnings. By 2018, this
rose to 53 weeks (a problem given there are only 52 weeks in a year,
writes Oren Cass, a former policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute).
This “low-wage” job trap has captured a huge portion of workers across
the industrialized world. The labor market in industrialized countries now
looks like a barbell: high-paying, high-skilled jobs on one end, and
unstable, low-paying ones on the other. “The labor market for people
with a high school degree or less is brutal,” says Ryan Nunn of The
Hamilton Project, an economic policy group. “It’s gotten significantly
more difficult.” The data reveals an economy relentlessly squeezing out
less-educated labor. Since 1963, the number of hours worked in the US
economy by those with a high school degree has plummeted from about
75% to less than 40% in 2017. Among dropouts, the decline was even
steeper.
Wages have flatlined for decades in Europe, Japan and other wealthy
countries (despite a recent bump) while the share of workers toiling for
low wages has risen steadily. In America, nearly 44% of workers—53
million people—are now stuck in dead-end jobs, from retail to call
centers, earning $18,000 per year. Without more education, their
prospects are dim: one study found only 5% of low-wage workers moved
into better jobs over a 12-month period.
The problem, in part, is that college is still designed for “traditional”
students: young people who attend school full time without serious family

or work responsibilities, a relic of the time when college was the domain
of the wealthy and elite.
Yet most students today are not traditional at all. Just 27% of US
undergraduates fit under the “traditional” model, according to the US
National Center for Education Statistics. Most worked full-time jobs,
lacked a high school diploma, attended part-time, or cared for children
and family members. At private for-profit institutions, the figure was just
9% of the student body.
The education system is now delivering the worst of both possible worlds
for many students: the promise of a better life without delivering for many
who start it. Only 60% of full-time US undergraduate students finish their
Bachelor’s degree within six years, and the figure is 21% at private for-
profit institutions.
The problem of student debt
The US is unmatched in student debt, but it is not alone. While about 40
countries offer free public college education, the rest are hiking tuitions
and transferring the burden to students. In the last five years, British
graduates’ average loan debt rose from $20,000 to more than $55,000.
Loans for education are turning America into the world’s largest debtors’
prison. Student debt is now the second largest category of debt for US
households behind mortgages, but one that can never be discharged in
bankruptcy. More than one in ten borrowers are already delinquent on
student loans, and the number is expected to grow to 40% by 2023,
reports the Brookings Institution.
Advanced economies can’t expect to have a middle class without offering
advanced education. Just as high school was crucial to a stable,
productive life in the 20th century, training after high school is now
crucial to one in the 21st—even if it does not end in a college diploma.

Using private debt to finance what is effectively the minimum education
to compete in a modern economy—a policy shift under former US
president Ronald Reagan’s budget director David Stockman—no longer
seems sustainable.
One answer is for the government to spend more on subsidizing college
attendance, as in countries like Sweden and Norway. For places like the
US and the UK where student debt is a major problem, that would be a
considerable improvement. But even in many of the countries where
tuition is free, most young people don’t complete postsecondary
education. Along with more government funding, better models are
needed.
What can be done?
Michelle Dervan, a partner at the social impact investment firm Rethink
Education, identified four promising trends, if done right, they might offer
an affordable way to teach critical skills without requiring students to go
deep into debt. Most are nascent. But they point to a future where more
and more students opt out of traditional college. Harvard it will not be.
But these new approaches may serve the nearly half of Americans stuck
in low-wage jobs due to a lack of education, as well as employers holding
7 million positions open because applicants lack the right skills. It won’t
stop there. Over the next decade, we’ll need to retrain 375 million people
around the world, 14% percent of the global workforce (pdf), as
technology transforms the global economy.
Here’s a preview of what’s to come.
Education as a benefit
For decades, big companies reimbursed white-collar workers to go back
to school. It wasn’t altruism, just good business. As long ago as 2002,

researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research (pdf)
suggested tuition assistance allowed firms to hire better quality, more
educated, more productive workers. Companies paid the tuition bills and
were rewarded with workers’ higher productivity.
Education as a benefit is now expanding to the working class. This time
companies are paying for education, but college is not necessarily the
goal. Microdegrees and competency credentials have proliferated,
alongside company-designed curriculums and virtual satellite campuses
at the office. Whereas earlier programs reimbursed professionals and
executives for part of their tuition, a growing number of employers now
pay most or all of the education expenses of their front-line workers.
To recruit and keep talent, companies are experimenting with ways to
move their workers up—and out. This “outskilling,” as opposed to
reskilling for internal jobs, marks a fundamental shift in the implicit
bargain between low-wage workers and corporations. Companies no
longer expect workers to arrive with all their skills. They are taking an
active role shepherding workers from basic education to middle or
advanced skills where demand is high—even if that means preparing
them for rolse outside the company itself. With the skills workers need
changing faster than many traditional schools can handle, companies are
finding new partners online and offline to deliver an education to their
employees.
There’s big money behind it. Last July, Amazon announced that it would
spend $700 million on job training for 100,000 of its workers through
2025. Billions more have been pledged by Walmart, AT&T PwC, Home
Depot, and others. While that doesn’t make them ideal places to work—
Amazon, in particular, has been criticized for its onerous working
conditions—it does turn what was once a career cul-de-sac (or worse)
into a possible route to a different life.
Amazon’s CareerChoice program, one of the expanding initiatives, pays

almost all tuition costs (up to $12,000) for workers earning credentials in
high-demand occupations. “Not everyone who comes to Amazon is
going to stay at Amazon,” says Tammy Thieman who helps run
CareerChoice out of Seattle. “From a business perspective, it’s a great
recruiting tool. They have the opportunity to make their life better. People
engaged in this program are better able to serve customers. If they
choose to leave Amazon, and find opportunities in local communities,
they become a customer for life…We know it’s effective.” So far, more
than 25,000 people have been trained through the program from aircraft
mechanics to machinists to and nurses.
Amazon has partnered with more than 900 schools to facilitate the
program. But it’s also setting up its own classrooms and technical training
academies inside Amazon. By the end of 2020, notes Thieman, the e-
commerce company will have at least 60 classrooms in warehouses
around the world where workers can attend classes around their workday.
The idea that its workers could commute to work, pick up kids and run
errands, go to school, and then return home was a non-starter for many.
As part of every new warehouse built in the future, a classroom is
designed into the floorplan.
Amazon is exceptional, thanks to its sheer size. It hires hundreds of
thousands of people each year in a tight labor market. But LinkedIn spans
all of it. The social network for professionals has about 660 million users
in 200 countries. Its acquisition of Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) for
$1.5 billion in 2015 thrust it into an online learning market. It now serves
12,000 big enterprise companies looking to reskill their workforce, and is
growing fast.
Since 2017, LinkedIn says its learning platform with 23 million users has
seen the number of paid learners (both company learners and
individuals) rise 104%. Many of the skills companies are seeking out are
only now hitting curriculums at colleges (if at all). Expertise in blockchain

was the skill in the shortest supply in 2020, according to LinkedIn data,
followed by cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and user experience
design. Partners like Verizon say it has allowed them to train workers in
novel ways and retain the best workers. “A lot of the technology has
finally caught up with the ideas,” says Lou Tedrick who leads learning &
development at Verizon. “In the past, you were hired to do the job you
were hired to do, and we provide learning to do that job. Now we prepare
for what’s coming next.”
Coding bootcamps and accelerated learning
programs
Bootcamps are the technology industry’s answer to a vocational school.
Exploding onto the scene with General Assembly in 2011, more than 100
bootcamps have now graduated 133,000 students, according to
CareerKarma, a firm connecting students to coding programs.
With names like AppAcademy, General Assembly, Hack Reactor, Metis,
and Lambda School, these short, intensive training schools are designed
to turn capable students—many of whom already have a college degree
—into entry-level programmers, product managers, data scientists, and
more. Most are independent, although a few universities have embraced
them to modernize their traditional degrees through companies such as
Trilogy Education Services (acquired for $750 million last year). Last year,
bootcamps posted a record 34,000 graduates, pulling in nearly half a
billion dollars in revenue.
Unlike massive open online courses, or MOOCs, bootcamps tend to bring
together small classes for intense weeks of full-time study. Teams solve
technical problems together, offline or online. They are often assigned
practical projects, or even internships, with companies that might hire
them after graduation. While coding was the original focus, the model
has steadily expanded to include subjects such as cybersecurity, user

experience and even sales.
A key element for bootcamps is how students pay. Many charge tuition
between $10,000 and $25,000, a risky proposition for unaccredited
schools. But the most well-known bootcamps are shifting to income
share agreements. Students agree to pay a percentage of their income
(usually about 15%) after finding a well-paying job. (The exact threshold
varies by school.) If no job materializes, they owe nothing. In 2019, there
were 27 bootcamps in the US offering ISAs with varying terms. The
standard average offer was a 38-month repayment term for students
earning more than $42,476 per year, with a 13.8% income-share
percentage and $32,754 payment cap, according to CareerKarma.
Yet coding bootcamps remain largely unaccredited and only some are
regulated. That has allowed them to scale up quickly around the country,
but a steady stream of student complaints is growing into a torrent as
some students’ expectations are not met. Since 2014, California
regulators have sent cease-and-desist letters and fined about dozen
coding bootcamps operating without a license, some have registered
while continuing to operate (incurring more fines and leaving students
without much recourse should things go wrong).
The most recent example is Silicon Valley’s Lambda School which has
raised $48 million, according to the private equity research firm
PitchBook. Last month, The Verge reported on design students
castigating Lambda School for “unprofessionalism, incompetence, and
disorganization” who asked to be released from their ISAs. It was later
reported that the school had misled students about the quality of its
program and job placement rates. Lambda’s co-founder Austen Allred
later admitted to mistakes, and vowed to revamp aspects of the school’s
program. Despite an effort to standardize reporting of student outcomes,
the controversy has cast doubt on bootcamps’ job placement rates and
their ability to grow while maintaining standards.

Last-mile education
Companies are no longer waiting for candidates to apply with the right
skills. They’re designing mini-degrees for candidates to complete before
they even apply. Last-mile education delivers a light-weight, focused
credentials that brings promising candidates through a hiring process
where they might otherwise have gotten lost. Rather than build out their
own program, companies are integrating with existing universities so
students can add credentials to conventional degree tracks.
SV Academy is one of them. It acts like digital finishing school for aspiring
tech workers, a fusion of a vocational bootcamp and a recruiting firm. It
offers a three month (part-time) training program in tech sales and
support roles at Arizona State and Florida International Universities (so
far). The company—which claims that 60% of its graduates are women
and 40% are African American or Latinx—says its trying to improve talent
search and training for fast-growing startups, where minorities remain
underrepresented. Every quarter, about 100 people go through courses
designed to prepare them for roles at startups in Silicon Valley and New
York. The program is free for students (who must work exclusively with
SV Academy’s hiring network), and employers pay SV Academy for hiring
students after they graduate.
A second is Pathstream which partners with existing universities to train
students through online courses designed by the tech firms themselves.
Students can earn certifications in a simulated work environment from
Facebook (digital marketing), Salesforce (customer relation) and Silicon
Valley Bank (business and data analytics), an more focused alternative to
bootcamps that give students a way to signal practical competency and
develop a portfolio, while companies get access to a new recruiting
pipeline.
A few companies, such as Facebook, are big enough to simply partner

with colleges directly. The social media giant launched a digital marketing
certification for community colleges to add to their associate degree
tracks. It’s not designed to recruit new hires to Facebook, the company
claims, but teach marketable digital skills to students (as well as promote
Facebook’s advertising model to more small businesses). Colleges say
it’s helping them meet employers’ demands. “We don’t want to say this is
a Facebook school or program,” said Jermaine Whirl, a vice president at
South Carolina’s Greenville Technical College which offers the
certification. “But it’s definitely giving us a competitive advantage to have
something substantial, branded, and nationally recognized. Almost every
company out there has a Facebook page, and nearly all small businesses
have a Facebook page.”
Competency education
You probably haven’t heard of one of America’s biggest universities. It
has no Ivy League legacy. No Nobel laureates. Its sports teams get little
airtime. Since 2003, however, Southern New Hampshire University
(SNHU) has rocketed from 3,000 students to more than 132,000, almost
all of them online. The private, non-profit university’s improbable success
came from reimagining how to deliver a vocational education online using
technology and a learning process that pushes down costs without
sacrificing credibility.
SNHU’s president, Paul LeBlanc saw the writing on the wall in 2009. Small
colleges were closing. Tuition was rising, but public funding and private
funding were not. Cuts were imminent. Rather than slash faculty, LeBlanc
doubled down on the school’s online education betting growth there was
the future. It was the right bet. The school, described as the “Amazon of
education,” offers 200 fast, low-cost, employer-tailored programs
delivered online. Its rapid growth strategy, borrowing from the aggressive
marketing and cost-cutting measures more familiar in the for-profit world,
while aiming to maintain the academics of an accredited, non-profit

university.
But SNHU doesn’t operate like most universities. Its $139 million annual
marketing budget works out to about $1,134 per student (about half of
what it spends on instruction). Its online curriculums are standardized
and then handed out to thousands of adjunct professors who earn as
little as $30 an hour and rarely interact with students until they need
help. “Admissions counselors” work huge phone banks so when a
student expresses interest online, they get a phone call back in less than
a minute.
If that all seems anathema to the popular conception of a college
education, LeBlanc sees it as lower the cost of a degree so millions of
students can afford a shot at the middle class. “We are super-focused on
customer service, which is a phrase that most universities can’t even
use,” LeBlanc has said.
The school’s next step has been to do away with the need for traditional
tests, letter-grades, and credit hours to earn a degree. SNHU’s College
For America program lets students earn a diploma by working on
projects, overseen by instructors, and submit work to prove they’re
mastering skills before advancing. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-
backed effort bears almost no resemblance to the classic college
experience: material is delivered entirely online, teachers only work with
students when projects aren’t up to par, and the entire Bachelor’s degree
may be earned in two years costing as little as $10,000.
Many employers sponsor the program as a benefit. Its partnership with a
startup called Guild means it now has access to workers at companies
such as Walmart, Chipotle, Disney, Lowes, and others spending some
$16.5 billion in education and training for their workers each year. Guild,
and competitors such as Bright Horizons, InStride, and Pearson,
essentially acts as a student recruitment service for colleges eager to
scale online programs, while companies get access to thousands of

online degree programs assembled from university partners.
SNHU is now moving into skills-based credentials. SNHU is betting the
future of education for people who want marketable skills will be micro-
degree that increase their incomes. To make this a “seamless pathway”
from high school through college to employment job, SNHU recently
acquired the Chicago company LRNG matching young people with job
opportunities using game-based learning and digital badges. SNHU plans
to roll that into its accredited College for America. “I think we have to
move away from a one-size-fits-all model of education and give people
choices,” says LeBlanc.
Is SNHU another University Phoenix waiting to happen? Despite
borrowing its marketing strategies, LeBlanc bristles at the comparison.
Instead, he argues, the non-profit school is more effective at educating
the 93% of its students who study online and part-time without placating
shareholders. In 2018, SNHU boasted a six-year graduation rate of 52%,
according to federal filings, not far off the US average of 60% for four-
year institutions and far better than the 21% graduation rate at private
for-profit institutions. The tuition for a four-year Bachelor’s degree is just
$38,400, one of the lowest, and unchanged since 2012. SNHU says it
plans to keep the price frozen until 2021. But as SNHU grows, it will test
just how big a university can get while serving its students.
The future of education
Some of these experiments will succeed; others won’t. But one way or
another the way we train workers is changing. A few principles unite the
experiments I’ve described, and point toward the future of education.
Students won’t pay up front (or at all)
Education is an investment in the future. Two new sources of cash are
filling the void for those without the means. The first is investors. Income

share agreements backed by investor cash are allowing students to pay
for school out of their future earning potential. Their tuition cost is paid
back over time as a percentage of a student’s salary. If they don’t earn a
minimum amount, they owe nothing. Most are capped so students know
the maximum amount they’ll be required to repay. The contract transfers
the risk of financing education from students (once reliant on debt) to
investors and the schools themselves.
The second is employers. For decades, companies have educated their
professional workforce because they knew it increased productivity,
retention, and recruiting. Now they’re extending the same benefit to
lower-wage workers. As low-cost programs come online, they’re paying
for their entire education.
Education will adapt to students’ lives, not the other way
around
Schools assume students will come to campus, learn on the school’s
schedule and leave with a degree. New programs abandon that idea.
Courses are moving online. Schedules and locations follow the students.
Amazon’s decision to build classrooms in its warehouses emerged from
student feedback. “Everyone told us the number one barrier for them is
work-life balance,” says Thieman of Amazon’s Career Choice program.
Austen Allred, the head of Lambda School bootcamp, said the most
important component of the school was not the curriculum, it was
delivering a flexible education. It’s a more customer-centric view of
learning, but also one reflecting the reality many “non-traditional”
students face. “The more difficult aspect is actually working around
people’s lives,” he says “How do you provide outcomes in as little time as
possible, right?”
Competency matters more than credentials

While an Ivy League degree will not lose its pedigree, companies are
dropping college degrees as prerequisites in favor of proven ability.
Apple, Costco, IBM, and Google no longer require a diploma for a myriad
of white-collar jobs ranging from program manager to software engineer.
To some degree, that’s a matter of supply and demand (not enough
technical candidates), but it’s also an acknowledgment that the college
degree is a crude indicator of aptitude. “We are now in the transitional
stage of employers gradually reducing their prejudice in the hiring of
those who studied at a distance, and moving in favor of such ‘graduates’
who, in the workplace, demonstrate greater proactiveness, initiative,
discipline, collaborativeness–because they studied online,” says Fredric
Litto, a professor emeritus of communications and longtime distance-
learning expert from the University of São Paulo.
Education ends with a (better) job
For “non-traditional” college students (the vast majority), school is an
economic calculation to better their life for themselves and their families.
Yet “it’s difficult for people to even figure out what is the opportunity,”
says David Autor, a labor economist at MIT. Students must pick a new
career, select courses, gain practical experience, and find a job after
graduation with little visibility into what lives their education will lead. The
best educational programs now guide students toward careers that fit
into the constraints of their lives, and spend as much time on career
placement and preparation, as the education itself. At Amazon, Thieman
says the company has full-time staff dedicated to finding jobs for
graduates and guiding them into the right career trajectory. “We have
learned it’s less about aptitude and interests and it’s more about keeping
students’ end in mind,” she says. “How do we give people a really clear
vision for what happens after education.”
Education will not end after graduation

Most educational spending is dedicated to the first two decades of life,
but lifelong learning is now seen as essential in the workplace. A 2016
survey by the Pew Research Center found 87% of workers say they will
need new training and job skills throughout their work life. “College
education (which will still favor multi-year, residential education) will need
to be more focused on teaching students to be lifelong learners, followed
by more online content, in situ training, and other such [elements] to
increase skills in a rapidly changing information world,” predicts Jim
Hendler, a professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute. As automation puts increasing numbers of low- and middle-skill
workers out of work, these models will also provide for certifications and
training needs to function in an increasingly automated service sector.”
That’s already reflected in the data. Degree-holders and non-degree
holders now devote a nearly identical share of overall learning time
toward learning tech skills: 42% vs 43%, according to LinkedIn.
We don’t yet know what will work
There’s no technology today that can reliably train large numbers of
unskilled students to a high standard, argues MIT’s Autor. “Technology
has been most successful increasing the learning opportunity for people
who are really good at learning,” he says. The numbers bear this out.
While a third of students take at least one online course as part of an
accredited college experience, the most common use of online education
is for advanced master’s degrees. “We have not found the kind of secret
sauce on how to use all this technology to make a cost-effective, fast
education,” says Autor.
As with almost every technological revolution, the key is unlikely to be
technology itself. It’s how it empowers people. Access to information
could be the least important part of education. Instead, it’s fostering the
social benefits of a traditional experience online, without the expense of a
physical campus. Whoever solves this will lead the way, says Rethink

Education’s Dervan. “When we look at the challenge of training the
workforce, in many cases it’s a human solution: mentors and teachers,”
she said. “How can you extend the reach of what’s possible for those
people using technology?”
It’s the feedback, encouragement, and guidance that great teachers and
peers provide which makes the difference between graduation and
failure. As part of MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, Autor is helping run studies
of how policy interventions can reverse the trends decimating the
prospects of the working class throughout the world. The results will take
a decade or more to come in. But he’s optimistic. “Many people believe
they are good opportunities and we just haven’t found them all yet,” says
Autor. “We need a portfolio rather than a single one.”

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