Age: rebalancing educational wealth

As we become more affluent the birth rate slows and people live longer. The net result is that we are getting older. However, the aging process has two quite distinct modes. Most of what we used to call the developed world is in a stage where a large swath of people are entering retirement age, while most of the developing world has a massive proportion of its population about to enter the workforce. For example, Japan has a median age of 47.3 and Germany 47.1 , while Niger and Uganda have median ages of 15.4 and 15.8, respectively (The World Factbook 2018). These are remarkable statistics. That is a three-decade gap in the median age of the world’s oldest and youngest countries. And this isn’t limited to a few countries — there are forty-eight countries with a median age over 40 and thirty-nine countries with a median age under 20. As you would expect, the countries over 40 are generally quite well-off and growing economically and the ones under 20 are still trying to emerge economically. It should be noted there are some exceptions to the positive narrative around older countries; for example, Greece and Italy are likely to become the oldest countries quite soon due to the combined effect of declining birth rate and emigration of youth fleeing declining economies.

But what does this have to do with education? In a word, everything.

First, the resources are in the wrong place. Universities in Japan are struggling with dramatic enrollment declines and budget cuts due to declining tax income, while countries like India need 1,000 new universities in the next decade (The Telegraph). The numbers are even more striking at the primary and secondary levels. The challenge in developed countries is that schools and universities are not easy institutions to close or repurpose. They tend to be custom-designed for a set of outcomes that were defined during the industrial era. Alumni resist dramatic action and, in many instances, the faculty are a fixed cost that is extremely difficult to navigate given the employment model based around tenure. The challenge in developing countries is that demand cannot be met with traditional approaches. There is simply not enough resource of any kind to build and staff the number of required schools and universities.

And there is another side to the resource challenge. As populations age they significantly reduce their tax contributions and begin to put demands on social safety nets. As funds are reduced or are redirected to manage the challenges of an aging population, the consequence is a squeezing of operating resources needed to sustain the educational institutions that exist. In addition there is an increasing shortage of people to staff schools as people retire out of the system. For younger countries, similar problems arise, but for the opposite reason. The sheer number of people requiring the most expensive form of education — colleges and universities — is just too much for the emerging tax base to handle. And, there are not enough older, let alone qualified, adults to teach. In both cases, education is starved of resources.

The needs of the two groups are dramatically different. Aside from funding foundational education for young people, an older population also needs additional types of educational support, including retooling from lost work, preparing for a second or third career, as well as what might be called ‘recreational learning’ as people continue to live long beyond when they cease working. The educational needs of a very young country, on the other hand, are related to getting a first job and require schools to work with the private and public sectors to find a way to create those jobs at the scale necessary to have high employment on the back end.

In stark terms, half the world has too much of the wrong kind of educational institution and the other half simply too little of any kind. And in both places the problems are acute. Great institutions in developed countries are on the brink of financial disaster, or simply crumbling a little bit every day. Meanwhile, in the developing world, deserving children and young adults are going wanting. As you can imagine, the other forces described in ADAPT make these issues even more urgent. And, there is virtually no time left to act.

In deciding to act, we must be willing to take dramatically new approaches to address the challenges appropriately. To conclude this post, I have laid out some initial thoughts about what some elements of that approach might look like. These are incomplete, but are intended to stimulate fresh thinking and propose ideas that are different to any I am currently aware of. As I have written in previous posts, whatever the proposed changes undertaken, they need to impact what and how we teach and learn, the nature of the school or entity in which the learning happens and the relation of both to the society of which they are a part.

1. Redeploy older generations. One way to manage the resource mismatch across nations is to undertake massive redeployment of retirement age adults to teach in the regions of greatest need. One role of the university in places with aging populations could be to retool and prepare retirees to teach. At the same time, their expertise from their career to this point can be deployed to help young entrepreneurs be successful and midsize local companies to scale. The service needs of this group arriving in locations with younger populations would provide immediate job opportunities. To do this well at scale will require truly creative approaches, including integrating people into the business needs of the region, not burdening local resources or inadvertently harming the local economy or social system, teaching old dogs new tricks and expanding the mindsets of all parties to be naturally curious and non-judgmental.
2. Connect to communities. Education in many parts of the world has been disconnected from the local community of which the educational institution is a part. Since the needs of retiring populations differ quite dramatically from those with large numbers of young people just entering the workforce, the skills needed by those in education might differ substantially too. Education should be more connected to, and a more direct support for and feeder of, the local business and civil communities of which it is a part. If it isn’t, not only will it become irrelevant, but it also might serve to exacerbate the existing problems of its locale.
3. Apply technology astutely. Technology was supposed to be the great equaliser, but, as I outlined in my previous blog post, it can also exacerbate the challenges of asymmetry. Technology is both a means to an end — it can deliver compelling content to a more distributed recipient base — and a method of learning. There are some domains that can be covered using technological solutions, and some for which the power of the in-person interaction will still be critical. If older generations are being deployed to solve educator gaps, teaching resources cease to be such a constraint, which means technology really can be used in instances where it will add the most value, and the in-person experience can also be preserved.
4. Reinvent the educational institution. I was involved in an intriguing conversation a few years ago with a medical doctor in Nigeria who asked what it would look like to create a medical school that could graduate thousands of specialists in one or two years. He asked the question not only because that is what Nigeria really needed, but also because the only existing models for medical education are prolonged courses of full time study. My first reaction was that it was impossible, but as I reflected, a host of really interesting ideas emerged. We need to ask that sort of question again and again and be willing to find and test creative, yet practical answers.
5. Reconfigure institutions. One option might be to configure institutions in the developed world to meet the needs of younger countries, including helping to build quality, but more responsive institutions of their own. This is connected to my first point about repurposing universities in places with older populations to retrain their retirees for deployment as teachers in younger regions, but it’s bigger than that. The developed world has the resources and the systems to invest in their existing institutions, and they are the models that the developing world copies when it’s building its own. Can we conceive of ways to improve our current institutions in ways that would also benefit the developing world, both by providing new models to learn from and by using them to provide services the developing world sorely needs?

Education needs to ADAPT blog series:
Introduction
Asymmetry: education will cause disparities to grow
Disruption: education must keep up
Age: rebalancing educational wealth
Populism: [coming soon]
Trust: [coming soon]