Colleges need an experiential learning revolution
SATURDAY, November 1, 2025
Eric Schwarz
AMERICA IS FALLING out of love with college, and it’s not hard to see why.
First, colleges are not doing enough to build purpose, confidence, agency, and maturity. Colleges are not the cause of growing anxiety and a declining sense of purpose among young people; but, faced with the reality of these trends, colleges have not changed their models nearly enough to help students build purpose, confidence, agency, and maturity.
Second, colleges are not doing enough to build “durable” or “transferable” skills and the networks and experiences students need to transition successfully from high school to 21st century careers that pay good wages.
There is a striking gap between what students and college administrators think students have learned and can do, and what employers think students can do, particularly in vital areas such as communication, critical thinking, professionalism, and leadership. For example, 81 percent of recent graduates feel they are adept at critical thinking, while only 56 percent of employers agree. Seventy-eight percent of new graduates say they are proficient at communication, while only 54 percent of employers agree.
Third, colleges cost too much. While many colleges and degrees still provide a great return on investment, many do not. Over the last 80 years, the relative portion of college costs borne by students/families, philanthropy, and the public sector has gone up and down, but the actual cost of delivering a year of college has risen sharply — at about four times the rate of inflation.
The cost today of delivering a year of college education (not including research expenses, housing, etc.) at a four-year institution ranges from approximately $25,000 to $40,000, compared to the average cost per student of delivering a year of K-12 education of about $16,000. And this is true even though K-12 students are in class for about 950 hours a year and college students are in class for about 350 hours a year.
After a career spent mostly in K-12 education, for the last decade I have partnered closely with 20 different four-year colleges and universities, including public and private, large and small, selective and not selective. Each of these institutions offer strong programs backed by committed faculty and staff. But none is doing nearly enough to address the root causes of this trio of crises – a crisis of purpose, a crisis of skills, and a crisis of cost.
The result is that American young people and their families are voting with their feet (the percentage of high school graduates choosing to enroll in college has declined from 70 percent in 2009 to 61 percent in 2023) and Americans of all ages are sharing their opinions about college, including at the ballot box.
According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education declined from 58 to 36 percent over the last 10 years while the percent expressing “very little” or “no” confidence shot up from 10 to 32 percent.
So what should be done? And how can Massachusetts – home to America’s first public school (Boston Latin), first university (Harvard), and one of the greatest concentrations of colleges (104 colleges in a state of 7 million residents) – lead the way?
I believe we need fundamentally new models for teaching and learning and that the new models need to break the monopoly of “sage on the stage” teaching and lean into an experiential learning revolution – a dramatic increase in real-world, apprenticeship-based, internship-based, and work-based learning. We need to get students out of the classroom and out into the community.
Originally published in CommonWealth Beacon