How to do college better | Michelle Jones | TEDxSalem

my healthy habits apprised of the only interpretation the way we do college in the United States is broken I'm here is one step on my journey to try and help make it better for 15 years I was a professor and towards the end of that time I was experiencing a lot of heartbreak and frustration trying to make the college experience a bit better for students and I quit obviously I didn't quit altogether or I wouldn't be here right now but I quit trying to make change from inside the system and I quit my job and it took me a long time to try to figure out how I could use all of the experience that I'd built up in the higher education system to try to do something that might be a bit helpful and maybe even effective and I settled on the choice to start my own college wait I know what you're thinking that's not a normal life choice I imagine I am probably the only person in this entire room who thought to herself oh hey that sounds like fun let's give that a try but I think we're on to something we're still young so we're still at the beginning of this stage but we're definitely doing higher education frontwards which I'll come back to and we are putting students first and we've created what I think is an actual real alternative model to the traditional model that we've all become really accustomed to here's what I was seeing every single day as a professor that ended up sort of nudging me down this path in the United States we tell young people that when they graduate from high school they should go to college pretty much regardless of their background their family history their access to resources their interests we give them all the exact same advice go to college and most young people follow that advice they go to college and they get there and they get an advisor who they're given maybe 10 or 15 minutes a year to talk to and that person's primary job is to check things off of a list to make sure that that student is following along on a preset timeline and filling all of these prescribed requirements and some time early on in that relationship that advisor asks the student hey take a look at this long list of things and pick one of those things to be your major to be your area of focus so that they know which checklists that they're supposed to be applying to this particular student fast forward some number of years and towards the end of this experience somebody usually it's a family member or friend somebody who cares a lot about that student asks a question like so what's your plan for life it's a good question and the student is probably really really grateful to be asked it right but much like you're thinking that students probably thinking wait a minute shouldn't somebody have asked you that like you know before like maybe even at the very beginning of this process so that I could have had that in mind as I made all these other decisions because the way our system works you don't actually get to try out that thing that you picked until after you graduate maybe if you're lucky right before and by then it often feels too late like it's too late to change your mind you've invested a lot of time and energy and money into that and you kind of maybe feel stuck with the choice that you made and at some point in this experience that student has realized that this entire education system it just seems designed to sort them first it's sorting them by their standardized test scores into which colleges they can apply to and then once they get there it sorts them that by their GPA sometimes into which major that they can consider but definitely into by the time they graduate what jobs they can apply for or what next steps they have available as options to them and they know that there's so much more than that they're more than those test scores and they're more than their GPA more than their resume more than their transcript but they're never asked to show up as these whole complex full human beings and it seemed to me that there had to be a better way so I did the things that people do I read books and I read articles watched films and they were really good because it really helped me understand a lot of the criticisms of the way we do higher education in this country and those resources were really phenomenal at analyzing how things came to be this way but what I couldn't hardly ever find was an actual alternative like a different model a vision for how we could be doing this differently than we're already doing it some of the things that I learned really surprised me frankly some of them made me feel a little bit silly or stupid that I didn't know these things already I'd been in the higher education system for a long time first as a student and then as a faculty member and I felt like I should have known some of this stuff a few examples most young people do follow the advice that they're given and after high school they go to college but only a little over half of people who start college finish and if you look at people who go to a two-year college it's worse it's only a little over a third and of the people who do finish the ones who graduate 70% of them have debt that averages between twenty-eight thousand and forty thousand dollars depending on how you slice that data but the people that I talk to and the many of the people that you know they say they have about twice that much and the one that surprised me the very most the one that I thought to myself wow how did I not know this is that only 33% of Americans have a college degree most of us don't but that is not the impression that we give young people when they're trying to make the decision of what to do after high school and as a result we have a lot of folks who go to college get in a lot of debt and they don't finish and they don't have a degree and they have feelings of shame and failure that they carry around with them we can do better I brought with me a story to try to illustrate how it worked out in my imagination that maybe we could do this better this is TJ TJ is 21 years old it's from North Carolina identifies as gender non-binary and as a first-generation college student TJ did what most of us do when we graduate from high school and they went to a college in their case they chose a large state university close to where they grew up when they got there they picked a major that as closely as possible matched their interests a year and a half later TJ dropped out and went back home to their parents house now TJ's parents happen to have heard about the college that I started it's called wayfinding Academy and TJ did some research sent us an email I got on the phone with TJ right after that and we had a really nice conversation about what was frustrating to them about their first college experience what they thought they wanted to do next in their life obviously we also talked about what they thought about moving across the country to Portland Oregon and TJ decided to apply in our application process we do not ask for SAT scores or a CT scores or GPAs we ask a series of questions that gets the person to try to reflect on how they came to be where they are right now in their life and what they want for themselves in the next stage of life one of the questions we asked TJ was to tell us a time when they learned something new that changed their worldview and TJ told us about a film that they watched and they wrote I've been vegan for almost two years because of that film and that film made me realize the importance of having a discussion about how animal agriculture impacts climate change and how veganism could potentially be part of that solution but also acknowledge that it's a privilege to be able to choose to be vegan our team read through all of TJ's application and obviously I thought this person is amazing and we thought we can probably help we can probably help TJ figure out what to do with all of their interests and form a life path with that but it's not really up to us at all so we invited TJ to come visit us so that they could meet more of our faculty staff current students so they could make an informed an intentional choice about whether this was a good next step for them then we sent a member of our team to North Carolina to show up in person by surprise with the help of TJ's dad to invite TJ to be a student with us a few months later TJ moved to Portland they're more than halfway through the two-year program with us they'll be graduating in July and our second class of graduates and right now TJ has a guide who they meet with every week whose job is not to check things off of a list but whose job is to help TJ figure out how to integrate their interests into all of the different elements of the wayfinding curriculum and make sure that they're ready for their next steps after graduation last year in one of their core courses TJ decided to make a public service announcement video that talked about the negative impact that social media can have on young people's formation of identity TJ's hosted multiple art shows on campus that feature their artwork other students artwork and community members are for the first of their two internships they chose to work with a small business that helps other small businesses implement environmentally sustainable practices last spring TJ went with us to our annual trip to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage and just recently TJ got back from a national conference with over a hundred other college students to talk about how to be more effective changemakers in our democracy all of that is in just a little over a year and all of that is in TJ's online portfolio so that when they graduate they have a collection of their experiences and a tool that they can use to show the world who they are and what they're capable of doing I could have told many stories like that about our students and we now have alumni who use their two years with us and the experiences they had and the connections that they made to go directly into what they wanted to be doing after Annie is a carpenter at one of the premier green building companies in town Alden transferred to a four-year college to get a science degree to round out his desire to be an outdoor environmental educator hailey started her own event planning company Austin facilitates retreats for young men to break down patterns of toxic masculinity and none of them have debt as a result of going to wayfinding so I know we can be doing this better and we can change the thing that we tell young people when they're trying to make the decision of what to do after high school they could go to a four-year college but if they do they should be making an informed and intentional choice about where to go that's going to help them get to where they're trying to get to in life which means that somebody needs to be asking them that question what do you want to do with your life instead of asking them where are you going to college and their answer to that question what do you want to do with your life might mean that they should do something other than go to a four-year college maybe they should directly get a job doing what they want to be doing maybe they should go to a trade school maybe they should take a gap year and travel maybe they should start their own business but since many of our young people will continue to go to college we owe it to them to do it better the way we do College impacts all of us it weaves its way through the way that we live our lives and through the way we see ourselves and the way we see each other and in closing I'd like to offer us a different way of seeing how about there's more than one way to do life one definition of success is not enough too often the choice posed is what college to pick but the real choice is what life to pick we find the freedom to choose when we quiet the voices of others expectations learning emerges from curiosity and education should stoke it not cure it we're humans to be cultivated not objects to be sorted and the line between the real world in school between life and work it's imaginary we each have distinct potential what's not wasted and we all deserve the chance to grow without soul crushing debt education is an investment that we should share because it's our chance to make the world better what you choose to do with your life matters to more than just you and when we each live life on purpose we can all thrive thank you [Applause] you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 82,623

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Education, Achievement, Career, Change, Children, Classroom, Communication, Community, Creativity, Curiosity, Debate, Education reform, Higher education, Ideas, Impact, Individualism, Innovation, Intelligence, Learning, Life, Life Development, Math, Money, Movement, Passion, Personal education, Personal growth, Policy, Progress, Purpose, Reform, Revolution, Schools, Self improvement, Social Change, Society, Start-up, Teaching

Id: j9O7FJAG2J4

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2019