Market based approaches to public education reform are constantly pursuing a student’s developmental arc from elementary to high school, high school to post secondary education, and post secondary education to employment.  This arc presumes that employers are the ultimate end-consumers of degree holders. 

Those in the education field, career minded public servants, often view such marketplace assumptions and demand drivers of their “product” with a certain amount of suspicion, disdain even. 

Therefore it is not surprising that the recent string of articles chronicling the death of Massive Open Online Courses or “MOOCs” in higher education has been viewed by many long tenured educators as something to be cheered. These critics say that despite MOOCs free or fractional cost and widespread access to previously non-consuming segments of the higher education marketplace, when compared to traditional degrees, their quality is found to be lacking.
McKinsey’s recent report “Education to Employment:  Designing a System that Works” studied more than 100 education-to-employment initiatives in 25 countries.  What I found most striking about their findings was that effective education-to-employment programs (and only less than one third of the ones McKinsey studied fell into this category) routinely entered each other’s worlds.  “Employers might help to design curricula and offer their employees as faculty, for example, while education providers may have students spend half their time on a job site and secure them hiring guarantees.”

According to Dr. Michelle Rhee-Weise of the Christensen Institute, the latest pivot of the MOOC industry away from offering online courses through existing and mostly traditional Universities and Colleges and more towards workforce training directly with and for employers is precisely the kind of innovation that could disrupt traditional post secondary education. 

Identify the customer and serve him/her well.  Maybe the market-based approaches have it right after all.