Dive Summary:
- A new two-year program called Enstitute is challenging conventional wisdom that the young, digital elite need to attend college to land top professional jobs, opting instead to teach skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building through on-the-job experience in apprenticeships.
- Co-founder Kane Sarhan says the program's founders hold the long-term vision of becoming an acceptable alternative to college, with recruitment efforts aimed at students who can't afford college or aren't interested in attending one.
- While a college degree is still a prerequisite for most professional jobs, the number of people willing to test alternatives is on the rise, and Enstitute currently has partner companies including The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and Tumblr.
From the article:
... “We need educational research and development for a new time,” says Tony Wagner, an innovation education fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and the author of “Creating Innovators.”
“I have no idea whether Enstitute is going to be successful,” he adds. The only way to find out, he says, would be to follow the apprentices over time after the program and compare them with their college-educated peers. “Yes, you get exposed to a lot of great things by going to a liberal arts school,” Mr. Wagner says, “but you have to look at the cost-benefit analysis.” ...