Stanford 2025, a yearlong project aimed at developing “provocations” to stimulate discussion, was unveiled in May 2014 during two interactive sessions that invited participants to imagine what higher education might look like a decade ahead. Four “radical” ideas are the provocations that emerged from the sessions: 1. Open Loop University – extend college to six years rather than the current four years, 2. Paced Education – coursework paced to individual readiness, 3. Axis Flip – instead of accumulating knowledge by discipline, students would focus on acquiring transferable skills and so-called competencies, and 4. Purpose Learning – declare a mission rather than a major. Items 3 and 4 are of particular interest to me given my development of the theory of the wide toolbox, and identification of a cohort at Yale that is engaged in self-directed learning to close the gap between what they desire to learn and what is actually taught in the classroom.

The rigid teacher-classroom model needs to be reformed in order to prepare students to become “daring, creative, and resilient problem solvers,” asserted Sarah Stein Greenberg of the Stanford University d. School. Ms. Stein Greenberg was one of the principal organizers of the Stanford 2025 project. It is interesting that Stanford, like MIT, is challenging the conventional approach to college education. Both institutions are attempting to reinvent the “why” of higher education. The notion is to connect the meaning or “the why” behind one’s studies and actions. I believe that this is what the wide toolbox cohort at Yale is doing. While they are constrained by the system that requires students to declare a major and meet the major’s requisite requirements to graduate; this cohort is also doing what the Stanford project declares students should do: declare a mission, not a major. In other words, students couple their area of learning with the purpose that fuels it.

Devika, a recent Yale College graduate, majored in architecture because the subject met her criteria of combining her interest in rigorous problem solving and humanities. During our conversation she informed me that she started college as a physics major but switched to architecture. I asked whether there was any relationship between physics and architecture. She responded accordingly:  

Physics and architecture are essentially the same things in my mind. They are both essentially forms of problem solving. In physics, a lot of the circumstances are idealized. You have your white box. You are essentially using math, the equations that govern the universe to figure out how certain things work. Physics in general is quite beautiful. Architecture involves a lot of the same problem solving. Except you have a little more freedom. You are essentially designing the problem and the solution concurrently in architecture. You get to set the parameters as you go. You have to be a polymath to be an architect.

Being mission driven rather than major driven will put students in a position where they will take a more interdisciplinary approach to how they select their courses and extracurricular activities. This phenomenon is what Stanford 2025 refers to as “purpose learning.” Students, in other words, pursue meaning and impact through their studies and projects.

“The long term societal impact is human capital development,” notes Stanford 2025. Moreover, this human capital, along with entrepreneurship, might be the most important element for today’s students to create their own jobs, control their own labor, control the means of production and their intellectual property. The wide toolbox cohort pursues meaning and impact through their studies and activities because their mission is to engage in curiosity-driven learning inside and outside the conventional classroom. While the d. School project is intended to be implemented over the next decade or so, I feel that the wide toolbox cohort is creatively taking advantage of the intellectual and physical resources at Yale to facilitate self-directed learning today.      

The Navigator by Robert Parke Harrison

My goal is to be contributive to the larger conversation in American society about reimagining the role of the traditionally liberal arts colleges and universities in the 21^st century. Also, my research recognizes the unique role that elite universities such as Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Yale, Harvard and Columbia play in the production of American leaders for all aspects of American life. I want to contribute to the dialogue inside and outside the academy about how students are being prepared as 21^st century knowledge workers, managers, and owners. This conversation covers the role of fields such as the humanities, social sciences, the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math) and the emerging discipline of entrepreneurship in preparing college and university students for successful and rewarding careers.

Students need to understand how to approach preparing for their careers strategically. To this end, the two courses that I am designing are intended to speak to students in the context of today’s rapidly changing global economic landscape. Some people in academia might take exception with this notion of trying to have an effect beyond the purely academic realm. My simple response is today students should be given access to information and experiences that empower them, are useful and help them acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to create their own opportunities. A wide toolbox cohort who is majoring in English took a strategic path to creating her entrepreneurial opportunity. She described her route in the following terms:

My shift away from STEM is what got me interested in entrepreneurship. There were two tendencies that existed deeply within me. I have always been extremely interested in entrepreneurship. I started a non-profit in high school. Most people do not think of English majors and entrepreneurship. They see me as the head of a magazine, and they say she is an English major and she likes entrepreneurship. Oh being the head of a magazine focused on entrepreneurship makes sense. I love the magazine and I love English, but I am most interested in the startup culture. Being the head of the magazine gives me a platform to network within the entrepreneurial community.

I am proposing to teach two classes that relate to my research and interests, and speak to today’s students in a strategic way: The Culture of Entrepreneurship and Law, the Internet and Society. In my view 21^st century teaching should entail a multidisciplinary approach to reflect the reality of how we navigate today’s world. This means my classes will include elements of technology, the humanities, and entrepreneurship. My classes will draw on my background in academia, business, finance, anthropology, American studies, law, entrepreneurship, and Wall Street.

In The Culture of Entrepreneurship students will be exposed to a multidisciplinary approach to studying the phenomenon of entrepreneurship in American society today. In this course students will explore topics such as the role of the entrepreneur in American culture and society, how the entrepreneur is perceived in American society, as well as how the entrepreneur is portrayed in academia and popular culture. Students will be engaged in a capstone project of playing the role of co-founder of a startup and designing a corporate culture that is sustainable and scalable. The working definition of a startup is: A temporary organization that is formed to search for a sustainable and scalable business model.

In Law, the Internet and Society students will analyze issues such as privacy in an era of social media. They will discuss the fact that privacy is a cultural, social and legal construct in American society. Students will dissect how Americans’ expectations of privacy are culturally constructed and influenced generationally. Capstone projects will involve one of the major themes of this class: a) expectations of privacy in an era of social media, b) governmental policy governing the Internet, c) the cultural significance of “free” on the Internet, d) Internet piracy and intellectual property, e) the relationship between humans and machines, and f) the sharing economy (Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, and Zipcar).

Alexander Glandien

During the process of designing two undergraduate courses (The Culture of Entrepreneurship and Law, the Internet, and Society), I have been thinking about the following question: What is the premise of my research at Yale? At the macro-level, the premise is that given the changing relationship between labor and capital, students today need to prepare themselves more strategically than prior generations of students. They need to be prepared for a world where career paths are dynamic rather than linear. At the individual student-level, the premise is that self-directed learning is central to this more strategic approach that students should utilize to prepare themselves as 21st century knowledge workers. In the process of taking agency over their learning it is important for them to understand what is entailed in innovation, design, and entrepreneurship. This familiarity with innovation, design, and entrepreneurship, at both a theoretical and experiential level is intended to put students in the position to control their own labor, create their own jobs and jobs for others, to control their intellectual capital and their intellectual property. The notion is to provide students a modern perspective on how to take control of all facets of how, what, where, when and why they learn. My research has focused on how a cohort is preparing themselves for an uncertain world of work after graduating.   

“In business, as in sports, the vast majority of victories are determined before the beginning of the game,” proclaimed Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in his 2010 Auburn University Commencement Address. He continued, “We rarely control the timing of opportunities, but we can control our preparation.” A current Yale student made a similar point when he said, “I work hard and fill my days with interesting experiences. I’m not working toward any career specifically. I think that career opportunities, at least as a graduate of Yale, come as a side-effect from staying curious and working on interesting problems.” For this Eli staying hungry for opportunities to learn skills and acquire knowledge is based on staying curious and seeking diverse experiences in and out of class. This approach, which is vital to preparing strategically as a 21^st century knowledge worker, is amplified when professors engage in problem-based instruction.   

In problem-based learning, professors act as mentors as opposed to sages who exclusively impart knowledge from the front of a classroom. In this learning environment, much of the instruction is done by professors walking around and interacting with individual students or groups of students who have been teamed-up. For example, when a class is taught at the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design, there is a classroom component and a design studio component that involves students in building a prototype as a solution to a problem that was researched and resolved by a team of students. This pedagogical method allows students to take ownership of the application and execution of their solutions. Moreover, under this method students define their own paths of inquiry, which results in greater investment in project outcomes. This is similar to how the wide toolbox cohort engages in side-learning to fill in gaps in their formal education. All of this is preparation for a rapidly changing world that will challenge you to constantly and consistently learn new skills and acquire new knowledge.  

Henning Wagenbreth

Former Yale President Richard Levin led the university’s effort to reconstitute the sense of possibility at a 300 year old elite liberal arts institution. A myriad of initiatives during his tenure as president, 1993 – 2013, instigated new possibilities in learning. “Yale is committed to remain on everyone’s short list of the best universities in the world,” he stated in 2000. “In the 21^st century, you must excel in science and engineering to maintain that position. Modern space for scientific research is crucial in attracting top professors and students. We find ourselves in stiffer competition in the sciences than in other fields,” he further stated. The climate of possibilities that developed as a result of the Levin initiatives created the conditions under which self-directed apprenticeships, the hallmark of the wide toolbox cohort, could exist. The university provides the necessary conditions wherein students can personalize their education and learning; they can develop their own solutions, with external support based on a personalized approach to learning.

In earlier posts, I have written about the student-oriented infra-structure for innovation, design, and entrepreneurship. The Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design has been described as an academic maker space that provides students tools, materials, and mentorship to produce physical objects ranging from 3D printed items to artificial beehives with built-in temperature and moisture sensors. Also, I have described how the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute provides programs, and mentors to help students ideate about a venture, then learn the lean start-up methodology to create a business model and execution plan. As a modern teaching and research institution, Yale has created an environment teeming with student-oriented resources that prepare and equip students to optimize their ability to be successful in the new economy.

Talented students, who are intellectually curious and desire to learn, are the complementary factor to Yale establishing an institution-wide climate of possibilities. The wide toolbox cohort exists in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862 when he proclaimed: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” Lincoln was offering a challenge to people who were unwilling to change with the times. Challenging what is taken for granted is central to the wide toolbox mindset. This cohort is challenging the notion that learning only occurs in the classroom, or under the tutelage of a professor. They are challenging the notion that education and learning are the same thing. They are, above all else, challenging themselves to embrace a different sense of possibility, and to hold a different set of expectations, thus taking advantage of access to world-class facilities, faculty, and outstanding fellow students.

The array of possibilities, including engaging in entrepreneurship, is limitless is an environment that provides tools that empower students to imagine, then build solutions.

In a 1980 presentation Steve Jobs asserted that man possesses the ability to manufacture tools to amplify his inherent abilities. This, he said, was exactly what they were doing at Apple: designing and manufacturing the personal computer to amplify the human brain.

The wide toolbox mind-set, which I have discussed on this blog, has its own amplifying power: it enables students to create human capital through the use of student-oriented infra-structure that facilitates self-directed learning relating to innovation, design, and entrepreneurship. Further, the cohort that adopts this mind-set learns how and what to learn in the context of the 21^st century knowledge economy, as well as how to access certain tools to enhance their education. This human capital, along with entrepreneurship, might be the most important element for today’s students to create their own jobs, control their own labor, control the means of production and their intellectual property. 

What is being described here is an adaptive strategy to cope with the change that is occurring at the macro-level of the economy in the relationship between labor and capital. There is an emerging view that you are responsible for your own professional development and periodically updating your skills and knowledge. At the university level, change is occurring in the relationship between student, faculty, and university administration: responsibility for what a student learns has devolved to the student. Students who are on the cutting edge of pedagogy, and are cognizant of the economic shifts occurring globally, have devised a way to fill the gap between what is required by the university to maintain their student status and what they desire and need to learn to be competitive in today’s global economy.

Here is a link to the Jobs 1980 presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJKlc4m5D50.

Pieter Van Eenoge

The cohort that my research at Yale examines possess the imagination and creativity to conceive of a way to design their learning beyond a self-contained major. The traditional academic major is filled with prerequisites that prescribe the sequence that classes are taken in. There is never a pause in the process to ask what is the nature of the learning that is occurring? Or how is a student advancing intellectually? Once a prerequisite is fulfilled, a box is checked, metaphorically, and the student moves on. Period. 

As the final phase of data gathering for my research is unfolding, I have taken a step back from the process of ethnography to reaffirm my hypothesis:

An institutional shift in support of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (“STEM”) has transformed how students at Yale, a traditionally liberal arts college, prepare themselves as 21^st century knowledge workers. Student-oriented resources associated with this strategic shift empower a cohort to engage in self-directed learning in the realms of innovation, design, and entrepreneurship.

In reaffirming my hypothesis, I also reaffirm the “why” behind this investigation. Through the development of the wide toolbox framework my goal is to shed some light on how a cohort of purposeful learners have gone about the business of thinking critically about what is important for them to learn and master, and why they believe this approach will empower them to realize their full intellectual potential and optimize their time at an elite educational institution. The main points of my research thus far are:

• The traditional academic major is laden with prerequisites that often stifle the ambition of purposeful learners.
• Before choosing those areas to learn, self-directed learners look inward, figuring out what they are curious about, where there are university resources that they can use and how to create a hybrid educational experience.
• A “creative and intellectually courageous minority” has come up with a nontraditional learning methodology that involves choosing the areas they want to master and seeking out professors, and others who can assist them in learning in their selected areas.

An email I received regarding last week’s post makes the point that selecting classes or other activities purposefully involves a bit of work. This recent graduate of the School of Management wrote: I tend to agree that education in elite institutions tends to push students towards what is “best” as defined by general consensus, rather than what is “best for them,” which takes a bit more thinking and risk taking. He continues:

One thing I would add to what I said before is that an additional reason online learning and resources are nice is that unlike regimented class, you can actually do things during the day time. Meaning that you can try to start a business during the day time, and you can fill in the gaps in your learning when people have stopped working, at night. While it doesn’t leave time for breaks, it does allow you to quickly learn what one needs to in new areas.

Also, in doing our interview and reading your post, it was fun for me to think through the broader societal context of the way I approach learning, and how the Internet is allowing people like me to do more side learning.

This recent graduate exercised the courage to execute his strong belief that he had to sift, sort, and curate the classes and activities he was exposed to in order to build an individualized learning template that provided him the best and most relevant overall experience at Yale. As a result of pursuing his nontraditional learning path he acquired knowledge in areas such as business, medicine, the life sciences, molecular biology, biotechnology, and science lab protocol. Today he is the CEO of a startup in the life sciences space that recently closed on a $1.25 million Series A round with several venture capital firms.

June Wygant

A distinguishing factor of the cohort that my research covers is that at some point they decided to take control of their learning. While they still enjoy the privileges associated with attending an elite university, they recognize the need to take responsibility for their own intellectual growth. An email that I received in response to last week’s post described this self-directed growth mindset: “I’ve definitely learned the value of learning on the margins. Always important to keep an eye out on my intellectual periphery. A lot of times, it’s much more interesting than my coursework.” Self-teaching is not a new concept. Men and women have been doing so since they recognized the need to master their environment or create survival strategies. What makes the self-directed apprentices that I am investigating at Yale so interesting is that in some respects they are considered outliers because of their independent pursuit of knowledge and skills, and their willingness to chart unconventional career paths.

William Deresiewicz, a former Yale English professor and author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & The Way to a Meaningful Life (2014), argues that an elite education manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven but are “trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.” He continues, “most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them.” He seems to identify the cohort that I am studying when he makes the following statement: “Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a large project of intellectual discovery and development, one that they directed by themselves and for themselves.”

Is it possible that I have stumbled upon the path of the “very few” that are “coloring outside the lines”? Or, is it possible that the timeframe of my research (2012 – present) and the context are sufficiently different than the period when Deresiewicz taught at Yale (1998 – 2008)? Is it possible that Yale students now appreciate the need to take control of their own learning and preparation as 21^st century knowledge workers? Perhaps my observations are tracking with the ascendancy of an interest in entrepreneurship, innovation and design at Yale, and the build-out of student-oriented infrastructure, such as the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design and the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, to support these emerging interests.

Just as students are participating in problem-based learning in some classes at Yale, they recognize that ideas from books are pointless if they have no application to life as they live it. This relatively new approach to teaching and learning helps learners tackle real-world problems to be solved, and not just an abstract problem with no apparent utility. Deresiewicz might take issue with this approach, as he writes in his 2008 essay, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” “the admissions process increasingly selects kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms-the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy.” “We are slouching,” he contends, “even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.” 

While I agree that conformity exists among students at Yale to pursue the same career choices, specifically Wall Street and management consulting, I take issue with Deresiewicz’s cynicism. He observed that “most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy.” He refers to them as “excellent sheep” because they are following a well-worn path prescribed for them by society. Nonetheless, since Deresiewicz taught at Yale real world events have intervened in the lives of today’s students. The Great Recession, and its aftermath, has presented them with a new normal; a new reality, one in which they need to, in the words of Steve Jobs, “Think different.” This approach is no longer an optional one. Taking the “safe route” to Wall Street is no longer so safe. Today for some students pursuing entrepreneurship is perceived as a realistic possibility because the façade of job security in mainstream careers has been crumbling.

Given the fact that technology is spawning a new relationship between learners and teachers, students are empowered to control their own futures. Administrators and faculty are quietly negotiating how to improve teaching at a research university, even though there is little incentive to be a good teacher. Meanwhile, the cohort that is the focus of my research seems to be saying that whatever may improve teaching matters little because what they really want is the ability to tap into university resources outside of the traditional classroom to facilitate their self-directed learning.  

We live in a world where, in my opinion, “learning on the margins,” and “coloring outside the lines” are adaptive strategies for being successful in a rapidly changing environment that necessitates new behaviors and a new self-directed learning mindset.

The wide toolbox theory explains a pedagogical innovation that students have developed to close the gap between how they learn and how teaching is conducted. This innovative approach to learning enhances how students access information, and acquire knowledge and skills because they take ownership of the design of their education. This model of learning frees them from the constraints of the typical university education model that focuses on professors pouring information into students in a classroom setting. Under the wide toolbox rubric, students complement their formal education through self-teaching by using university facilities and personnel. This supplemental learning results in a personally relevant body of knowledge and experiences. As active-learners, they are assuming personal responsibility for what, why, how and when they learn. By strategically taping into the intellectual, physical, or financial resources of the university this cohort can achieve its educational goal which is to engage in deep learning that is curiosity-driven. 

“Side learning” is the phrase an informant used to describe how self-directed learning works for him. He explained that he first understood the importance and utility of self-directed learning when he was an associate in a Wall Street investment bank. One of his managers emphasized the importance of understanding a client’s business from the client’s perspective. His manager instilled in him the belief that quality investment banking went beyond raising capital or doing debt restructurings; it involved, for example, gaining a thorough understanding of esoteric accounting rules surrounding a debt restructuring: this is “side learning.” The scope of one’s knowledge, in this instance, goes beyond knowing how to do the required investment banking tasks.

By the time he came to Yale to attend one of its professional schools, he knew the value of learning things on the side. He recognized that side learning translated into many areas. Quoting Ben Franklin, he said “Don’t put off to tomorrow what you can do today.” He continued, “You are not going to learn it tomorrow. If you really care about this stuff you will do it now.” He realized there is but so much knowledge that someone can give you. You have to learn stuff on your own. On the value of taking structured classes he said: “You can go into a structured class and not get a lot out of it in terms of what you want to learn to do. I did not want to come to school to memorize more things.”

Another example of side learning at Yale is HackYale, a student-led organization whose mission is a pedagogical one: to engage in peer-to-peer teaching and learning involving how to code. This organization conducts its workshop weekly out of the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design. This is perhaps one of the only extracurricular groups at Yale that is solely engaged in pedagogy, says a professor who is familiar with HackYale.

On the other hand, a professor told me that the prevailing attitude among faculty is: “We know what is best for students. They should trust us.” Additionally, he said, the predominant view among faculty is that “We are here to train students how to think critically, not to prepare them for a job.” Yet my student-informant’s view is that only 20% of what was taught in the typical class applied to him. While you might quarrel with the percentage he used, can you quarrel with the fact that because of the access that students have to information through the Internet that many of them come to college or professional school with a better understanding of what interests them or what they want to focus on than prior generations of students? This knowledge and experience is an aspect of self-directed learning that they have been engaged in prior to college or professional school. So then we return to a core question: What is the role of a college or university in the 21st century?

Perhaps the answer to this question lies, in part, in the pedagogical tool project-based or problem-based learning that I wrote about last week. It is a bridge between the values of a traditional liberal education and preparing students for the real world. This pedagogical method, is a form of self-directed learning because students define the problem, then choose the path to pursue to find the answer. Citing Harvard professor George Whitesides, a Yale professor asserted that project based learning reaffirms the value of a liberal education, yet underscores the university’s responsibility to give students “structured and supervised opportunities to approach real world problems,” and he added “with a deep and wide toolbox.”

In studying educational production and experiential learning from the perspective of how knowledge is formed it is important to keep in mind that changes at the institutional level are happening because 21^st century learners, and in some instances their parents, are forcing a realignment of educational offerings to prepare students for the 21^st century knowledge workforce. “Just as physical capital is created by changes in materials to form tools that facilitate production, human capital is created by changes in persons that bring about skills and capabilities that make them able to act in new ways.” (Coleman 1988: S100) This characterization of human capital formation appears especially applicable to self-directed apprenticeship because knowledge is created through a learning focus rather than a teaching focus.

A Yale professor, who also is an administrator, told me that the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”) is an example of a modern learning facility because students are empowered to take ownership of their education. He emphasized that CEID aids in the trend towards “problem-directed” learning. Under this learning model, students take ownership of a problem that they want to explore; they define the path of inquiry, and then discover a solution. Yale, at the institutional level, defines and facilitates the environment that affords this “problem-directed” or “project-directed” learning to occur in.

MIT, a peer institution of Yale, seemingly understands that 21^st century learners have different expectations about how, what, where, when and why they learn. “The MIT education of the future is likely to be more global in its orientation and engagement, more modular and flexible in its offerings, and more open to experiments with new modes of learning,” proclaimed a news release from the MIT News Office. This news release introduced the final report of the Institute-Wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education, which had been convened 18 months ago by President L. Rafael Reif to “envision the MIT of 2020 and beyond.” Relf released the report with a letter to the MIT community, saying, the report “marks the beginning of an exciting new period of educational experimentation at MIT.” Consistent with the notion that 21^st century learners learn differently than prior generations, the report makes 16 recommendations that lay the groundwork for MIT “to reinvent education for future generations of learners both on its camps and beyond.” Moreover, the report, which is in line with my development of the wide toolbox framework, recognizes that students are accessing information in new ways, therefore MIT must put mechanisms in place that accommodate this new culture of learning:

The way in which students are accessing material points to the need for the modularization of online classes whenever possible. The very notion of a “class” may be outdated. This in many ways mirrors the preferences of students on campus. The unbundling of classes also reflects a larger trend in society—a number of other media offerings have become available in modules, whether it is a song from an album, an article in a newspaper, or a chapter from a textbook. Modularity also enables “just-in-time” delivery of instruction, further enabling project-based learning on campus and for students worldwide.

In light of MIT’s stature as an elite educational institution, the recommendations of this report will reverberate beyond the MIT campus and its global community.

As I wrote recently there is a gap between how today’s students learn and how they are being taught. Some Yale administrators along with educators at all levels are wringing their hands over the question of how to manage engagement in the classroom and how to make teachers more effective disseminators of information. Whereas MIT acknowledges that the very notion of a “class” may be outdated. In my view, there is disruption going on at Yale and other campuses. But unlike the typical pattern of disruption where the disruption is coming from outside the company or industry, in higher education the disruption is coming from inside the academy.

A cohort of students is taking more control of what, when, where, how and why they learn. They are using institutional facilities to facilitate this process while taking ownership of the form and substance of their preparation as 21^st century knowledge workers. The experiments in learning that are occurring at Yale and MIT have the potential to transform how learning occurs at elite educational institutions. The cohort that my research examines is in the vanguard, along with some faculty, in progressively and proactively creating human capital through taking responsibility for what, when, where, how and why and modern learners learn.     

The new culture of learning that my research has uncovered at Yale is driven by five factors: 1. self-directed apprenticeships (the wide toolbox framework), 2. students desire to build, create, and put something new into the world, 3. student oriented infrastructure for innovation, design and entrepreneurship, which is used to augment or supplement classroom learning, 4. peer-to-peer teaching and learning that includes extracurricular activities and clubs, and 5. tacit leadership training.

In theorizing about this new culture of learning, I am mindful that culture has meaning only in its social context, it has no significance by itself. (Leach 1965) Within the social context of higher education, education is shifting from a teaching focus in which instructors transfer knowledge to students, to an emphasis on students learning on their own, typically in forums, such as the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design, that foster peer-to peer teaching and learning.

Contextually, how, what, where and why students learn has devolved increasingly to the individual students. As this devolution becomes institutionalized, responsibility for preparing to work in the new economy is borne by individual students. At the student level, they are assuming the risk of acquiring the appropriate knowledge and skills for the new economy. This assumption of risk is grounded in the nature of capitalism as theorized by neoliberalism – faith in individual agency and the logic and efficiency of free markets. This perspective shapes the lives and worldview of individual Americans because collectively they believe in individual responsibility and the overarching faith in the power of individual agency to determine one’s personal and professional fate.

At the institutional level, the momentum for delegating responsibility for how, what, where and why students learn is clarified by the theory of academic capitalism which explains the processes and means by which colleges and universities integrate with the new economy. It describes market and market-like behaviors. In the new context of higher education, students are essentially free agents who have to take control of how, what and why they acquire certain knowledge and skills.

Student-led entrepreneurship, under the auspices of the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (“YEI”), is representative of how students use university student oriented infrastructure to facilitate learning in a self-directed and collaborative manner. Students conceptualize business ventures, then work with YEI staff and experienced mentors (many of whom are Yale alum) to build out their business models. YEI’s overarching approach is entrepreneurship pedagogy in an academic setting. They teach the lean startup methodology which emphasizes rapid prototyping – creating a minimum viable product and constant iterating based upon feedback from potential customers and clients. (The lean startup methodology, widely used by startups and taught at the Harvard B-School, was first promulgated by Eric Ries, a Yale alum, in his seminal book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.)

Recently, I attended YEI’s 2014 Demo Day which is illustrative of a successful student oriented experiment that bridges the gap between the traditional Yale education and the real world skills and knowledge that today’s students need and desire. At Demo Day, the 10 teams that participated in YEI’s 10-week accelerator program made pitch presentations demonstrating the progress that they had made in searching for a sustainable and scalable business models. This year’s presentations also included tummy zen, a 2013 YEI Summer Fellow, as well as presentations by participants in YEI Venture Creation Program (“VCP”). Participation by teams from the VCP is significant because VCP is the “pipeline for the YEI Summer Fellows Program,” said Jim Boyle, YEI Managing Director and co-founder. (This was my third consecutive Demo Day. Each successive year built on the progress of the prior year.)

Cudos to all of the teams and a special shout-out to 109 Design, the winner of this year’s Demo Day.