Enstitute

Going to college used to be the prescribed path to success, but today, students are considering different options. The cost of a college education is soaring and many students are graduating with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. One response to the high cost of secondary education are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offered by companies like Coursera or edX that offer free online courses taught by well-known professors, but the jury is still out on how employers will view qualifications from MOOCs.

Students are now considering whether work experience should come even before college education. What if applicants already had a solid footing in the industries they hope to enter? That’s the mission of Enstitute, a New York City-based non-profit that’s promoting the idea of learning by doing.

Co-founder Kane Sarhan developed Enstitute based on his personal experiences in college and in apprenticeships. He was a high achiever in university, but never felt very connected to what he studied until he started getting real-world experience through internships. Suddenly, the marketing terms used in class became relevant and there was a reason to understand them. His apprenticeships helped him get real-world job experience that he parlayed into a first job with more responsibility and higher pay than some of his peers who had graduated from top universities.

His friends started coming to him asking for advice and he tried to help them out by connecting them to entrepreneurs in his circle. The hunger for those connections, for real skills and practical experience, was so strong that Sarhan decided to institutionalize the apprenticeship experience.

“We sat down with about a dozen HR departments before we started the program and they said the traditional indicators that they use for recruiting are starting to fail,” Sarhan said. Hiring managers saw promise in Enstitute because new employees would come to them with practical skills – they wouldn’t have to spend valuable time retraining even the smartest entry-level applicant.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Enstitute, which raised funds to support their students from private investors, Microsoft Bing, and the Kauffman Foundation, welcomed its first class of 11 fellows in September of 2012. They’ve each been placed in a tech start-up where they’ll work and learn for two years. They rotate between different divisions of the company, learning each aspect of the business before being given one area of focus. Enstitute does weekly check-ins with fellows to follow their learning progress and monthly check-ins with the host-companies to make sure the experience remains substantive.

Fellows also have six to eight hours of coursework per week, a mixture of online and offline work. Enstitute partners with SkillShare, Treehouse, GeneralAssembly, as well as private corporations like the Economist and MOOCs, which provide the courses meant to solidify the foundations of what they’re doing on the job. The courses also focus on things like critical thinking and problem solving, written communication, verbal communication and presentation, as well as elective subjects in liberal arts, competency in basic business technology, and front- and back-end development.

[RELATED: For the Future Student, Higher Education Will Be Redefined]

In its pilot year, fellows get paid $200 per week and are given free room and board at a loft Enstitute rents in New York. The first year’s fellows have not had to pay for the education, but in the future, Sarhan predicts there will be a nominal fee of $1,500 per year to cover the cost of online courses. He also expects the weekly stipend paid by companies to increase. The first eleven fellows are an exceptionally driven bunch, he said, and most already have experience with tech start-ups.

WILL THEY GET JOBS?

Sarhan is intently focused on trying to make sure Enstitute fellows emerge from the program as competitive candidates for good jobs at companies of all sizes. He’s confident that the on-the-job skills they’re learning from their internships already put them a step above peers emerging from elite institutions with little experience.

But he’s also making connections with as many companies as he can, selling the Enstitute model. He’s creating a recruiting pipeline with employers on the other end who know exactly the kind of experience they’re cultivating. Additionally, the “credential” that fellows receive from Enstitute is what amounts to a real-world portfolio of their work. They can demonstrate the projects they

[RELATED: Should Work Experience Come Before College Education?]

worked on during their apprenticeships, recommendations from their entrepreneur-mentors, peers and Enstitute staff, as well as the results of their online coursework. Taken together, Sarhan hopes it will paint a compelling picture of competence.

THE FUTURE FOR ENSTITUTE

The company is currently accepting applications for their next set of fellows and have added digital media/advertising and non-profit/social good apprenticeships to the industry list they offer.

“At scale we see Enstitute working with any small to medium sized company in this country to place an apprentice, so anyone can learn on the job,” Sarhan said. That means flower shops or restaurants or auto body shops could all teach their trade through an apprenticeship. The founders want to take the program global, connecting international fellows to companies in their own communities. Sarhan said he’s committed to keeping the program affordable and getting apprentices paid through the company. He doesn’t think anyone should have to go into debt to find their career path.

Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun, who launched Udacity, free online higher-ed classes, sees this kind of new model emerging for what comes after high school.

Rather than having higher education be tangentially related to some future idea of a job, Thrun believes that equation will change.“I’d love to see a time when job choices we make reinforce education,” Thrun said. “We don’t put education first and job second, but the job begins much much earlier in a way to motivate the education.”

Watch How Free Online Courses Are Changing Traditional Education on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

For those still trying to piece together all the different definitions and scenarios of a MOOC (massive open online courses), this PBS Newshour segment presents a comprehensive overview of the evolution of this phenomenon.

From the financial angle, MOOC startups are still trying to figure out how to make money. Udacity is getting revenue from several companies like Google to provide specialized courses. Coursera is charging potential employers for providing names of high-scoring students.

Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng of Coursera, students, and other professors who question the wisdom of these classes weigh in.

Student Tracy Lippincott’s perspective on teacher-student connection:
“The thing that I really miss is actually personal contact with the professor. I like to be able to get personalized advice from the person who’s in charge, and maybe just a little of like a thumbs-up, you know, just a little bit of positive reinforcement.”

Sebastian Thrun on his view of lecturing:
“It’s not my lecturing that changes the student, but it’s the student exercise. So our courses feel very much like video games, where you’re being bombarded with exercise after exercise after exercise. That’s very different from the way I teach at Stanford, where I’m much more in a lecturing mode.”

Stanford professor Susan Holmes:
“I don’t think that you can give a Stanford education online, in the same way as I don’t think that Facebook gives you a social life.”

Coursera, which is seeking authority to give college credit for their courses (as opposed to just certification), is working with a company called ProctorU to verify student identity and participation. Correspondent Spencer Michels demonstrates in this video how online testing would work, and how the system they’ve devised is meant to prevent — or at least curtails — cheating.

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Not too far in the future, students may be faced with an entirely different set of choices than they do today. No longer might college or career straight after high school graduation be the two only and divergent paths in front of them. No longer may a four-to-six-year commitment to a highly esteemed institution be the fastest way to a fruitful career or a rich network.

With online education quickly gaining momentum, the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is not only shaking up higher education to the core — its value, its status, its cost — the movement is also changing how young people envision their education and their future.

Sebastian Thrun, whose free, online artificial intelligence class for Stanford last year enrolled more than 175,000 people and launched the MOOC movement, foresees a radically different future for students. Thrun, who founded Google X, the incubator for projects like the Google self-driving car and Google Glass, co-founded Udacity, a free online school that offers higher ed classes computer science classes — everything from Programming Languages to How to Build a Startup.

“Right now you go to college for four, six, seven years, and it’s a big commitment over a long period of time,” Thrun said in an interview earlier this week, which will be shown in an upcoming PBS Newshour story. “But in the future, learning will be lifelong, and it will happen in very small chunks. If you have an interest, a problem, if you need a skill, you’ll go find it and learn it. Things like degrees and classes and so on, will be replaced by entire sequences of achievements in the learning space but also in the kinds of things we can do in the project space.”

Thrun believes that some kids may not even have to graduate from high school — especially if they know from an early age that they’re interested in a field like engineering. “Probably at the of 13 or 14, they’re already great at engineering, they’re proficient on different systems and they’re able to demonstrate it.”

And rather than having higher education be tangentially related to some future idea of a job, Thrun believes that equation will change.

“I’d love to see a time when job choices we make reinforce education,” he said. “We don’t put education first and job second, but the job begins much much earlier in a way to motivate the education.”

A HEAD START

The founders of Coursera, another MOOC that offers free online courses from more than 30 universities, including Princeton, Columbia, and Duke, believe the existence of MOOCs will give students a head start toward finding their career path and areas of interest before they commit to a major in college.

“They can spend less time wandering around aimlessly looking for what’s right for them both in discipline and difficulty level. They can do risk-free exploration both in discipline and in difficulty level to find the thing that’s right for them,” said Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera. “The biggest opportunity here is to make considerable progress toward a degree before they have to make a commitment to going to school to complete it.”

What’s more, students who typically have an “undermatching” problem — they aim for colleges that are less selective than what they might aspire to and are thus less likely to get a degree — can have the experience of taking classes from top-notch universities and see a different option for themselves.

“They can take these courses and say, ‘Wait a minute, I can aspire to these colleges, to Stanford, Princeton or Columbia, and therefore I’m going to try to apply there.’” Koller said. “We hope it opens the door to a much higher success rate for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.”

And for students who already have every intention of applying to top-tier universities, these online classes can be used for the college admissions process, said Andrew Ng, another Coursera co-founder. “What better way to prove to a college admissions officer that you’re ready?” he said.

BIG CHANGES

No one can predict what will come of the top-ranked schools with the availability of online classes. But if there’s any hand-wringing about the changes, Thrun said people should consider what’s happening now.

“Go to a high school now, look at how many kids don’t learn math not because they’re not capable of understanding math, but because of the way it’s conveyed to them, the classroom setting, the fixed speed for all — it’s the wrong recipe for these kids,” he said. “Is that what we aspire to maintain? Or should we be creative about this?”

But he’s hopeful.

“I’m a big optimist,” he said. “Especially that in the U.S., every time we engage in a debate if what we’re doing is right or wrong, we end up in a better place. And that better place will strengthen us.”