We need some alternatives to the traditional four-year college

In the Bay Area, where I live, people are tinkering further with conventional campus models. The Minerva Project, a San Francisco start-up with offices two blocks from Twitter, offers classic seminar-style college courses via a sophisticated interactive online learning platform and accompanies them with residencies in cities all over the world. Nearby in the SoMa district, Dev Bootcamp, a 19-week immersive curriculum that trains people of all ages for jobs in the tech industry, is a popular alternative. Some successfully employed graduates brag of bypassing college altogether.

At Stanford, where I teach, an idea still in the concept phase developed by a student-led team in the university’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design calls for the replacement of four consecutive college years in young adulthood with multiple residencies distributed over a lifetime. What the designers call Open Loop University would grant students admitted to Stanford multiple years to spend on campus, along with advisers to help them time those years strategically in light of their personal development and career ambitions. Today’s arbitrarily segregated world of teenagers and young adults would become an ever-replenished intergenerational community of purposeful learners.

This utopian ideal is admittedly quite a distance from the institutional arrangements we have inherited, which encourage the nation’s most privileged young people to enter and finish college by the ripe old age of 22. But the status quo is not sustainable. Unrelenting demand for better-educated workers, rapidly developing technological capacity to support learning digitally and the soaring costs of conventional campus life are driving us toward substantial change.