Do colleges truly understand what students want?

In an effort to be all things to all people, most colleges have created one-size-fits-all offerings that serve few well and incur extraordinary overhead costs to deal with the complexity of serving students with very different motivations for enrolling. In research conducted over the last several years, the authors drew on more than 200 detailed stories of students making the decision to attend some form of post-secondary education, and analysed the data to discover the core “Jobs to Be Done” that cause people to “hire” post-secondary education. They discovered there are five Jobs to Be Done for which people go to college. Schools need to identify which “Job to Be Done” they will serve along with the requisite experiences they must offer to help people be successful in that Job. Making that decision will dictate what they must be good at doing and how they should organise themselves — and, by definition, what they should be intentionally bad at doing. Read the full article .