Education: Service or Product?

I continue to wonder whether education, public or private, pre-collegiate or postsecondary, here or there, is a service or a product. And, whether this even matters.

So which is it, service or product? Service because of the process endured during the rendering (or delivery) of that education. On college campuses there are layers and layers of support ‘services’ to enhance students probabilities of success; said services can include mental and health related services, mentoring services, academic support services, student government, as well as retail services such as residence life, or dining, or entertainment…and the list goes on. In the classroom, teachers and professors carefully execute lesson plans and syllabi. While some might be tax payer funded or subsidized and others may be self-funded, without a doubt education is a service!

But how about that diploma or that certificate? That’s the product that many of us work tirelessly or invest countlessly for. The product obtained in secondary school (or high school in the U.S.) is a right of passage to the next step – a little over half in the U.S. choose to make postsecondary institutions their next step. If you do opt for a postsecondary institution, then that next product is that diploma (2 yr or 4 yr, or more) which earns you the next right of passage into graduate school or the workforce.

To my last thought – does this even matter? Yes it does, and it matters for two reasons. First is because we are conditioned to firmly focus on the product at the neglect of the service. The service is the process of learning, learning itself, and all the maturation that occurs. This is essential for becoming lifelong learners (see my last post!). Second, this matters because of the future of the traditional product itself (not the service, and only the traditional product), of the traditional postsecondary product. We often train and confer our products as if the world today is what it was a decade or more ago — it is not. We need multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplined training to prepare our youth for a dynamic and fast target.

So, en mi mente is, service or product?

Cultivating Lifelong Learning

As we conclude a 2020 that was unlike any other year I have experienced and dive into a new year, 2021 promises to bring a plethora of additional opportunities and transformation all around us. Transformation in business, politics, practices, travel…and the list goes on. So with transformation in mind, today I found myself giving a lot more thought to how we might transform how we look at education.

Please do disagree with me, but I find many of us considering education as something that happens to us, for a period of time, and at a given point in time. In other words, we are required to go to college and listen to sage doctorate holding faculty for our undergraduate education (=happens to us) for a period of four years (=for a period of time) most often when we are 18-24 years old (=at a given point in time). And, we are told we are ‘done’. Done? 

I will certainly touch on these variables in future posts, but what if instead of being ‘done’ after this period of when we are/were 18-24 years old where we invested some amount of money towards our education and livelihood, what if we increased, and spread, our investment into our education over several years? Perhaps a transformation from a snapshot of 4 years worth of education to one of 40+ years would allow us to mature, serve, and transform what, when, and how we serve those around us.