Watch Out Harvard, Amazon University May Revolutionize Higher Education

There’s a huge gap between what skills colleges teach and what skills employers expect. Colleges were originally designed to provide a liberal art and basic science research education. But today, employers need highly-skilled technical workers, not necessarily college-educated workers. Amazon has taken the bold step to spend $700 million over the next six years to retrain 100,000 employees. With a competitive labor market and more automation, Amazon decided to retrain a third of their employees to strengthen their workforce. Google is doing the same, and they have enrolled 75,000 students in their online IT support certificate program.

Both Amazon and Google are also working with colleges so they can offer credit-bearing courses. Amazon Technical Academy helps technical employees get the skills needed to transition to software engineering careers. Amazon also recently created Machine Learning University, which is designed for tech and coding employees to learn skills in machine learning. They’re opening 60 campus across the country for their Career Choice program, and they’ve partnered with over 800 post-secondary providers in 35 countries to offer cloud computing credentials.

Seems like colleges will either need to step up their programs to teach the skills that employers are seeking, or they’ll become the intellectual liberal arts institutions that they used to be.  Maybe we will start seeing vocational colleges again. Not every high school grad should go to university. I certainly hope so — too many students are deep in debt for a 4-year degree that they got because they were pressured to “go to college.”

[Source]