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PK Agarwal holds one of the more unusual posts in academia — he is regional dean and CEO of Northeastern University Silicon Valley.
“Northeastern has a disruptive view of the future,” said Agarwal, explaining why he is running a campus all the way across the continent from the university’s home base in Boston. The university will continue to be place-based, but its places will be global.
Northeastern works with 3,000 corporate partners to better match curricula and training programs to high-demand STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) jobs.
The university has conducted several surveys of corporation in the Bay Area asking companies what they need, and more employees with computer science degrees topped their wish list. Last November, 14,900 job openings were advertised for someone with a masters in computer science; the universities in the Bay area graduate just 500 a year, Agarwal said.
“We plan to deal with this question by offering a handful of degrees from the college of computer science and the college of professional studies."
Higher ed is being disrupted, he added, and Northeastern intends to be at the leading edge of adapting to the needs of corporations and students. It wants to help students with immediate training in specific areas, but then allow them the flexibility to stack their learning into a degree at the end.
“You need that one course in machine learning or product management? We can give you that course in any format. Then maybe over time you say I took three courses, if I take one more I get a certificate, or I have two certificates and I can keep going and get a degree.” Most of its programs are professional studies for working adults. Courses are offered online or in classrooms, but most people take a hybrid approach.
“Workload demands, especially in the tech sector, are incredible. Thirty percent of our target audience say their schedules are unpredictable. They want to be online, but many also want to build a network and interact with professors.” Hardly any want an entirely classroom based education.
The Northeastern approach is strongly student-centric, he said.
“Rather than having a single central location, we are building learning hubs around the Bay Area. We started with one in San Jose, and we also promote this as a co-working space. It has a lot of breakout pods where you can hang out. It is also your club, so you can bring four or five of your friends. That’s another element of networking, we work very hard to leverage Northeastern alums in the Bay Area through meet-ups and other events, as well as strengthening the global network.
“The story is still unfolding,” he added. “Given the demand-supply gap —if you look at the next five to seven years, demand is growing to three to four million, and there’s very limited supply in the U.S. Meeting the demand is not going to happen through the normal STEM pipeline from high school on,” added Agarwal.
An education in basic coding may soon be obsolete.
Programmers don’t need college, he said, if you define the job very narrowly and are content to grind out 21st century production workers. Both Northeastern and many of the companies he talks to take a longer view — they are asking what skills will be valuable for an individual in five or 10 years. Market forces and technology will reduce the value of routine programming, since much of it will be done through machine learning.
“Agarwal added "In the future, it is quite likely you can talk to the machine in English and it cranks out code. Why can’t automation automate itself? The real economic competitiveness, and U.S. future, really lies in very smart, highly educated people who are advancing the frontiers, the Watson type stuff.”
We believe strongly that we need to bridge people from outside of STEM. We have an program, aptly called ALIGN, in which we are offering anyone with a BS from a non-STEM background a program to get a master's in computer science in three years.”
Northeastern also offers boot camp programs, like eight weeks full-time or 20 weeks hybrid in the high demand area of data analytics.
“You don’t need to know Hadoop or Spark or all these things to be a good business analyst who can work with data and tools like visualization. That program is working for us and for employers and for people who want to change careers. Any time there is a big demand-supply gap, people come up with new ideas and companies are open to it.”
To thrive in Silicon Valley, Agarwal knows that Northeastern has to be nimble, ready to offer courses in subjects such as machine learning, augmented reality and Internet of Things (IoT).
“You need to be very current in what you offer,” he said. "If you follow the normal institutional process it would be time-consuming to go through the course approval process, but if you want to be relevant, can we offer this now? That puts a lot of strain on established academic processes of how you establish credentials. IoT is becoming one of the biggest market forces at this point, so we decided two months ago we would offer a certificate starting in January.”
In a university, that speed is almost unheard of.
“Everything we offer is fully accredited, but sometimes to be relevant we will do things that don’t go through accreditation process right away, but then the accreditation process catches up.”
Northeastern has been running similar programs in Seattle and Charlotte, he added, saying the biggest competition is the status quo. The school’s tuition prices are mid-range, lower than Stanford or UC Berkeley.
Agarwal said Northeastern recruited him for both his startup and technology experience and his academic credentials.
He had been CEO of TiE Global, a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit focused on fostering entrepreurship. For five years he was California’s chief technology officer and he has long been active in promoting the use of the internet in government. He did his undergrad work at the Indian Institute of Technology and has a master's in mechanical engineering from California State University, Sacramento and another master's in operations research from UC Berkeley.
