Increasing equity through continuing education

Jane Jacobs, named the most influential urban thinker in history by Planetizen, never went to college.  But she did take continuing education classes.

As Anthony Flint describes it in Wrestling with Moses, Jacobs was denied entry into college because she had not had good grades in high school.  But because she was a serious learner, she combined her learning in continuing education courses with her observation to change the way planners, architects and other professionals approach cities.

How many smart and creative thinkers are being denied fair opportunities because of the inherent bias in the planning education industry towards wealth and privilege?

From the undergraduate to the continuing education level, the planning education industry (PEI) favors those people who have the luxury of time and wealth.  (Because wealth and privilege in the United States correlates well to gender, class and race, the executive and director levels of planning tend to be dominated by white men from wealthy and middle class backgrounds.) 

Through a tyranny of custom and comfort with the familiar, many undergraduate and graduate planning programs are geared to students who can afford to spend several years worth of weekdays in face-to-face classrooms.  As universities struggle to provide more scholarships (because the well of government and foundation grants runs low in tough economic times), it will be harder for them to bring in the students from the kind of communities where planners face their most difficult challenges.

Some continuing education providers perpetuate inequity even more.  With naming names, I can confidently say that some charge way too much for the type of education they provide.  (When someone claims they can teach you everything you need to know about X in a one- to two-day workshop, be skeptical.)

From what I have seen, this problem stems can come from several sources:

• Providers seeing continuing education more as a low-cost way to generate revenue than to enhance the quality of the field.
• Providers being unfamiliar with adult education theories and learning retention strategies, so they just do what they know from experience -- i.e., the two-day workshop.
• Providers paying too much money for headliners, then passing along the costs through course fees.
• Learners making the mistake that more expensive means better.
• Learners thinking, or being led to think, that something complex and challenging could learned in a few hours.
• Professionals thinking that the cram-session learning they did when they were 20 and going to school full-time will work when they're 35 and juggling work and family commitments.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that planning educators are themselves biased.  Most planning educators I have worked with want to make planning more accessible to more people.  But, like many people, they tend to enjoy the comfort of the familiar.  And they generally focus more of their creative time on the details of their research and practice than on the processes that lead to sustainable knowledge.

The programs of the Professional Development Institute and The Leading Institute are designed to counteract the biases in the planning education industry.  We do as much as possible to help smart, serious and creative people build their knowledge and their capacity to be more influential in their fields.  We make it possible for the people who don't have a lot of time, money or resources to get high quality learning.

That's why we do online continuing education courses that run over several weeks and offer them at half the cost (or less) of two- and three-day workshops or even other online classes.  We know we could charge a lot more (and make more money because some people will associate cost with value).  But because we believe in increasing opportunity and equity in planning, design and development, we took the harder road.

And because we know that $200 to $300 per class may be a challenge for some who are experiencing difficult times, we offer Learning Labs for $20.  But we never claim that you can learn as much in a Learning Lab as you would in a Deep Learning class. 

This is also why our Leading from the Middle program is not a one- or two-day course.  If leadership were so easy you could learn it in a day or two, our offices would be filled with great leaders. Is yours?

Because our mission is to build leaders for urban planning and public affairs in the 21st century, we offer Leading from the Middle at less than half the price of other leadership programs.  We're even comparatively more affordable than some one and two-day workshops you may have seen advertised.

Please be aware that it is expensive to run continuing education programs and to meet the opportunity costs of qualified instructors. (We are honored that so many experts are willing to work so hard for less than they might get elsewhere. But we have to respect the fact that they are working professionals who have other obligations.)  So we cut back on the bells and whistles and over-priced catering to focus on what matters: providing high-quality continuing education to as many people as possible.

At PDI, we are committed to helping the Jane Jacobses, Daniel Burnhams and Frederick Law Olmsteds of the 21st century, wherever they may be.

--Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP