“I am fond of thinking about a problem over and over,” wrote Taiichi Ohno, a Japanese industrial engineer who worked for Toyota Motor Company. The problem that obsessed him in the period after World War II was how to catch up with the automotive giants of Detroit. The American firms were far wealthier than Toyota and vastly better resourced. They could afford to stockpile parts ahead of the assembly of individual cars.
Toyota couldn’t. Ohno concluded that Toyota would have to become nimble and well coordinated. “I kept thinking about how to supply the number of parts needed just in time.” Timely delivery would reduce or eliminate the need for warehouses and for the capital to fund parts inventories.
But how to calculate what was needed?
“The flow of production is the transfer of materials. The conventional way was to supply materials from an earlier process to a later process. So, I tried thinking about the transfer of materials in the reverse direction.
“In automobile production, material is machined into a part, the part is then assembled with others into a unit part, and this flows toward the final assembly line. The material progresses from the earlier processes toward the later ones, forming the body of the car.”
It didn’t have to be this way.
“Let’s look at this production flow in reverse: a later process goes to an earlier process to pick up only the right part in the quantity needed at the exact time needed. In this case, wouldn’t it be logical for the earlier process to make only the number of parts withdrawn? As far as communication between the many processes is concerned, wouldn’t it be sufficient to clearly indicate what and how many are needed?”
Ohno’s insight—to let demand summon supply in the manufacturing chain—revolutionized Toyota, which became the largest automobile manufacturer in the world. Just-in-time production revolutionized manufacturing in general, underpinning the global prosperity of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
The approach suffered a setback during covid, which disrupted supply chains and knocked the just-in-time systems out of whack. Cautious companies with sufficient resources retreated to a just-in-case approach, reminiscent of 1950s Detroit. Donald Trump’s trade war added a geopolitical incentive to the reversion. But Ohno’s insight wasn’t forgotten, and it can be expected to resurface when the current turmoil subsides.
Meanwhile it can serve as a model for a revolution in another field: higher education.
At present, as it has for many generations past, the model of higher education looks more like General Motors circa 1950 than Toyota circa 1990. Students are taught a variety of subjects just in case what they learn will be useful to them as adults. The acquired knowledge and skills are then placed on shelves in mental warehouses until they are assembled with other components in the former students’ working or personal lives.
This front-loading has three serious drawbacks. First, much of the effort winds up wasted when students shift career plans.
Second, the shelflife of unused skills and knowledge is limited. Students can master material for an exam, but if they don’t use what they’ve learned they soon forget it.
Third, and most serious, the just-in-cast approach makes reluctant learners out of most students. Students are told what they need to learn. Obedient students do as they are told, for reasons extrinsic to the learning task. They want good grades, a diploma, admission to graduate or professional school. They have little intrinsic interest in the material.
Ask any teacher: Who learns more readily and retains more: the conscripted student or the volunteer? There’s no comparison. The former has to be bribed or threatened. The latter merely has to be pointed in the right direction.
We live in a golden age of self-learning. There is no part of human knowledge that motivated individuals can’t learn on their own. The internet, YouTube and now artificial intelligence offer just-in-time instruction in anything under the sun to those who seek it.
Some young men and women could do fine skipping college entirely. They would be directors of their own education, and there would be no limit on what they could learn.
Yet there’s still a place for colleges as communities of learners. But it would be a different place than colleges occupy today.
Here’s how just-in-time college education might be organized:
Students would spend their first year being introduced to the broad range of human intellectual and artistic endeavor. They would take survey courses in humanities, arts, and social and natural sciences.
Then they would be sent out in the world to find jobs.
But they wouldn’t be ready for jobs, critics would say.
To which the response is: Many students aren’t any more job-ready after four years. And if employers want trained workers, let the employers do the training. Employers know better than colleges what skills and knowledge their employees require.
Some students would discover, as they gained experience in the world, that they neither needed nor wanted additional formal education. More power to them. College dismissed.
Yet the presumption would be in favor of further education. After two to several years, students would be expected to return to college. Their colleges would be prepared to have them back.
The returnees would be better students than when they had left, for they would decide for themselves what to study rather than being told. Some would seek training for work. Some would simply follow their curiosity, perhaps in a different work direction, perhaps in directions unrelated to work. Some would stay for a year, others longer.
Then back into the world—with the college doors remaining open for future returns.
The essential point would be to spread college over a lifetime, with all but the introductory year driven by the needs and desires of learners.
Aspects of this approach already exist. Some colleges have generous leave-of-absence policies, allowing students to take time off from classes to pursue other interests, with the understanding that they’ll be welcomed when they choose to return. Many colleges have alumni education programs. Corporations provide time and financial support to employees to get additional education. The American military assigns midlevel officers to graduate programs.
The objections to this approach are numerous. It would upend the business model of colleges. It ignores the extracurricular parts of the college experience that matter more to many students than the classes. It places responsibility on students before some of them are ready to handle it.
For these reasons, the just-in-time approach might never be adopted wholesale.
Yet colleges could do a service for themselves and their students if they make it possible for individual students to adopt it one by one. Many students already take gap years before or during college. Encourage more of them to do so. And let them take multiple gap years.
The just-in-time approach to education would have made sense in almost any era. But it makes more sense than ever now, as technology is changing the workplace more rapidly than ever.
Who can guess today what skills and knowledge will be marketable in ten years? No one. So don’t try. Let the future write its own curriculum, and let our students consult it then.
Coming on May 12: American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington
As you know, I did a version of this myself, returning to school (repeatedly) after being away in in the work force for a couple of decades. It suited me, but most people, I fear, would find it financially burdensome. Aside from the objections you raise, the problem is designing a system that would allow re-immersion for students who have only spent a few years in the workforce, have become the economic support of families and can't afford to veer off the career path they are on already. I could not have done what I did without a good twenty years of profitable work under my belt, grown kids, and a concomitant amount of savings that would allow me to retrain while not working.
Did you just reinvent Antioch?