The industrial era produced more than a way of working. It produced an architecture for an entire life, divided into three stages so familiar that almost no one thinks to question them. First comes learning, then earning, then retirement, and every institution in higher education was built to manage one stage and pass people along to the next.

That architecture is coming apart. Learning no longer ends at commencement, earning no longer follows a single track, and retirement keeps moving out of reach. The only piece still running on the original design is the bridge between school and work, which expects one crossing per lifetime.

A new architecture is already taking shape, in scattered experiments that have not yet found one another. Nariway studies what comes next.