Thinking Outside the College Box
Last Thursday, as I was teaching my undergraduate class in international business, I couldn’t help having the nagging thought: “I lost them…I lost them”. I could see that the students were disengaged, and I too was bored out of my wits. I teach three different undergraduate courses, two at a senior level and international business at an intermediate level. I have no issues with keeping my senior students engaged, but my international business class is not going to be a success this spring term…or any other term.
The subject matter is dry, my students can’t relate to it (trade theory and policy, regional integration, monetary systems and foreign direct investment patterns…anyone???) and no amount of real world experience (I used to work in an export-import start-up and the international department of a major bank) can bring the course to life. The textbook I use as a reference has dated at the time of printing and is full of conceptual and factual errors. Anyway, business textbooks are neither millennial nor professor friendly. Publishers still don’t get it.
So what’s the problem? Let’s put aside the easy explanations straight away (I’m an awful teacher, the students are lazy…). These are symptoms. The less obvious and more unpalatable explanation is that the traditional educational system is running out of steam. Let’s see why. These are facts and figures, so no point in getting emotional about them.
What students study at school and in college — I don’t even dare to say “learn”, because they don’t (more on this below) — is mostly irrelevant in today’s world, let alone in future. For young people to succeed and have good paying jobs on graduation, they need to be highly proficient in hard (STEM) skills combined with soft 21st century skills — 4Cs (critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration). As many will be unlikely to find corporate jobs because of automation (which is predicted to make as many as 47% of jobs in the U.S. obsolete in the next 10 years), entrepreneurial abilities in starting businesses will also help to take control of one’s own destiny.
Are these skills — STEM, 4Cs and entrepreneurship — taught at school? Young children from kindergarten on spend thousands of hours learning skills which have no relevance in today’s labour market. Otherwise it would be hard to explain the job mismatch paradox– a war for talent and high youth unemployment. On the one hand, almost 50% of US employers struggle to fill in job vacancies (vs. 35% globally) because of lack of talent. On the other hand, thousands of graduates are working in retail or hospitality — they’re becoming waiters, Gap salespeople and baristas, because it’s the only work they could find. 284,000 of college graduates (37,000 of those have advanced degrees like JD’s or PhD’s) will be working minimum wage jobs — like flipping burgers. The saddest thing is that 75% of young people say they aren’t living up to their creative potential. Students have a poor understanding of skills and degrees that will help them in the job market, and I suspect that their parents are equally ill-informed.
If students don’t learn real-word skills, what DO they learn? Not much. One study of 2,300 undergraduates who took the Collegiate Learning Assessment in the US shows that
· 45% demonstrated no gains in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communication during first two years.
· 32% did not typically take courses with more than 40 pages of reading per week.
· 50% did not take a single course in which they wrote more than 20 pages.
What’s even more worrying is that students can’t apply what they learnt without significant outside help (this claim is backed by impressive experimental evidence).
I won’t even dwell on the credentials arms race, the only purpose of which is to impress potential employers. I know it first-hand, from my own students, because many of them rush straight into a Master’s degree after they complete their bachelor’s in business (I always advise them against it, and nobody ever listens). There are many more uncomfortable stats that I could cite, but let’s stop here.
Does this mean that college degrees aren’t worth much? NOT AT ALL! In North America at least the most significant value of education lies in signaling your personality traits to potential employers — that you’re intellectually capable, conscientious and have a good work ethic. Signaling is so important that a U.S. graduate will get an almost 75% premium in the job market vs. one without a college degree. But while the value of signaling is not well recognised, the value of education beyond signaling is clearly overstated. The correlation between job performance and education level is weak at best. As college fees skyrocketed (in the US they increased 8 times faster than wages since the 1980s), more and more people — and particularly those who look at education as a way to advance their careers and so care about its ROI — started to question its worth.
We as a society — and particularly parents of schoolchildren — must be ready to open up our hearts and minds to the idea that there are alternatives and complements to the traditional system. That is, of course, if we want our children to have a more fulfilling and abundant life. Our society has always paid highly for domain-specific skills, which are often technical or creative, skills that cannot be outsourced or automated. One cannot be trained for specific knowledge: if society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you. This “someone else” is most likely to be software and algorithms: to quote the Internet pioneer and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, “the spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do. Only one of these job categories will be well paid”. Specific knowledge and skills in the first category are best learnt by doing and through apprenticeship, not in a traditional classroom.
Fortunately, the notion of “education” is broadening– we see a rise of bootcamps, coding and start-up schools (of the Y-Combinator ilk), fellowships and large online educational platforms (such as Coursera, edX, MasterClass and Udemy). Back in 2011, Peter Thiel, a famous Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur, established a 20 under 20 Fellowship ($100,000 worth per Fellow) open to a select group of young individuals who are prepared to drop school to work on vexing problems of tomorrow and become the next generation of “tech visionaries”. It’s harder to become a Thiel Fellow than to get into the MIT. One of the Fellows in the very first cohort, Dale Stephens, is the founder of a start-up with a telling name — UnCollege — and a mission to help individuals to take ownership of their education.
Many other “uncolleges” have similar visions and are succeeding to attract millions of students worldwide (as well as millions in venture capital). If you are a parent of a young child, you have a responsibility to your child and humanity. Time has come to start thinking outside the school and college box.
