The Broken Promise of Education
Why it doesn’t matter who you want to be when you grow up anymore.
Behold, the promised land lies after a college degree.
In one way or another, many of us have heard a version of that statement. Go to school, get good grades, enroll in a good college, graduate with a degree and you’ll get a job that earns you a decent standard of living.
We spend 25% of GDP on education, increasingly in college, because it promises to equip us for a job. But it’s not working.
For example, here in Kenya, the Minister of ICT recently said that 60% of the country’s ICT graduates are either unemployed or working outside of ICT. Andela — Africa’s top engineering outsourcing company — just laid off almost 400 junior engineers because employers were just not interested.
And if you think trend is unique to Africa, think again. In 2015, Accenture conducted a poll in the UK that showed similar trends:
Underemployment — the state where highly-skilled workers are working in low-paying jobs — is an issue across the labor market.
So we must lack jobs, right?
Well, here’s where it gets confusing. Despite all of the overqualified workers in the economy, employers continue to lose money on vacancies:
- In a 2014 Indeed report, researchers from the Centre for Economic Research estimated the skills gap to cost U.S. companies $160 billion per year.
- According to a CareerBuilder survey, 60% of U.S. employers have job openings that stay vacant for 12 weeks or longer, costing them on average $800,000 or more annually.
- In a recent conversation we had with a pan-African employer, they told us they lost $4 Million in opportunities due to their inability to hire.
Around the world, university graduates appear to be misaligned with employer demand. Students graduate disoriented, perfectly prepared to excel in a world that no longer exists.
Degrees ≠ Qualifications
According to Audrey Cheng, Moringa School co-founder and CEO,
“it takes an average Kenyan graduate five years to get a job”.
As if these numbers are not sobering enough, the trajectory we’re on presents a bigger challenge for educators. 50% of the skills learned today will be irrelevant in 5 years. What’s the point of a degree whose value expires before you even get to use it?
Education’s failure on this most basic function — giving you skills to use in your first job — makes you wonder…what’s the point?
When education was for jobs.
It wasn’t always like this. For most of recent history, education worked quite well. However, our economy has changed in one very important way. It’s stopped valuing jobs.
When most of what we did was agriculture, economic growth was driven by better labor. In other words, people who worked harder, faster, and longer were considered productive. So, we optimized for fitness and endurance.
When we learned how to use new forms of power (e.g. steam, electricity) to mechanize production, the rules changed. Productivity hinged on those who could manage machines and their processes. To make this new process work, companies organized factories into specialized jobs.
This is one of the most profound innovations of the industrial era, we learned to divide and define jobs really well. It worked so well that we developed our model of education around those jobs. Students were placed in grades segmented by age and then moved towards increasing levels of specialization until they were employed as doctors, mechanics, accountants, etc.
You might call this the “what do you want to be when you grow up” era of education. It’s when we formed the idea that you could choose a life’s profession. You weren’t just born into something. If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because we’re still here. We still run education as if productivity is determined by jobs. But times have changed.
The value shift.
Around 1975, the introduction of computers into the workspace heralded the knowledge era. Production could be automated making those who could create and manage knowledge more productive and valuable. Ever since managing knowledge (aka problem-solving) superseded having knowledge (aka expertise and discipline) we’ve seen a decline in the value of labor.
In fact, it’s quite eerie how rapid the shift in value occurred:
Education has tried to catch up, by promoting STEM fields, teaching people how to learn, and increasing on-the-job training. But today’s accelerated pace of change has made STEM, by itself, insufficient. The structure of education still operates on a taxonomy of jobs that is now over four decades out of date.
The decline of jobs.
What exactly did the knowledge era do to all the good jobs? Let’s start with the obvious: automation and the rise of the gig economy are democratizing work.
As the future of work expert, Ravin Jesuthasan, brilliantly describes, just like software, people’s “capabilities are rented at virtually zero fixed cost (think of the cost of Uber acquiring another driver or customer).” This is possible because “jobs can be deconstructed and work distributed to any part of the world and often performed at a fraction of its legacy cost and often at a much higher speed and quality.”
The fundamental format of work has changed:
Gallup, Upwork, and others have estimated that 30% of US workers are already full-time freelancers. In addition, AI is taking over more areas of work that we considered safe for humans. Kai Fu estimates 40% of today’s jobs will be automated in the next 15 years.
In a world where we are continuously running ahead of AI and regularly auditioning for freelance gigs, choosing a lifelong job or discipline is no longer a smart organizing principle for work. It no longer matters “who you want to be when you grow up.” It only matters what you can do right now.
To be productive, you have no choice but to continuously retrain or be left out of the economy.
Let’s call this somewhat exhausting and stressful sounding option the…
The Micro-Skilling response.
In late 2018, Upwork found that “70% of full-time freelancers participated in skills training in the past six months, compared to 49% of full-time non-freelancers.”
Skills training is usually done outside of traditional colleges. Their programs aren’t as relevant, and even when they try to catch up, they are bogged down by bureaucracy. By the time regulators are ready to approve and accredit college programs, market demands have already changed.
If we stopped here, it would seem the only path to stay valuable now is to scramble to learn quickly diminishing skills while you compete against practically everyone else on earth, oh and also the machines.
But there is a different option…
The Connected Learning response.
Thomas Khun introduced the term paradigm shift in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as a moment where the culmination of everything that has been learned across fields can be combined into a new understanding of how the world works.
In the 1900s, this meant reading academic journals and encountering people at conferences. However, recent technological advances have laid the foundation for a far more accelerated form of encountering others. In the knowledge era, people can incorporate knowledge in real-time from anyone and anywhere around the world.
The scary world laid out by the micro-skilling response, of continuous global competition for work that is less and less valuable, also opens the door to global collaboration to solve profound human problems. It’s not just creating and managing knowledge that matters. Those who connect knowledge create the most value. Where some race to micro-skill, others innovate.
For example, a group of video-gamers solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years by playing a collaborative online game called Foldit. When describing how such a feat is possible, its leading players responded:
“Each player can work on a solo solution to a puzzle, but we can also exchange solutions between the team and add our own improvements to achieve a better result. Often the evolved solution for a team scores higher than the top solo score.” — Mimi, Foldit Contender Group
“The strength lies in comradeship, cooperation, and perseverance.” — Bletchley Park, Foldit Contender Group
“Ideas rise in crowds. They rise in liquid networks, where connection is valued more than protection. Collaboration is as important as competition in driving innovation” — Steve Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From.
We must change education. Not just for continuous skill building, but for continuous collaborative innovation. What creates value today is a blend of acquiring new skills and finding new ways of collaborating — forming projects with others across languages, disciplines, industries, and continents.
The idea that we should keep learning because the skills we have today won’t matter tomorrow is a dystopia. Faster (re)skilling and (re)training misses the full picture of how the world has changed. It’s not just that the content of work is different. So is the format. And that’s as (if not more) important to the value people can create.
Author
Ibanga Umanah is a Cofounder and the Head of Strategy for Brave Venture Labs. Brave is a tool for spotting and ranking talent for companies building product teams in emerging markets.
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