Is Education Today Useless in the World of Tomorrow?
In 1771, a British barber had a vision for manufacturing wigs without the cumbersome process of hand-weaving, the only process available to create fabrics then. Dismissed by most people he knew and almost entirely forgotten by history, Richard Arkwright spent 5 years trying to replicate the delicate process of spinning cotton by a water-powered mill. Having created a working invention several years later, Arkwright figured that his machine could expand beyond wigs to manufacturing most clothing items. Seeing that thread production had already been mechanized, Arkwright postulated that all the other separate operational process that were necessary to produce clothing could be centralized into one location. However one issue he faced, was he needed to ensure that everyone in his company could operate and maintain these machines. He therefore was also the first to recognize that for a business to operate efficiently, it needed to establish comprehensive and high quality training for its employees. Richard Arkwright was not only the founder of the factory, which in turn kick-started the industrial age, but also laid the foundations for corporate Learning and Development (L&D).
Since the 1880s, education for the general workforce has evolved in two ways. On one end, education became a necessity to function in increasingly complex workplaces. On the other end, education was recognized as a right for children as a way to prepare them for a future in an increasingly complex economy. In this way, we can see the pressure for education coming from two sources:
- Driven by business — where any education that existed before simply couldn’t cater to the specific needs of businesses
- Driven by government — where education increasingly became considered a right to prepare for the challenges of the modern world
The split of education-as-a-right vs. education-as-a-means to prepare for work came around in the early 1950s, with the proliferation of the grades system. As jobs demanded technical competencies, schools needed a better way of allocating students to optimal places within the economy. It was easy to say, tell Sally she should be a doctor due to her strong grades in science and weak ones in history. Thus the first “sorting hat” of the modern world was created, albeit a far less exciting prospect than joining Hufflepuff or Slytherin.
But the world of the 1950s was very different to the world we live in today. The technical requirements for jobs back then could be acquired in a lifetime of work for one company. One could expect to be promoted as their knowledge of company processes, product, and services increased. Today however, we know that the chances of a company being around for a lifetime of work is very unlikely. In fact, the average lifespan of an S&P company has decreased since the 1950s by 60%, to an all time low of 9 years. The reasons for this change in company lifespan are numerous and uncertain. Some argue that companies have not adapted to rapid changes in technology, while others say that technology has simply catalyzed the growth, stagnation and failure of businesses. What is certain, is that never in history has a young generation of workers felt more disillusioned with education and preparedness for work.
The American Liberal Arts program, which has remained largely unchanged for the last 400 years, is aimed at developing communication, leadership, and analytical skills. By providing students with thousands of courses to possibly take, this type of education is less focused on specialization and more on softer, intangible skills that are harder to measure. Liberal Arts programs have been the foundation for much of the world’s general view on education driven by government since the mid 17th century. The question is, with the ever-increasing complexity of today’s economy, does it help to find a job with a Liberal Arts program? Especially with so many educational resources available for free online?
In the US alone, students today have more debt than ever (USD 30,100/pax), will likely not take jobs in the fields they specialized in (72% take jobs unrelated to their majors), and are increasingly dissatisfied with their jobs (48% of new hires will quit or are fired within 18 months of starting work). Education for students, which principally stems from the Liberal Arts paradigm, is failing in helping young people find value in today’s economy. While the tension to acknowledge these failings has gradually boiled in the last few decades, we as a society have not hit an inflexion point where we must radically alter the way we view education. Much like the frog that doesn’t realize it is being slowly boiled alive, we need to be suddenly plunged in boiling water to feel the pain and realize that this situation is serious, and that plunge into boiling water may be closer on the horizon than we realize.
In the last five years, breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence prove that machines are closer than we thought to replacing a significant portion of white-collar work, previously thought to be untouchable by computers. Artificial Intelligence we have today is known as ‘weak’ or ‘narrow’ or ‘applied’ — focused on doing one very particular task very well. These tasks rely on a lot of data and are governed by strict rules (clerk-like roles, factory assembly, driving, etc.) Since these rules are set and the goals are defined by people, it is tempting to believe that a machine will always depend on a human to do a job well.
However, statistics don’t quite support this heuristic. Andrew McAfee‘s chart says it all. Employment plummeted during the financial crisis, but corporate profits and investments skyrocketed in the subsequent years while the employment-ratio remained the same.The chart above only shows statistics up to 2011, but fast forward to today and things remain largely the same:
You can see clearly that the recession only served to accelerate what appears to be a long-term trend of declining employment. To understand why, we can examine the effects of the “Machine Mind” on the US and Global economy. During the Industrial revolution, many people (called Luddites) believed that machines would dispel the necessity for humans altogether, wiping out millions of jobs. They saw Arkwright’s factories and believed that human productivity would be entirely wiped out by steam, cogs, and iron. Since machine muscle could work harder and more tirelessly, this led to the spectacular decline of agricultural and manufacturing employment.
While using machines as ‘muscle’ did indeed replace some jobs, it also freed up the human ‘brain’ to specialize. With all this new free time, we saw a golden century of accelerated innovation and invention. All of this is to say that in today’s world, a student can take a generic degree in a field unrelated to their work, because ultimately humans are the only agents capable of doing most of today’s work. Businesses will hire irrelevant college graduates for lack of a better alternative. But in the near future, we can expect the proliferation of AI that is more and more capable of substituting human abilities. Businesses and their workers will have to constantly upskill and reeducate themselves, or be overtaken by a more agile business or even replaced by machines.
While research indicates that employment will increase, it is fair to say that to be productive and useful in today’s world, more than a Liberal Arts degree is needed. There is a responsibility to help students achieve technical specializations earlier in their lives and provide continuous, high quality education while at work. The outdated practice of businesses continuing to hire people with no qualifications or background knowledge in the careers they apply for, with universities having no obligation to assist students in finding meaning in today’s economy, simply doesn’t make sense.
The foundation of the capitalist system is growth. Growth comes from incessantly maximizing revenues and minimizing costs. In this system, it is unreasonable to expect that businesses will feel some ethical or moral impetus to retain redundant workers. Instead, we must consider the shortcomings in today’s education as driven by both government and businesses, in order to maximize happiness and productivity (and revenues!) rather than create anxiety and fear for the world of tomorrow.
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