College and Business Will Never be the Same
steveblank.com
steveblank.com
The energy industry, for instance, is facing a shortage of skilled welders. It takes ten years of experience welding full-time to become the kind of welder who can be depended on to weld natural gas pipeline segments or the primary loop of a nuclear reactor.
These days, careers are so unstable that in ten years, somebody might get shoved through job training 2 or 3 different times, never get good at anything, and then we find that in our quest for short-term gain and the delusion of compound interest, we don't have people with the skills we need to keep our economy going.
Upside-down, lying in mud, your arms up in a noble-gas manifold, welding titanium. Get a Man.
"I'm good at collaborating but can't actually make anything" seems to be the result of the system Blank discussed. You just can't replace 3 years of domain expertise building with 1.5 and assume nothing will change.
Expect for the occasional project/elective during undergrad, I would leave the learning of how to collaborate to post-collegiate studies. Learning how to learn is the goal of college.
Maybe we're both wrong. Maybe business do want hires who can collaborate over peak skill at their actual work.
Industry (even startups) are always looking for training from universities to more closely match the applied skills that industry most clearly "needs" at the moment. I'm ambivalent about the necessity of university training for many fields today, but oppose tightly-coupled university/industry programs. Down this path lie blub schools . . .
Which is quite different from saying that you shouldn't spend some time doing industry specific training (internships, apprenticeships, etc). I consider my undergrad CS experience quite successful and it was precisely the balance between the academic, fundamental CS courses and the applied, get-shit-done real world that made it work for me.
Most people take at least 5 years to get a PhD, pro athletes take at least that long to get established, even Justin Bieber worked really hard at making music when he was a little kid. 10k hours is also roughly the timescale involved with children learning language.
You can certainly see people who seem come out of the blue, like Sylvester Stallone's success with Rocky, you usually find that there was a lot of hard work in the background. Stallone was playing bit parts, writing scripts, and lifting weights for a few years before he got his break. Certainly his acting, writing, directing, and bodybuilding progressed considerably after he got big.
Not only would this be a strained approach for most students at such a school, but it would detract from the number one goal of trade schools: providing students with skills that can immediately secure a job. As mentioned earlier, generalists are more difficult to hire... giving a solid credential indicating that someone has base level design skills is much easier for the graduate to sell than "Sure, I can do design a fabric for you. Then I can market it and set up logistical channels to get worldwide distribution and ... all based on my time at X university!"
There are broad-area programs out there, however they're generally lacking in any functional depth. I graduated in a "marketing communications" program that spanned design, business, marketing and web development. Unfortunately, coming from a semi-autodidactic background I found it to be truly superficial. It was painful to know the proper way to build a site, versus the default dreamweaver snippets taught. The same for design, and I can only assume the business component too. However, the upside is still important: flexibility in approach and thinking, meaning graduates won't think to fix a solution in the only way they were trained (nee: "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.)
Blank's recommendation of both broad-area and foundation is better, and could be seen to stem from the "a-words" around here: art school. The broad-area art degree requires the student to learn both a core discipline, along with a wide variety of other art areas.
I believe college degree plans contain large amounts of fluff that do not advance a students needs to get into the job field. It used to be that a student took college courses to make them a better person. But I've seen over the years in my own school years that teachers no longer seem to care or bother. My biology teacher is a self identified lazy ass that frankly hates teaching freshman biology, my geology teacher speaks exactly from the notes, and in the only class I care about, Geographic Information systems (a computer class) I know more about computers than the teacher does.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
The problem with formal education's applicability to the business world isn't with the quantity, quality, or breadth or its theory, it's with it's lack of practice. Every time I return to my alma mater to discuss my business with my professors, I come away with the same reaction, "They just don't get it." It's hard to understand that which you have never done.
Formal education doesn't need to improve it's delivery of theory, it needs to combine it with real-world practice before graduation. A single internship usually trumps all curriculum gyrations.
Two years of theory followed by two years of practice backed by theory would make a much more effective B.S. Are there any educator's that think outside the box enough to make that happen?
There is nothing like TAing a theory course to disavow you of the former part of that assertion. I'm told that TAing a coding course is great for convincing you of the second part.
However, you can do this at the end of your education, which renders it less useful. Forcing people to take it in the middle of their education would be a lot more useful, but on the other hand it would suck if the job market tanked and a lot of students couldn't continue their studies based on some external cause.
For a Computer Science, you had to have 4, which means an entire year of work. (The CS program was a 5 year program: 4 years of school interspersed with a year of work).
Many people would get coops at Apple, IBM, Google, Microsoft, etc.
A similar thing happened with pensions versus self-managed retirement funds (e.g. 401k's) beginning in the 1970's.
Not that stable career paths existed for all time before this, nor managed retirement. But the changes do reflect the current, um, "delta".
Where this leads, I don't know. However, a certain amount of stability seems necessary, to me, for fostering advanced, complicated systems including social, employment, and production systems. If everyone's an "entrepreneur", I don't know how we're going to e.g. build jet engines. (I exaggerate for the sake of my point.)
I've met those "specialists in cross training". They're called management. A few are genuinely good at it; many aren't particularly good at anything.
Addendum: On the other hand, much of Blank's post reads like a variation on the argument for a liberal arts education. He even mentions liberal arts as a component.
However... Those liberal arts people need at least a modicum of post-education investment in order to get up to speed in a particular, current area of focus. (And that's when they're good, and really educated: Something neither all liberal arts degrees nor all liberal arts students produce/become.) We're in a marketplace that won't even go that far. Again, placing the risk on the student venturing to pursue that path.
P.S. I do think that pre-graduation work is a good idea. I also think that people should be paid for it. Unpaid internships introduce all kinds of distortions, including distortion of the work experience for the interns. Level the playing field, and make it real.
There are days when I'm inspired by Seth Godin and there are days when I think he personifies everything that's wrong with our civilization.
If we all had "lynchpin" jobs that were transforming the economy continuously, we'd have no food at the supermarket and no electricity at the plug. The disappearance of dependable jobs for dependable people is a prelude to the disappearance of everything else.
If a person is entrepreneurial minded, then the real world sand-box this program is trying to create, will only annoy them, especially when considering the tuition costs. On the other hand, if the person isn't entrepreneurial minded enough, why should they be in that type of program to begin with? They should be pursuing trade or pure studies, depending on their capacity and inclination.
It's not that I don't agree with his point, but I think the problem here is much simpler: feedback loops.
We can argue what sort of feedback is appropriate -- whether colleges should be judged for the amount of value they bring to life, or whether they should be judged by the job prospects of the graduates, etc. But the sad fact is that in most criteria, many people think that the product is mis-aligned with the needs of the customers. This is because there is no feedback loop for colleges to evaluate when they are doing something wrong and thereby correct it. Without a loop in place, all the theorizing in the world isn't going to make a better college, just a prettier org chart.
I think there's a difference between saying something that's probably true and that we can probably agree with and actually observing the results to changes in an organization. The first thing doesn't have much of a quality criteria except for our concurrence. The second always produces results we don't like and makes us challenge our assumptions. That's why feedback loops always beat theory work.