Some attitudes never change. Parents usually have a problem with the music preferences of their teenage children and employers always think that recent college graduates aren’t sufficiently prepared for the workplace. But just because it’s a recurring generational complaint doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Two recent reports put the “career readiness” issue back at center stage. AACU released its annual survey of employer and student perceptions and no surprise – students think they are much better prepared for work than employers do. The gap is strongest in the capabilities associated with a liberal arts experience: “oral communication, written communication, critical thinking, and creativity.” The Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus, administered at 169 colleges and universities in 2013 and 2014 confirms the employer perspective and asserts that many students graduate “without the ability to read a scatter plot, construct a cohesive argument or identify a logical fallacy.”
Here’s a question to throw some fuel on the fire of this debate: is it possible that the pace of change over the past thirty years has opened a “rigor gap” between higher education and the outside world? If colleges and universities were once the best places to find the smart people doing the most intellectually rigorous thinking in a given city or region has the outside world caught up and maybe even surpassed higher education as a whole? This discussion goes beyond career readiness as emerging conversations hosted by the Kettering Foundation affirm.
Even if true, this does not mean higher education has gotten less rigorous over the years – just that the pace in the outside world has so quickened that comparative positions have changed. There would also be many factors underlying such a potential shift such as the inescapable challenge of adapting to a student body shaped by a significantly higher college going rate than in the time when most students came from privileged families. It would also be a mistake to assume that a collection of ‘tough” courses without alignment to broader learning goals makes for rigor.
If the outside world no longer sees higher education as “higher” – to put it bluntly in our own terms – this shift in thinking will affect more than just employer perspectives about the value of traditional higher education. If there is a growing belief in a rigor and relevance gap, eventually prospective students will see the value of higher education in general, or in a specific institution or program, differently. And if that change is in a negative direction, it could have more impact on affected colleges or disciplines than technology innovation or demographic trends combined.
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Michael Meotti is the Principal of Ed Policy Group and formerly served as CT Commissioner of Higher Education.
