In this post I’m going to try something a little bit different. I’m presenting at my alma matter this fall to talk about my research for Bristol Myers Squibb. As I’ve been reflecting on objective differences in project longevity, rigor, or collaborative style in preparation for some early-mid 20’s students, I revisited one of my favorite RSA Animate talks: Ken Robinson’s ‘Changing Education Paradigms’.
Contradictions to a Vertical Career Growth/Success Narrative
People are revisiting the grad school model in the wake of several news items: grad student unions, PhD/Postdoc bubble, uncertain ROI of PhD degree, wage/hiring stagnation after the Trump tax breaks, reports about lack of businesss/soft skills in grads. There is a lack of dialogue between educational institutions and industry about necessary industry agnostics business skills and field-specific fundamentals. Furthermore, the age-old specialization/generalization axis still plagues our decision making process.
Perhaps these indicators have something to do with the myth of continuous vertical career growth that is both simplistic and greedy in values. The myth of the corporate ladder describes scrambling for vertical promotions as opposed to lateral movements within a company. I believe this may be less common in interdisciplinary fields where learning progress in both fields is cut in half or more. This traditional education/career progression paradigm has created large divides in philosophy between art/social fields and technoindustrial/logistic fields in terms of symmetry in degree value, talent pools, and funding. Degrees demonstrate mastery of foundational theory and simple but important competencies: commitment, ability to meet deadlines, and study.
The prescriptive notion that degrees are not prerequisites or guarantees about employment buries three misconceptions about higher education: a) that a degree necessarily provides both the minimum, accurate, and complete courework for success, b) that your education is complete when the degree is complete, and c) that education is sufficient for employment. That being said, the preceding three rules used to be accurate and fair descriptions of expectations of where employers and employees were supposed to meet the higher education system with the labor market. Degree inflation can be thought of in terms of jobs that list a degree as ‘required’ when they really mean ‘preferred’. Additionally, the value of a degree decreases over time as the field’s theory is advanced and rewritten.
The conversation between the business-world and education has become elitist. A small number of industry panels advise higher-education exclusively over high-schools while much of the production labor needs have low educational requirements. Conversely, the ‘too many chefs in the kitchen’ adage seems to hold for fields with high competition and diverse technical competencies with the JD and PhD bubbles as crucial examples. Why doesnt industry approach high schools or undergraduate programs with simple, fun seminars and competitions on pipetting skills to guage students, instead of pippette testing being an excrutiatingly difficult front-door barrier for laboratory companies?
So, lateral growth then?
It would be interesting for integration and/or overlap between ‘periods’ and subject areas. The assembly line mentality is used to describe the focus on throughput, efficiency, and ‘batch’ mentality but more interesting might be the siloing of students into isolated subject areas. Many professionals approach their higher education and development in the same way. Why doesn’t high-school study of WWII history include economic analysis of key commodities such as oil and steel in the origin, alliances, and progression of the war? Is it that controversial to admit that federal or top-down investment in key sectors is still a major part of our economic strategy to this day with examples of national security and STEM programs as important but controversial strategies in today’s news?
A Crisis of Metrics, Structure, and Finance
Sir Robinson describes educational and economic tradition as originating from enlightenment-age Europe, where progress was perceived largely through the lens of automation and separation of concerns. While we tend to fixate on Dickensian images of crowded, dirty London when describing the downside of industrialization, it is an economic model that provides an important focus on metrics and feedback. However, our educational ‘model’ (i.e. the systems and schema of production around time, units, quality, and throughput) also derives in part from a schoolhouse model from the 18th and 19th centuries in rural America, where a high student-teacher ratio was driven by economic necessity. In the schoolhouse model, teachers performed a humongous number of roles as caretakers (and peacekeepers among children lol), disciplinarians, counselors, and guardians of the children in rural communities. An interesting comparison would be the student/tax ratio and the student/teacher ratios between rural and urban America with cities like Vienna, Paris, and London in the 19th century.
We are simultaneously trying to standardize student quality and create uniformity across unclear definitions of literacy or core competencies in the information age without the input of children. Then we target, label, and medicate students with family or medical issues and low interest in traditional curricula. The focus on student quality through uniformity doesn’t seem to be optimizing the experience for children let alone the teachers. The student/tax and student/teacher ratios are appropriate metrics to highlight dissimilarities between the education of children and the production of goods. Moreover, the matter of curriculum and core skills is a different matter from the quantitative and objective lens of educational funding, organizational structure, and logistics.