Education Needs Reinvention
We have come to a situation where there are not just graduates aplenty, but also postgraduates of all sorts of training. It is no longer unusual to find people with multiple Masters degrees and doctorates to boot. The question is if industry actually needs such qualifications, or even sees them as an advantage.
Unfortunately, most cash-strapped universities have only a single real source of revenues. The need people to believe in the value of education, and that furthering their education will actually help their marketability. Unfortunately, most universities are run by academics who have never spent a day working in industry. Smart as they are, they can only posit what industry wants of university graduates. Coupled with the pressure to draw students with the trendy and glamour, they market the successes of alumni (forgetting to mention that for every graduate who lands a job that pays much more than the average, there are thousands who have to make do with that average or lower).
So, what does industry want? Workers who can do what the firm requires. For many firms, this involves a lot of on-the-job training, because even if the university does offer a course in that particular specialisation, what is taught is often to theoretical and ideal. Some universities have reacted to this by taking in practice faculty, who are faculty who have come in from industry, and not academia. The question often is what would make a successful person who is climbing the corporate ladder, take time off work to teach in a university? So, often, you have has-beers who end up in such faculty positions. They might have an enviable track record of previous success, but may no longer be so engaged in industry (past-prime). So while I do not discount their experience, I wonder how much of it is actually applicable in the fast-changing environment of today.
Or take traditional industries like power generation, paper-making and iron and steel, which are far from glamorous. Few are interested in studying courses related to these industries in the universities. As enrolment drops, universities react to make the courses marketable (revised to keep up with changes and trends), leaving few people qualified to do these jobs.
So everyone wants to be an investment banker or hotshot lawyer (forgetting the long hours needed on the job), so who is going to build the stuff that actually provides the business for the bankers and lawyers? If progressively only poorer and weaker students go into the fields of the sciences and engineering, will we run into the problem of collapsing buildings and such? Or the sheer stagnation of technological advancement?
Or what about industries like the venture capital industry? What they need is a mish-mash of finance, business and technical skills (and even some legal skills). How do they find their juniors? Surely, you cannot rely on the traditional route (with sky-rocketing fees and student debt), of doing a technical degree followed by an MBA and perhaps a JD?
Perhaps the good schools are also starting to realise that there needs to be a fundamental rethink on university education. The weaker schools are already facing these problems, and many are already facing falling enrolment and revenues. Who will come to their aid? What measures will they take?