Densil Williams | Value of a university degree: beyond job readiness

There seems to be a growing tendency to believe that persons go to university to get a degree as their route to a well-paying job. This simplistic notion for acquiring an education is quite troubling. For what it does, if it becomes pervasive, is to lead to the conceptualisation and design of strategies and policies in the education system that are skewed towards a narrow outcome, that will not lead to society having the full benefits of a well-developed mind. Instead of the narrowness of trying to prepare persons for the job market, which is mercurial in content and structure, one should embrace the view that education is meant for a holistic development of the mind, a by-product of which is being fit for the job market. If we take this broader view, job-readiness will become one of the many outcomes that a society will achieve from offering high-quality education to its population.

So, when futurists like Anthony Clayton, professor at The University of the West Indies (UWI), observed that: “In the United Kingdom, for example, a university degree used to be the route to a well-paid job, but about 20 per cent of students today would have been financially better off if they had not gone to university”, there seems to be a subtle message to say, degrees that are not geared towards job readiness are redundant and should be axed in the university of the future. Even more troubling is the silent message that we do not need to have so many of our people earning a degree. I would strongly discourage this kind of thinking, especially among public policymakers, and more so for those who have oversight for education.

Post-secondary education, including having a university degree, is even more critical for societies like ours in the Caribbean where only two out of every 10 students who leave secondary school progress to post-secondary education, which is far distant behind when compared to contexts like the UK where seven out of every 10 students progress to post-secondary levels of education. When the Caribbean, generally, can get to levels like the UK, we can possibly start talking about whether or not a degree is still relevant for the job market. Given our development challenge, which can be summarised as a lack of global competitiveness of our outputs, it requires for us to urgently get more persons into post-secondary education to gain the relevant higher order skills such as critical thinking, emotional intelligence, networking and diversity and teamwork ,which will be relevant to operate in a 21st century world.

NEED FOR ENLIGHTENMENT

Narratives from futuristic predictions about whether or not a degree is a pathway towards a well-paying job gives the impression that, going forward, a university degree must be designed around the narrow outcome of preparing persons for the job market, both today and in the future. Thinking of a university degree in this narrow sense of job readiness will lead to skewed policies on teaching and learning and leave learners not benefiting from the tremendous enlightenment which comes with learning. A university degree must be viewed in the context of providing enlightenment so that persons can make more informed and conscious decisions, which eventually will redound to being fit-for-purpose for the job market now and into the future. For, a critical mind is more important than providing context-specific training for a particular industry or an organisation. A university degree is just another step in the process which prepares a critical mind, which process starts from pre-school.

University should not yield to the unthinking and unbridled neo-liberal idea that, if learners cannot get a job from the courses offered, then it should shutter its doors. This simplistic approach to learning and knowledge creation will result in society not seeing advancements which evolve from critical exploratory thinking, discourses and falsification of ideas. Societies will only advance when contending views are placed on the table and can be falsified and re-imagined for continuous improvements. This is the kind of value which you get from a university degree. This value cannot be placed on a balance sheet, nor captured in a profit and loss statement. The value of education is beyond financial metrics. Indeed, society becomes much better for having more persons with strong critical minds, as there will be more conscious citizens to protect the environment, make socially responsible decisions, be more efficient at their task, which leads to stronger economic outcomes, manifested in productivity ratios, among other positive externalities derived from having an educated population.

UNIVERSITY OF THE FUTURE

The notion of preparing graduates for the job market spills over into a narrative that the future for universities is online. The underlying assumption is that, by merely putting material online, students will download same, then sit an exam and eventually get a degree and become competitive in the labour market. Further, there the notion that online is cheaper and, therefore, if universities want to cut costs of operation, they should look to online education. A nuanced understanding of online education will show the fallacy of this argument. There is a substantial cost structure to establish a sophisticated online platform for teaching and learning. There is also the maintenance cost to ensure high-quality customer service. Online is not as cheap as one might think.

To say the future of the university is online lacks an appreciation for the community aspect of the teaching and learning process. Learners attend universities not only to pass an exam and get a well-paying job. There is an entire social interaction around entering a university campus which fosters the teaching-and-learning process. Group dynamics is critical to today’s learner as it helps them to develop necessary skills for the 21st century. Skills such as diversity, tolerance and emotional intelligence do not get developed from hiding behind a computer screen in a virtual world. Physical interaction is necessary.

Indeed, the direction for the university of the future cannot be purely virtual. It has to be a hybrid of virtual and face-to-face. A cavalier analysis to say that the brick-and-mortar infrastructure of a university will become redundant in the future is not the most appropriate at this time. An analysis which calls for a balance between virtual delivery of aspects of the teaching and learning process and a physical coming together of learners is the future. Therefore, universities should not rush to sell off their physical infrastructure but, instead, look at how they can repurpose these facilities to create demand when areas of their operation are in the virtual space. The discussion on future direction of the university should not be either virtual or face-to-face, but virtual and face-to-face.

As we develop the discourse on the future of education, the narrative must be more nuanced and not extremist. The university degree should not be conceptualised using an instrumentalist lens which sees it as the passport to a well-paying job. The university degree and the broader pedagogical process should be conceptualised through an enlightenment lens. This way, the teaching-and-learning process will develop critical minds that will be able to fit into any job, whether today or in the future. The progressive university must be seen as a place for enlightenment, freedom of thought and learning, not an instrument for getting a high-profile job.

- Densil Williams is a professor of International Business at the UWI. Send feedback to densilw@yahoo.com