I thought this might be of interest. From a controversial blogpost by Ezra Klein:
"For many kids, college represents an end goal. Once you get into a
good college, you’ve made it, and everyone stops worrying about you.
You’re encouraged to take classes in subjects like English literature
and history and political science, all of which are fine and
interesting, but none of which leave you with marketable skills. After a
few years of study, you suddenly find it’s late in your junior year, or
early in your senior year, and you have no skills pointing to the
obvious next step.
What Wall Street figured out is that colleges
are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused
graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, incredible work ethics
and no idea what to do next. So the finance industry takes advantage of
that confusion, attracting students who never intended to work in
finance but don’t have any better ideas about where to go.
....
So it seems universities have been looking at the problem backward. The
issue isn’t that so many of their well-educated students want to go to
Wall Street rather than make another sort of contribution. It’s that so
many of their students end up feeling so poorly prepared that they go to
Wall Street because they’re not sure what other contribution they can
make. "
And a response.
It seems, in part, to be due to the swift progression of technology, which affects the skill needed to form a career. Colleges can hardly keep up with this progression, making their curriculum inevitably obsolete.
ReplyDeleteFor example, I've often wondered how useful it would have been to have learned basic computer programming in college - html, css, etc - so that I could enter life with fundamental understanding of utilizing the Internet. I could use that much more than mathematics, geometry and geography.
I am sure some educational organizations are trying to implement such studies, but by the time they do, coding might already become obsolete. So it is a difficult race to keep up with.