I ran into an interesting post by Rhett Allain at Wired wondering about that question.
Administrators and politicians are emphasizing the importance of colleges in their role of producing an educated workforce. More people in college means more people that can work at higher level jobs. . . . Yes, humans with a college degree would be better at some jobs – but you can’t make a college degree job training. But what if we did? What if we optimized the whole higher education system to train and develop humans to be work-ready? [Read more]
His answer is that we might not like where we ended up (robots do come into it.) I have more than a passing interest in what’s wrong with academia, and one of the things that is wrong with it is when people try to make it something it is not. Allain has some good reasons why the general move in the direction of education-as-job-training is wrong. (His reasons raise the further question–one that the blog Oikonomia was tossing around for a while–as to whether college is for everybody if college isn’t job training. Should some people be sent in the direction of training for blue-collar jobs? The jury is still out for me on that one.) He reminds us that one of the best parts of college is:
the opportunity to explore what makes us human. Being a human isn’t listed as “workforce ready” – but maybe it should be.
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