The United States as a country was founded on the notion that education serves as a cornerstone of a free society. According to Thomas Jefferson and many other founding fathers, universal education was a prerequisite for participating in a functioning democracy. Though the founding fathers were egregiously flawed in many ways, they were definitely on to something in that regard. Nowadays, the focus of higher education seems to be more on its function as a strategic path toward a successful career rather than a means of upholding the integrity of our democracy. Still, companies across disciplines have been vocal about how unprepared university graduates are for even entry level positions. Michael Hansen wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review called "The U.S. Education System Isn’t Giving Students What Employers Need" in which he critiques universities for not doing enough to prepare students for the workforce. He writes:
"The U.S. education system is not held accountable for ensuring that students are properly equipped with the skills and capabilities to prepare for a career where they can obtain financial stability."
Hansen makes some excellent observations, ultimately advocating for more vocational programs such as those in Germany and other parts of Europe which provide more specialized training. He also believes in the need for employers to reassess which jobs actually should require a four year degree, which would almost certainly produce some favorable outcomes for both employers and job seekers. However, Hansen's framing of the problem demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of learning. Reducing the role of higher education to job training fails to capture the importance of critical thinking skills and a rigorous discourse in the advancement of society both inside and outside the workplace.
Many universities put forth a concerted effort to both satisfy the loftier goals of higher education and appease employers: they structure their curricula during the first two years to focus on critical thinking and foundational knowledge, and then allow students to become more specialized to their field in the latter part of their degree programs. However, this orientation toward having one's cake and eating it too causes universities to fail on both sides of the spectrum. A recent article from The Times Higher Education reveals that companies are increasingly looking for candidates who have honed analytical reasoning and problem solving skills, but struggle to find recent graduates who possess those skills.
Critical thinking requires a willingness to ask fundamental questions and an openness to rejecting the status quo. University graduates would be much better off if they were allowed to freely engage in extended inquiries about how the world should be without worrying about their immediate employability. But there is such enormous pressure from universities to justify their high price tags to prospective students as a decision that will pay off in the future: the university degree must provide quantifiable advantages in the labor market and lead to a financial return on investment.
The obvious answer is to curtail the astronomical cost of higher education, allowing universities to focus on cultivating whole people rather than just cogs in a corporate machine. This would amplify the qualities that truly matter and bring about a more widespread shift in what employers are looking for. Instead of expecting recent graduates to be already trained to do a job, they could instead seek individuals who are capable of excitedly learning new tasks and finding new ways of approaching them.
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