Poor fit

‘Just-in-case’ learning, around which present-day education systems are mostly built, are ill-suited for the ‘just-in-time’ business world.

- THOMAS FREY

If you have had the fortune to have a college education and you are two or more decades removed from the experience, what do you remember about what you learned? If you are in the hard science world, with a PhD. in astrophysics and still working in that field, for example, no doubt you remember quite a bit, and you have built on it ten-fold during your career.

On the other hand, if you had a liberal arts degree, you may find it harder to point to where exactly your education gave you the bits of knowledge you needed to be, say, a politician, a banker, a CEO, a futurist. No doubt throughout your college years you learned and honed some important ‘soft skills’, like communication, collaboration, and stick-to-it-iveness. But in a way, are not those just reinforcements of the lessons we have learned since kindergarten: “Use your words!” “Play nice!” “Don’t quit!”

A while back, I went through the process of analysing which of my courses in college had the least value throughout my working career.

No, I am probably not the best example since I was working on an undergraduate engineering major. But I took the classes the college required for me to graduate with a degree in engineering. These included a super-important class on how to use a slide rule, Fortran programming (done with punch card machines), and calculus. No, I have never used a slide rule since then, and even though I worked as a programmer and solved tons of problems mathematically, I have never used Fortran or calculus either.

Colleges today end up being very backward-facing organisations