Thoughts from the editor – Is our university system irreparably broken?

First of all, please allow me to apologize for not writing on this blog as often as I perhaps should, I have been too preoccupied trying to absorb the constantly changing economic environment, and its impact on students. Anyways, this is a new feature on this blog, “thoughts from the editor”, where I will pontificate on things going on in the world, and will try to focus the conversation on the effect that these events have on students.

In recent months, as the economy has continued to move in the direction that birds move for winter (south) and as unemployment has continued to rise, resulting in many of my friends becoming unemployed I have been struck with the failure of our college system to train students for a job in the “post Facebook world”.  This “failure” as I see it is two-fold, one, we are not taught the right skills, creativity is not encouraged or valued, and two, having graduated from college with $100k in debt many of us must spend the next two decades repaying banks for our education (that is, assuming we are able to repay them ever)

Our college system was designed during an industrial era, an era when very few were able to go to college- most going to work straight out of high school, and an era when the skills we were taught were not only applicable, but would aid us in our chosen career. Additionally, since a college degree meant something, we were able to get good paying jobs and had the shot of living good lives, not being indebted to banks for our education.  Today this is no longer the case. True, you can still get a scientific education, and graduate having an expectation of a good salary, but most of us these days are not choosing to study engineering, or biology, but are rather choosing to get degrees in English, literature, or business, and with such degrees, given our real earning potential it is impossible for us to even hope of one day being free from the yolk of students loans.  There are multiple other issues that we can discuss regarding the brokenness of higher education with extent to cost, but having scratched the surface of this issue I feel that I ought to move on.

The second issue I would like to talk about stems from the quality of our education, the “quality” I speak of is a constant and remains low, whether one is attending Harvard, or a local community college.  Our colleges do not teach us the skills we need, and in fact, often fight against the integration of modernity into the university setting.  Here I would like to refer to a recent experience of mine. My university requires all students to have completed an internship for credit prior to graduation, and they help students obtain said internships through the career center.  Knowing this I approached the career center on behalf of We Compare Books wanting to post an internship, I completed the required forms, wrote a description… having finished ands submitted my application I was told that my application was declined and could not be posted because the position I posted was telecommuting. Of course, I was given other reasons, but I was struck with the sense that the primary reason that my application was turned away is because I did not want to require my interns to go to an office to work.  Having spoken with a representative at the career center I was struck by the fact that the career center either did not understand, or was unwilling to understand the way that e-commerce operated, and the role that e-commerce plays in today’s world- this is a reality that applies to the career centers of most universities.

The next example of how today’s colleges are broken is one that I’ve seen time and again throughout my academic career.  During many of the business/communication classes I’ve taken I have been required to design everything from a business plan for a fictitious business to a website, but I was never taught, indeed I was never encouraged to pursue these to reality. Whenever we designed websites we were never told to post them on the web, and whenever we made business or marketing plans we were not encouraged to make them a reality.  Indeed, we were discouraged from using the same business plan idea in our marketing plan… and lastly, the word “entrepreneur” never emerged from any professors lips, and might had been viewed as blasphemy if it had.  (I learned more about starting a business from old sitcoms than I ever did from any business course I have taken).  Indeed, greatness and innovation in the past 20 years has accelerated away from academia and into the minds of college drop-outs, who grow tired of mediocrity and go on to greatness.

The point that I am trying to make is that the college system is broken because it does not foster creativity, and as a reward for our attendance over burdens us with debt.  Today, many colleges unfortunately are no longer institutions of learning, but are businesses, collecting money, with utter disregard for the stakeholders (the students).