While higher education might be under a variety of attacks these days, I tend to think this is only the latest wave of efforts to convert higher education into a job training program. I really hope we don’t continue down that road.
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The Problem With Centering Job Training in Higher Education
I’m writing this article because I’ve been repeatedly berated with work emails with opening lines like:
Dear friends and colleagues: as you may be aware we are in an era where workforce development is increasingly emphasized as an outcome of higher education.
In addition to all of the “AI fluency” and “SB1 compliance” garbage that comes through my inbox, you might find it odd for me to be irritated by emails like this. After all, certainly the only reason anyone goes to college is to get a job, right?
Regardless of what role I believe higher education is meant to serve, I am increasingly bothered by this obsession with treating colleges and universities as a means to an end: a barrier to the workforce. This kind of attitude has allowed higher education to be pressured from all sides—from students to parents to administrators to industry—about what its role should be in society.
The consequences to me are somewhat obvious. When you continually pressure colleges and universities to center “workforce development,” you end up with an education system that is largely broken. I’ll describe what I mean in the following subsections.
Job Training Prioritizes Competition Over Collaboration Leading to Isolation
To start, when higher education is pressured to function like a jobs program, there is really only one possible outcome: an environment where students must view their peers as enemies. After all, if the only goal of education is to get a job, then everyone else is your competition. You must work as hard as you can to make yourself more marketable to corporations than your peers.
In this highly competitive environment, interesting things happen. For example, in addition to completing your coursework, you must find other ways of building out your resume. After all, if everyone is getting good grades, then you need to find ways to stick out.
In tech, this means students are often coding outside of class to build out their personal portfolios. In addition, students might engage in undergraduate research, join professional organizations, complete certification exams, and spend every summer at an internship. Ultimately, it’s no longer enough to simply complete your coursework.
To me, this is completely absurd. Sure, students should have to work hard because learning is hard, but the idea that they should walk the path of self-isolation because everyone is the enemy is antithetical to living in a society. Perhaps that’s why so many tech bros are unironically evil.
Job Training Prioritizes Utility Over Understanding Leading to Cluelessness
Interestingly, rather than recognizing that this culture of competition is directly caused by treating education as a jobs program, most stakeholders double down. After all, it’s higher education’s fault that students have to beef up their resumes outside of class, right? Therefore, the classroom becomes a place where every topic is assessed for utility.
These days students are our harshest critics: “how is this concept going to help me in my job?,” they’ll ask. As a caring educator, you might also fall for this trap and attempt to trim away as much “fat” as possible while losing any real educational value in the process. Alternatively, as a department, you might offload “soft” skills to a one-off class, rather than integrating them throughout the curriculum. After all, who has time for ethics, empathy, or communication when you have important skills to “learn” like vibe coding?
What most bothers me about this obsession with utility is that plenty of practical skills cannot be taught without knowledge of impractical skills. I can’t just teach you how to write code without you understanding more theoretical concepts, like memory, type systems, control flow, and abstraction—funnily enough. To illustrate what I mean, think about how understanding type systems is not a useful skill in and of itself, but coding is a lot harder when you can’t parse a type error.
Likewise, plenty of practical skills aren’t skills that are seemingly valued. As I mentioned earlier, it’s really easy for STEM programs to prioritize STEM skills and ignore workplace skills like communication, time management, ethics, and empathy. Hell, there isn’t even time spent on developing life skills like critical thinking, reading, or learning. We just assume you’ll develop those by osmosis.
Personally, I think this issue has been around for a while in education fields that are more directly applicable to careers, like computer science and engineering. Both of these fields have long valued memorization over understanding in the classroom. I can’t tell you how many engineers I know who got through classes simply by repeatedly completing practice problems without any real understanding of the ideas. But, I definitely feel like there’s more pressure recently to prioritize the utility of education.
Job Training Prioritizes Relevance Over Track Record Leading to Scams
Finally, there is this constant push from industry (and subsequently, students who want to work in industry) to stay relevant. You have to constantly update your curriculum and pedagogy to “adapt to a rapidly changing world.” What this ultimately looks like is educators being baited into what are basically scams.
In just the last 7 years, I’ve seen at least one scam run through my program. Specifically, I remember several of our courses adopting these new digital textbooks from zyBooks that let you code in them directly. While these sound nice in theory, I very rapidly noticed students coming into my classroom without basic software development skills. The reason being that zyBooks writes all the testing for you, so you never learn how to debug and test your own code. Imagine how bad this is going to get when “AI fluency” is integrated into our classrooms.
Funnily enough, most tech folks are familiar with the jokes around the latest web frameworks
. Meanwhile, the average developer is maintaining 30+ year old legacy code. What’s realistic is teaching students how to work on existing systems, not teaching them how to jump on the latest trend. There’s a reason I teach skills like testing and version control; they have a proven track record of being effective.
The Role of Higher Education
Broadly, I believe the role of higher education is the same role as education broadly: education is about building the society we want to live in. That means educating citizens to be compassionate members of society. To do that, people need to have a well-rounded education in a variety of fields.
Sure, higher education might be narrower in scope. Students might attend college so they can learn more about a specific area of study, such as physics, psychology, or art. However, the function largely should remain the same. Whatever discipline you study should be grounded in whatever role you intend to provide to society. If you plan to be an engineer, you shouldn’t just learn design and be done with it. You should have to contend with how your designs might affect society; you shouldn’t just build something because you can.
If higher education is to continue down the path of workforce development, then I really only see society getting worse over time. We cannot have the society we want if we only teach practical skills. We cannot have the society we want if we force students into competitive isolation. We cannot have the society we want if we continue to chase relevance. It’s just not going to work out.
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