Category: Education-to-Career

We don’t place enough value on jobs that aren’t finance or tech related. We don’t value them, we don’t pay them well, because these positions (teachers, other educators, people running the day-to-day of our social welfare systems, artists, etc.) are not inherent money-makers. Then, we don’t advise that young people go into these positions because they aren’t paid well.

When we talk about companies providing higher education, what do we envision that to look like? Do they serve options that allow for some exploration in the liberal arts realm, or do students need to know exactly what they want to “be” and who they want to work for as they select their “undergraduate” programs? (Based on prediction number 7 of Busteed’s “Ten Predictions for the Very Near Future of Higher Education” in Forbes, “undergraduate degree” may not be the name anymore…)

In Future U’s podcast on November 18^th, 2019 (Episode 44: Community College Innovation), Michael Horn spoke to offering both guided pathways, as well as alternatives to guided pathways. “Guided pathways” better serve students who know what industry they want to jump in after completing their degree, but Horn makes a great point: not every student is like that. A lot of them have no idea what they even enjoy studying, much less what they want to do after college. Not allowing flexibility for students in this bucket is a primary criticism of European education systems, in fact. 

Leaders and influencers in the United States are pushing post-secondary education in the direction of “guided pathways” and employer-approved educational systems because our higher education has become incredibly expensive. The way we value higher education is tied directly to immediate payoffs, which is difficult as we continue to expand our resources and opportunities to more and more students.

Ultimately, “guided pathways” exist in the money-maker industries. I participated in a small NACE event on Monday, and one of my colleagues from UC Berkeley mentioned that as Career Services professionals, her team was not concerned about their business students or their engineering students. It is their liberal arts students who “meander” more as they look for work after college. The straightforward pathways exist in fields such as accounting, finance, and engineering, and all of these majors are always in demand. But not everyone can be, or wants to be, an accountant or engineer, as much money as they might make, as straightforward of a path as it may be. The skeptic in me wonders who the structure of “guided pathways” really benefits, particularly with corporations at the helm. If corporations are deemed the “accreditors” of higher education and begin taking educationally-related parts of the “guided path” into their own hands, who does this system serve? The students and the people of this world – or the corporations?

What do we mean by “siloed” thinking, and what kinds of environments encourage this kind of thinking?

The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary’s fourth definition of “silo” reads: “a system, process, department, etc. that operates separately or is thought of as separate from others.” The concept of “siloed mentality” in a business setting is considered one of the traps for any business controlled primarily by senior leadership. If departments don’t share information with one another, it is considered faltered communication and results in inefficient practices, such as duplicating actions and responsibilities.  

Ryan Craig and Troy Markowitz wrote for Forbes in 2017 that one of the key values of providing a liberal arts education is to teach the future workforce how to “creatively synthesize information,” ultimately arguing that silos in both the academic and organizational structure of college campuses “must die in order for students to thrive.” Siloed information does not teach critical thinking, it does not exist as creative thinking, and it does not lead to thinking outside of the box. If a person falls into siloed thinking, the blame falls on a lack of information.  

In a Forbes article listing ten predictions for the near future of higher ed (by Brandon Busteed – I’m noticing I need to follow more article writers in this vein to diversify my references!), I nodded along with most of them. I think all of the predictions are correct, at least in the US, but I stopped nodding when I read “Employers will become the accreditors of higher education.” Upon further reflection, I’m not too crazy about students getting the job to get a college degree – when I first read this point, I shrugged it off, assuming it meant that the company would pay for the college degree. But I think it may mean that the company provides the degree.

I would be more open to the idea of employers becoming the accreditors or even the providers of education if this country wasn’t run by Corporate America. Our social safety nets are lacking in the United States, and I can’t say I feel too crazy about for-profit entities that are required by law not to make any moves that would forgo any measure of the company’s profit controlling any piece our education system.

What is at the base of this fear? Siloed thinking – broadly speaking.

It’s not to say that certificates and programs offered by companies such as Google and Amazon aren’t valuable. They likely are, and it’s great that these companies are investing in their own employees. But I don’t think these programs can ultimately replace the liberal arts components of education that ask people to consider ethics and social systems. It’s tricky, because these courses shouldn’t be all-consuming either; I get that not everyone is drawn to the humanities, I personally am one who will begrudgingly try out some online coding course at some point in my life, I’m sure. But we can’t leave out the civics and social pieces as we consider expanding vocational education and these in-company training programs (both of which I support).

I don’t think the answer to this will be in-company ethics courses, either. This is where corporate law and siloed thinking come into play: the culture of the company classroom will be the same as the company culture. And that’s where this gets dangerous.

Companies need to do right by their employees, and they need to retain their employees, but every company goes through layoffs, and not every company (or really any company) lives forever. It will benefit people to obtain their critical thinking and problem solving skills in a different setting, with problems that expand beyond (or even completely adjacent to) their company’s work. Learning and working in different settings helps defray siloed thinking and encourages thinking outside the box, bolstering those critical thinking, creativity and problem solving skills that employers say are so often lacking these days (SHRM, 2019, p. 4).

I hope that we keep this in mind as we explore methods of changing up our post-secondary education offerings. The diversity in thought that is offered through educational institutions is not something all companies can replicate, and diversity in thought is the most important component of creative and innovative thinking.