How Do Universities Prepare Graduates For Jobs That Don't Yet Exist? (theguardian.com) 164
Technological changes such as automation and artificial intelligence are expected to transform the employment landscape. The question is: will our education system keep up? From a report: The answer matters because an estimated 65% of children entering primary schools today will work in jobs and functions that don't currently exist, according to a recent Universities UK report. The research, which explores the "rapid pace of change and increasing complexity of work", also warns that the UK isn't even creating the workers that will be needed for the jobs that can be anticipated. By 2030, it will have a talent deficit of between 600,000 and 1.2 million workers in the financial and business sector, and technology, media and telecommunications sector.
University leaders would be "foolish" not to pay attention, says Lancaster University vice-chancellor Mark E Smith. "We look at the trends in the job market and the skills employers are looking for, and we listen to what employers are saying. We don't want to be talking about yesterday's problem." This is one of the reasons the university is a partner in the National Institute of Coding. The programme, led by the University of Bath, is bringing 25 universities together with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and global companies including IBM, Cisco, BT and Microsoft to create "the next generation of digital specialists".
Jordan Morrow, chair of the Data Literacy Project advisory board and global head of data literacy at US-based analytics firm Qlik, thinks that in a climate of uncertainty, universities should focus on developing the thing they have specialised in for centuries: critical thinking. "We need people who can give insight, not just observations," he says. Likewise, he says, the "softer" skills of communication and storytelling are vital. "The reality is that data scientists are trained to do very complex and complicated things with data, but their training is not necessarily in people skills or leadership. It becomes an issue when you have, say, a very intelligent data scientist who has put together an analysis, but doesn't know how to communicate it."
University leaders would be "foolish" not to pay attention, says Lancaster University vice-chancellor Mark E Smith. "We look at the trends in the job market and the skills employers are looking for, and we listen to what employers are saying. We don't want to be talking about yesterday's problem." This is one of the reasons the university is a partner in the National Institute of Coding. The programme, led by the University of Bath, is bringing 25 universities together with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and global companies including IBM, Cisco, BT and Microsoft to create "the next generation of digital specialists".
Jordan Morrow, chair of the Data Literacy Project advisory board and global head of data literacy at US-based analytics firm Qlik, thinks that in a climate of uncertainty, universities should focus on developing the thing they have specialised in for centuries: critical thinking. "We need people who can give insight, not just observations," he says. Likewise, he says, the "softer" skills of communication and storytelling are vital. "The reality is that data scientists are trained to do very complex and complicated things with data, but their training is not necessarily in people skills or leadership. It becomes an issue when you have, say, a very intelligent data scientist who has put together an analysis, but doesn't know how to communicate it."
65% of my ass won't exist (Score:2)
so medical, military, civil service, hotel and restaurants, hookers and blow... won't exists in the future... nice to know.
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I work in a Hospital, but my job isn't Medical. My Job in the hospital didn't exist 30 years ago. They had people who did work that produced most of the same outcome as what my job does, but they wouldn't be able to do my job, if they tried to take my job away and bring back the people who did the same outcome would probably put the Hospital out of business.
Today, Doctors will need to know how to use Electronic Medical Records, Soldiers need to be able to handle computers and electronic Armament, Hotel need
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yes yes, computers exist and horse carriages are also out... my point is that the basic skill set that education is suppose to teach hasn't changed and if it seems like it has changed... you are being sold a bridge to no where.
The issue, at least in US undergrad colleges, seems to be that other than the professional degree path, its a bunch of darts in the darkness with no value for the college experience other than experimentation.... which i am sure has its own value but not for the debt it incurs.
Re: 65% of my ass won't exist (Score:1)
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Thing is, I would not call technologies like JavaScript, Ajax, VB, restful interfaces, etc, to be 'foundations'.
I think a big problem is students and employers have been treating college like expensive trade schools, expending time on teaching short lived 'hit the ground running' technologies rather than fundamentals and a good solid theoretical background. Classes should be using languages and technologies to teach a concept, not to teach the tech.
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One of my children finally realized he value of the crap I forced them to learn by doing, and is making good money in IT security with no degree, but 10+ years of practical experience.
This avenue was common 20 years ago, and still happens today with some frequency, but I doubt it will be true for much longer. I know two engineers in their 60's who only have an associates degree, but entered the industry before a BS in Engineering was necessary for many engineering jobs. That is not true today as far as I know in any engineering fields. The same is likely to hold true for IT jobs by the time today's elementary school students enter the workforce. Automation rarely removes all jobs, but it
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They said 65% of today's youth will work in jobs which don't exist today, not that 65% of today's jobs will go away. There is a big difference. Let us hope at least the medical, military, and civil service jobs you mention go under drastic changes over the next 50 years.
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That's not how education works. (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't *train* for a job ( if you're running a college correctly) - you teach the students **how** to learn new things. And BTW the need to teach students how to communicate clearly has been present for a couple hundred years. it's hardly a NewThing in education.
Re:That's not how education works. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly: College/University != Vocational School.
The problem is that companies have gotten greedy and want fresh graduates to be able to fill their open positions and "hit the ground running" so that the company doesn't have to spend money bringing them up to speed on the way the company does business. That time new graduates are spending on learning new things sure isn't going to be available at the vast, vast majority of companies nowadays---not during the work day, that's for sure. What I find rather amusing (or maddening, depending on the day) is that companies all tout how different they are in their promotional materials -- otherwise how would they be better than their competition -- yet they seem to think that there's an unlimited supply of job candidates that will be productive on Day 1 without any ramp-up time. And colleges/universities aren't doing their job if they aren't producing plenty of new employees that meet their unique specifications.
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And BTW the need to teach students how to communicate clearly has been present for a couple hundred years. it's hardly a NewThing in education
I thought it was the opposite -- in the industrial revolution, and in a manufacturing economy with a slower pace of development, then there was vastly less need for people to develop (1) critical thinking and independent creativity+originality, (2) communication skills. Think of how vastly many more people worked in farming. Or of jobs in factories, or say doing bank ledgers. I think the recent move to service economies, coupled with the rapid pace of development, means that communication and creativity are
Re: That's not how education works. (Score:1)
Knowing how to improvise when something deviates from the norm matters in manufacturing, accounting and farming. Literally every discipline needs critical thinking and creative problem solving, else everything grinds to a halt while all the peons wait for the specialist to arrive and get things going again when anything unexpected happens.
Re:That's not how education works. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. You teach concepts and techniques for learning new concepts. For the most part, you only teach tools and current methods inasmuch as they're necessary for teaching the things that actually matter.
None of what's being talked about here is actually new. Between my internships, hobby projects, and professional career, I've likely put dozens of programming, scripting, markup, and query languages into use at various points, not to mention countless frameworks and stacks, a huge percentage of which didn't exist when I graduated. My university's program did a good job of preparing me for all of that by exposing me to plenty of different paradigms while ensuring that I understood the benefits and drawbacks to each of them. It would have been a waste of time to make learning the languages or frameworks the point of the class, since languages and frameworks come and go, but their concepts continue to live on. Of course, it also means that the onus was on me to pick up those languages and frameworks once I got out of school.
That's why a lot of students feel like they learn more in their first six months on the job than they ever did in four years at a university: that's how it's supposed to work. Their university education has given them the frames of reference and context they need to quickly absorb that new information and put it to quick use. You don't need a university education to do so, of course, and I think most of us know people who made it in STEM careers without a four-year degree. That said, we tend to be biased by hearing about the rare success stories while never really hearing about the multitude of people who didn't make it. The ones who did make it have always been the exception, not the rule, and that's only becoming more true with time. As these industries mature, the door that used to let people in without a degree has been closing more and more.
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what is measly 30 years in advance, my college successfully trained me for a school bus driving route between Jupiter and Ceres. they were thinking 300 years ahead.
Also a lot of knowledge, shoulders of giants (Score:3)
Reasoning skills and learning skills are certainly important. We could be teaching a lot of that long before people go to a university, but some people haven't learned it, so okay teach that. Through deliberate teaching, my four-year-old is better at critical thinking and asking "does this claim pass the sniff test?" than many adults I know.
Also, there is a TON of knowledge that doesn't change much. Another big stack of knowledge is about "standing on the shoulders of giants".
The maths are huge field where
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I have to agree about the programming language part. My first programming course taught FORTRAN and PL/1. I haven't used it since, but the concepts were foundational, and I've used them every day, with every programming language I've learned since: Pascal, IBM Assembler, LISP, C, Python, a few others on the side.
Prolog was in there too, but is enough different from FORTRAN etc. that it's almost a different concept. But even there, general notions of commenting, program-internal documentation, even useful
Exaggerated trope (Score:1)
As an engineering college professor, I can attest to the fact that this is used all the time, by people who teach impractical things. Yet, there is no validating evidence that what they teach matters, helps people learn, or teaches pr
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"In other cultures, they do not claim this or teach these things not really study them. They focus on the necessary, and frankly, are beating us badly." I'm not sure exactly what you're saying, but let me relate an anecdote which may--or may not--be relevant.
My experience is limited to a couple years a long time ago teaching at the university level in South America. And my experience was that they knew far less about critical thinking than (I would hope) an American student would. Afaict, their learning
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Exactly.
It's like my motorcycle riding course, all we did was practice the test in a closed course over a couple of weeks. Of course I passed the test the first time, but after that I was alone on the road and had to learn a lot before I was an OK rider.
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And BTW the need to teach students how to communicate clearly has been present for a couple hundred years. it's hardly a NewThing in education.
I don't know, have you seen Gen Z communicate to each other? Let's just say the ability for emojis to talk is a step forward compared to the graphical salad that gets sent around!
And in the interest of being inclusive to Gen Z:
[Shakes head Emoji] Have [finger pointing to you emoji] [eye emoji] [talking smiley emoji]? [Talking smiley emoji] [poo emoji] [thumbs up emoji], [trash emoji] [confused smiley emoji] [thumbs down emoji] [colourful exclamation mark].
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I was lucky in school. I was trained on a five year old obsolete mainframe and microcomputers. This mean that I had the basics so when MS Excel was released I was able to learn it quickly and get paid lots of
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Companies will be less likely to hire you if they have to spend money to train you.
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Someone very intelligent but with a poor memory is almost guaranteed to fail, and someone with low intelligence but excellent memory is almost guaranteed to succeed.
College is paying a lot of money to jump through hoops for a sheepskin. It may be a requirement of your desired career, but it does not magically improve you at all.
Send your dog to college and see if he com
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If college has gone that far downhill in the past 50 years, then I guess there's a problem. I got my BS in 1972. I got through courses like organic chemistry not by memorizing a bunch of facts, but by learning a handful and then using rule-based extrapolation to derive answers (sort of analogous to constructing proofs in geometry). A carbon triple bond is stronger than a double bond, which is stronger than a single bond. From that a bunch of properties having to do with IR spectra etc. can be inferred.
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Yup...it clearly takes four years to teach students how to learn. They certainly didn't spend the prior twelve years doing any such thing.
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And I think this is part of what's broken in much of US expectations of colleges and universities. They're not supposed to be job factories. They can certainly help with jobs and they can provide certain types of skills necessary for some jobs, but their primary jobs are to teach the student to learn, provide an environment where the student can learn, and especially to enable learning something that has never been known before.
Remember that "jobs that don't exist yet" are invented by people who did not l
Comment removed (Score:3)
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If you get those down while encouraging group and independent learning, you've done your job as an educator.
Sounds like a great way of manufacturing exclusively white collar drones who will use the complete power of the university education to forever question why electricians are so bloody expensive and hard to book.
Not the Point of Universities (Score:4, Insightful)
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*Should* is the operative word here. Universities absolutely should be teaching students how to think and listen critically.
Instead they have safe spaces and riots when someone who "Thinks Different" comes to give a speech.
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>The point of a university is (should be?) to teach people how to learn
Hell, that should start with your first year of grade school and be built on every year thereafter - in fact that should be one of the primary goals. Knowing how to learn makes an *incredible* difference in the effectiveness of all the years of schooling to follow, the sooner you start teaching it, the greater the benefit.
You even have the advantage that young children already instinctively know how to learn experimentally at near-op
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It's a common reply to say "college teaches you how to learn", and that is true to some extent, but college goes way beyond that.
College teaches you basic ideas, both practical and theoretical, and those ideas help you in your life.
I went to a technical school; My major was mathematics, and I took other courses concentrating in business, computer science, and history. I have a Master's in Operations Research and Statistics.
I likely do not use any of what I learned directly in my job, however I still have a
People skills are most important....mostly (Score:3)
It is something that is part nature (born with)...and part environment, how did you grow up and learn how to interact with people.
I have found that having really good people skills, especially if you can readily persuade people to do what you want, etc...can often be MORE valuable that pure tech knowledge and proficiency.
If you have people skills, and decent tech skills, you can go quite far, often further than those that are only tech, even if brilliant at it.
Sadly today, with the youth having grown up with faces stuck in phones and tablets rather than developing real people skills in meatspace, they are going to be at a disadvantage to those few that actually DID develop people skills.
I guess it is never too late to start to learn, but it sure is easier if you start out young, and learn how people interact, and how you can read them and interact with friends, and even manipulate others when needed.
Re: People skills are most important....mostly (Score:1)
With an increasingly dispersed workforce, knowing how to use asynchronous communication mediums like Snapchat, txt messaging and Instagram will become more important than reading body language and listening to tonal changes in someone's voice. I've been interviewing for remote jobs and they do filter people out who don't have these newer communication skills.
I think it's also wise to consider that the youth will determine the culture of the future, not us. So what they're doing now is what everyone will be
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Well, using txt and the like to communicate, anyone can do that, no special skills required, especially with spell check these days.
But you're never really doing to get away from personal interaction, especially when you get higher up and larger deals are made.
Usually for BIG money items, you do it in p
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cayenne8 speaks to the personal skills part of your post, and I think I agree with him about that. I'd like to ask you about the asynch communication part of your post.
I started working at a job in 1972. Well into the 1990s, I worked on large projects that required concentrating for long periods of time: editing book-length documents, writing longish computer programs, etc. I didn't have trouble getting myself started. And when I read the news, I'd spend a half hour going through a newspaper.
But now, wi
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I don't think a college can even TEACH people skills.
and part environment
So you think people stop developing at 18 is that it? College IS an environment. Anything that can be learnt from an environment can be learnt in college including how to more effectively communicate with others.
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A university can teach people with skills to improve those skills or learn how to gain new skills. It's like a gym, you go there and sweat a lot and come out better at the end. Doesn't mean the end result is a perfect athletic body, just that it's better than it was.
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They don't (Score:1)
Oh, you mean "How Do Universities Prepare Graduates For Jobs so employers don't have to pay for industry specific training anymore?". Sorry, you can see why I'd get confused....
(Bitter as hell because I'm paying for $32/k for 2 years of Nursing school for my kid that's basically on the job training that yo
Re:They don't (Score:4, Insightful)
Nursing schools have been a thing, and a degree/test in it required to be a nurse, for at least 30 years. Because you don't want the hospitals hiring someone with no training and letting them learn on the job- you want them to have at least injected a few oranges before doing it on a human. And you want them to know the signs of a heart attack, not get taught them by missing it the first time and being told after the patient codes.
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Not disagreeing with anyone here, but when my first wife got her RN in the late 60s, it was a two year course (or maybe a bit longer with the OJT). I don't believe you can get an RN now in 4 years. I suspect that's due to at least two things: nurses have to work more independently from MDs these days; and there's a lot more to learn about patient care now. Also, I'm sure that methods will continue to change, and being a life-long learner of those methods will be critical.
FWIW, I doubt that AI and roboti
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There are bachellors and associates of nursing. Associates still take 2 years. Bachellors take 4. I believe there are some types of nursing that has more overlap with doctors (including prescribing power) that requires a bachellors, but the standard floor nurse is an associates.
And no, AI isn't going to replace nurses. I doubt it will even replace doctors, but someone has to do the practical stuff like drawing blood, putting on sensors, inserting IVs, etc.
Short & Long Term (Score:1)
Most expect both kinds of skills out of a University education: practical get-a-job-now skills, and general problem-solving & team skills. You can't move up the ladder if you can't get on the ladder.
Curiosity (Score:2)
Curiosity is overrated (Score:1)
History & philosophy degrees have existed fore (Score:2)
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There is nothing like having a BA in BS when it come to business BS.
Sorry, I couldn't help it.
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It's true though, people always make fun of gender studies majors, but now they can find jobs as diversity officers.
The same way they always have? (Score:2)
The same way they always have? Giving students a broad education, steeping them in the great thinkers of their (and to some degree, other) cultures?
At least, that used to be the idea, I thought.
Just shut up and pay $250 for your textbooks. (Score:1)
This discussion has been going on for years (Score:1)
2015 out of Australia - http://theconversation.com/uni... [theconversation.com]
2011 from the Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
I have read the comments here, and actually have no quarrels with either argument. But this topic has been around for a long time, and probably will always be a topic.
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Complete and utter bollocks (Score:3)
This isn't even news. It's recycling some old claims made by Andreas Scheicher, et al. at the OECD's education department. The 65% figure or anything similar to it has yet to be supported by any evidence whatsoever -- I know several experts in education who have tried & failed to even find a citation of the figure. Re:
"...there is a need for skills such as judgement, decision-making, and analysis and evaluation of systems."
This doesn't make sense unless we teach people sufficient knowledge to support these skills, i.e. What do you want them to judge, make-decisions, analyse, & evaluate? What kinds of foundational knowledge do we need in order to be able to make use of these skills? Currently, our primary, secondary, & post-secondary educational institutions are doing a great job of providing students with a broad range of useful foundational knowledge as well as analytical & critical thinking skills.
Not mentioned in the article but implicit is the need for "21st century skills." They're often not actually listed or defined when these claims are made but when they are, they look an awful lot like 3rd century BCE skills. (See: http://www.ascd.org/publicatio... [ascd.org])
Another fallacy is that we need to teach school children to write code, e.g. code.org. So far, research shows that learning to code requires that students already have problem solving & logical reasoning skills that are sufficiently well-developed for them to transfer to the abstract concepts involved in writing code. Additionally, there's no evidence of any benefits to other areas of study or thinking that learning to code can provide. In other words, coding requires knowledge & skills learned from elsewhere & doesn't provide any benefits to elsewhere, i.e. it's a specialist cul-de-sac and end result of learning that's a waste of time in primary & secondary education. There are more useful & important things to be learned.
Re: so called "soft skills" like being able to communicate your ideas to others clearly & to participate in & manage teams, it turns out that the best communicators, participators, & managers are those who have a great deal of expertise & experience in their specific professional domain, & those skills don't necessarily transfer from one domain to another, e.g. a great sports coach doesn't necessarily make a great software team leader.
Conflation (Score:3)
I'm of two opinions about communication.
The practical side of me says communications is important. The ideal side of me says if the audience can't understand it, either you don't understand it or the audience is not smart enough in whatever domain that it matters. That said, I have issue with many in my profession using technical jargon because they use it incorrectly. They use it more like an ambiguous buzzword than a technical word with specific meaning. But again, this really just means the person talking doesn't understand.
In my experience, communication is more like a soft skill of using simple enough words that the receiver thinks they understand just enough. Just a "feel good" kind of skill. It's like describing a cube to someone who doesn't understand 3D shapes. In the end, you just tell them it a bunch of connected lines and they feel better about themselves because they know what a line is.
innumeracy gap (Score:3)
For the most part, that's a complete canard.
60% of the adult American population belongs to the arithmetic Special Olympics:
* couldn't solve a quadratic equation
* couldn't integrate x
* couldn't differentiate x
* couldn't explain why anyone would ever add two logarithms
* couldn't factor 1050 into primes without several mulligans
* couldn't check a calculation by casting out nines
* couldn't explain the significance of the law of large numbers
* think that the "Bell" curve was invented by Alexander Graham Bell
* think that "Bay's" rule concerns the golden ratio of cuts to cut-offs
* think that tariffs aren't paid for by the end consumer
* and don't even get them started on randomness or correlation.
And it's the cossetted research scientist who can't communicate?
The innumeracy gap is real, and it's spectacular.
But sure, you can add a few extra courses to their already intense course load to help them best explain the paintings of M. C. Escher to a congenitally blind man.
Data scientist: "You see, it's about perspective ... "
Now the blind person believes that he or she has perspective, only in no way does it resemble the "perspective" under discussion.
Tariffs? [Re:innumeracy gap] (Score:2)
I don't think it's that simple. It's possible tariffs could create more lower and middle-class jobs, thus giving one more spending money. It may also increase jobs but decrease the average number of trinkets one can buy. Should people prefer jobs or stuff? Math won't tell you what you should want, only the side-effects at best.
I agree tariffs probably "hurt" somebody as a side-effect, but the distribution of the down-sides is hard to pin down in a comple
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What half the Trump supporters believe about Trump's tariffs: that the foreign company simply pays the tax, and then offers their product in the American market at the same price as before, for Americans to continue to enjoy at their accustomed cost. Easiest win-win of all time. (That was the first clue.)
Supply curves only work this way in the extreme short term, as changes to the supply-side production level don't happen overnight (they might have to eat something in the short term so as not to wind up wit
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Japan has a rather protectionist economy, yet they have one of the lowest unemployment rates among industrialized nations. You may argue they have less of something physical because of it, but would they and should they trade away jobs for more stuff?
Having plentiful jobs is highly valued because it keeps people out of crime (due to boredom or desperation), and male self-worth/ego is tied to having a job, for good or bad.
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I thought Bay's Rule was about the frequency of explosions?
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* couldn't integrate x
* couldn't differentiate x
* couldn't explain why anyone would ever add two logarithms
* couldn't factor 1050 into primes without several mulligans
* couldn't check a calculation by casting out nines
As someone who's been an engineer for many years I would put myself into that 60% category. Now before you talk about how spectacular a gap is, you can start by defining why the heck it matters.
Beyond basic trig, basic algebra, there's petty little Math out there that someone actually needs to be practically capable of doing, even in some quite advanced fields.
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The relevancy was pretty clear: for the innumerate general public to have a meaningful dialogue with a data scientist without the data scientist having to bend over backwards into trite, kindergarten narratives. Find me a working data scientist who can't do the vast majority of these things upside down and underwater, and I'll show you a horse that can add by stamping its feet.
I basically didn't put anything on that list I didn't already grasp in a deep way by the time I reached grade 8 or 9.
The premise of
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for the innumerate general public to have a meaningful dialogue with a data scientist without the data scientist having to bend over backwards into trite, kindergarten narratives
And that's where I fundamentally disagree with your requirement. You're effectively saying someone needs to be a data scientist to talk to a data scientist rather than simply understanding what it is the data scientist does and the significance of it. e.g. Knowing what integration does is orders of magnitude more important than being able to calculate an integral. That sort of knowledge is fundamental compared to the ability to actually do an integral, and it's this line of thinking that underpins basic gen
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Hmmph. Never heard of Bay's rule, although I have heard of (and can work with) Baye's Theorem.
As for casting out 9s, I'm sure that's really useful. If for some reason you're without your calculator (or slide rule). Indeed, as thegarbz says (in another reply), knowing what an integral or derivative *means* is far more important than remembering how to do it. I'm 50 years out of my last calculus course, and I don't remember how to do anything more than the simplest integrals. But I still know (some of th
You don't (Score:2)
Because if you do, you create artificial need for something that doesn't exist. Then lo-and-behold, someone comes along with grants and actually makes this "job" into a reality to appease all the idiots who indebted themselves for a useless degree.
Universities should teach you how to learn; so that YOU can go out and create these "jobs that don't exist yet" because you're smart enough to realize there's a need for X by doing Y.
Just get a degree in pataphysics (Score:2)
Universities don't train graduates for jobs. (Score:3)
They give you a broad-based education within a particular field. They teach you how to teach yourself what you have to do for a job.
The question fundamentally misses the point of what an education is.
Re:Universities _DO_ train graduates for jobs. (Score:1)
They don't teach job skills
They absoluteley do!
They teach doctors everything about doctoring. Other medical branches, too. The teach lawyers about the law. They teach accountants to account. The teach architects to do whatever the hell it is they do.
In fact almost every profession requires a degree qualification in the relevant subject as a basis for entrance. Therefore in almost every well-paid job, there will be a person who was taught how to do it at university. In a course specifically designed to feed into the jobs market.
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Medicine and law are a little different in that their professional schools are very regimented compared to undergrad university studies. You're right that they don't learn everything. But, anyone getting through medical or law school has a common baseline level of knowledge. They have to pass a licensing exam to move on to the next phase of their training (resident or junior lawyer.)
Every time I run into a "rockstar developer" or "systems ninja" with mile-wide holes in their skills I wish we in IT had a mor
Answer: read widely (Score:2)
The first job I took after leaving university was in a field that didn't exist when I started the course, 3 years earlier.
And because of that, nobody was able to assess my ability to do it. However, it turns out that because of my broad range of skills and understanding of things that hadn't been on the curriculum as part of my undergrad studies - but which interested me anyway - I was able to beat many other candidates with better academic results. But who had far narrower fields of knowledge.
And it t
In my experience... (Score:2)
..both as a former student and now as a business owner, colleges are pretty shitty at preparing students for actual work NOW. Maybe they should focus on that before trying to prepare students for jobs that don't exist yet?
Employers don't know how to screen for that (Score:2)
And this is coming from someone who is working a job that did not exist even 20 years ago.
That's not what universites are for (Score:2)
You're thinking about vocational schools. Universities are explicitly not job training.
The original purpose of a university is to provide a rounded education which in theory will allow the student to provide a higher potential value to society than a focused education in a single discipline. It was the intended destination for the children of the elite, folks who would be seated at the economic, legal, or political controls of the country in the future, their 'jobs' already provided as a legacy of their pa
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The original purpose of a university is to provide a rounded education
I suppose that depends on the country.
In most countries it is secondary education that provides the broad base, the "rounded" education. Tertiary education (university) courses specialise in a single subject or a set of closely related and inter-dependent subjects. The american concept of a "major" subject and other ones, that are unrelated, seems a bit pointless if you were already taught all that other stuff before you were 18. Which in most countries, children are.
As it is, with the cost of a univers
University research creates the jobs of the future (Score:1)
University research creates the jobs of the future. How are they behind in teaching what they're laying the path for? Maybe specific universities don't conduct research or integrate that research with their undergraduate program. Mine did though, so no problem here.
If they're talking about courses that are still being taught for careers which are disappearing, then that's a totally valid concern. The way to fix that is to rate the University programs on job placement success. My university did that too, it
Know what? (Score:2)
When you're being prepared for a job/work of some kind, it's a trade school.
When you're educated, you learn to learn and to prepare your self.
I institutions of higher learning are functioning as trade schools and you can't get a job when you get finished, it should be counted as fraud and litigated.
no wonder trump was elected.
Just focus on fundamentals and you'll be fine (Score:2)
The way I see it, in order for society to function correctly and not devolve into a winner-take-all nightmare is to find a way to keep everyone employed. You need the super-geniuses who will advance the state of the art, good solid engineering/technician types who can problem solve and think critically, and yes you need something for the people who can't even graduate high school to do.The top two tiers start with a solid higher education experience, and the lower tier can be filled by vocational training.
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Maybe it hasnâ(TM)t occurred to them (Score:2)
But, TRAINING should be provided through apprenticeship or on the job training.
Education is not the same thing.
They do not (Score:2)
But do not worry, they have never done that and it is actually not their job. Universities give you a base-understanding of a specific field (well, unless you study gender-"studies" or something in that direction), but they do not and should not provide job training. If you had a really good university program, you will probably end up using something like 30% of the content during your career. On the plus-side, that will be often stuff you just cannot pick up on the side and cannot really learn on the job.
By teaching them...THINGS THAT LAST? (Score:2)
I know how NOT to do it. (Score:2)
By trying to be the institution with the most accurate crystal ball. Even if it is accurate, it's only going to be accurate for a very short time.
The best way to prepare people for jobs whose nature you can't predict is to educate them on generally useful things. Critical thinking. Research skills. Mathematics. Writing. Financial and economic literacy. How to work with other people. These are all skills that make someone adaptable.
Develop a new educational paradigm, that's what (Score:2)
The question assumes that the old higher education model of accumulating well-established knowledge into degree steps is the only way of preparing people for the job market. The problem with that is that the old model works for the old jobs, in restricted-entry professions. If you want to practice law, get educated the traditional way.
To address the new jobs, universities need to make use of their current research to squirt small modules of current learning into people already in the job market, whether or
Better than for jobs that no longer exist (Score:2)
Nothing worse than a college preparing you for jobs that are on their way out or will leave you hopelessly pigeon-holed.
School Sucks, (Score:2)
It used to work like this (Score:2)
Education vs Training (Score:2)
Which would be more appropriate for your teenage daughter? A class on sex education or a class
They Lie (Score:1)
See Isaac Asimov (Score:2)
As in most things, the good doctor recognized this and wrote a story about it (or at least pretty close):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The giving tenure part is getting smaller. I believe (but don't have statistics to back it up) that lecturerships are much more common now than they were 30 years ago.
Also, a lot of professors' work is in research, more so than teaching. (And my title is Research Scientist, which I believe is also more common in universities than it used to be.)
Surely the one-word post is... (Score:2)
plastics.