Dale J Stephens - Education's Skills Asymmetry, Ctd

Dale J Stephens explained his position on university and the 'Skills Asymmetry' problem:

"That is a notion that is put into our brains from a very young age. The notion that if you want to be a happy, productive person and want to contribute to society, you have to have a college degree. And the fact is college isn't actually training individuals with the skills the job market actually needs.  

In the US for example, there are about the same number of jobs in 2008 before the recession. But they're taking twice as long to fill. Because the graduates don't have the training to meet the needs of the job market."  

Dale was then asked: What skills does the job market want?

"The market wants self-direction, creativity and people who a life-long-learners, able to adapt, able to be flexible. Those aren't things you learn in a traditional college degree or in any school for that matter. What you learn in school is how to memorise facts, follow instructions, meet deadlines. Those skills are very important but they are not unique, everybody has them."

Dale J Stephens - University's Party Curriculum

Dale J Stephens quit college and started a movement to break the college as the default career path mind-set called UnCollege. He appeared in Wired Magazine (March/April 2013) and said of his university experience:

"Going to college is meant to be the culmination of 12 years of hard work, determination and study. You're told that if you get good grades, ace your tests and do lots of extracurriculars, you'll get into a good university. The reasoning seems solid when you're at secondary school - after all, everyone tells you that university graduates earn more and are less likely to be unemployed.  

I enrolled... However any idealism was quickly squashed. For the most part, people weren't there to learn - they were there to party, and hangovers permitting, learn something along the way. I started asking questions."

Specifically he asked:

"If the best experiences happen outside the classroom, why was I paying $42,000 to sit inside one?... Is it worth getting into serious debt just to get a degree? Will your degree even get you a job when 35% of grads in the UK are working in roles that don't require one?"

 Stephens then said:

"[College] Rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than application."

Employability versus The Traditional University Degree - An Open Letter to Sir David Bell (part 3)

Sir David Bell, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Reading.

The Socratic dialogue continues.

Part 1 of this dialectical series was began by me with an open letter published on the Huffington Post and on Ambitious Minds which addressed Sir David Bell who had made suggestions in the Times newspaper that a growing push towards "employability" of university degrees was putting the 'intellectual integrity of degrees at risk.'

In Part 2 Sir David Bell responded to my riposte and gave his own counter-argument. I have since published what he had to say on my blog which you can read it here. Sir David Bell made a number of fair and interesting points.

In Part 3 of the dialectic I would like to give further response by broadening my argument, and by citing more of the commentators and authorities that I've been following and reading assiduously in recent months. To begin with, I would like to present three testimonies that all give a dim account of the "status quo" university education.

Firstly, to start with Dale J Stephens (@DaleJStephens), the founder of the Uncollege movement said of his university experience in the US:

My Favourite Tweet of All Time

Utter bollocks from start to finish. This is what passes for Belfast's intellectual academia.ukconstitutionallaw.org/2012/08/02/col…
— Newton Emerson (@NewtonEmerson) August 19, 2012

I'm quite the critic of what I've come to call 'Law School Think', Law as the Default Career Choice as well as the broader school of thought that is committed to rigid 'anti-employability' third level education (the traditional model) in the face of a fluid and changing world (the new model).