The Known Unknowns

Bad information widens skills gaps

As we wrote in a previous post, it is common for industry leaders to decry student preparation as insufficient for workforce needs and for students to complain that their college experience did not prepare them for their early careers.   What are the root causes for this gap, and what can be done to close it?

We begin a series of posts on this question with a focus on how fundamental gaps in information – what students, employers, and the university know about each other – lead to a mismatch between what employers want and what the university and students provide.  

Here is the sad state of affairs.   Employers don’t know enough about what universities offer. Universities don’t know enough about what employers want (either the mix of majors, or their content), or whether students’ pathways through the university prepared them for a successful career.  Students don’t know enough about how one university or one degree program differs from others, or enough about the experience of different careers and where they might flourish. This leads to a “build it and they will come” attitude on the part of universities, which largely works…until it doesn’t.

What Employers Don’t Know

For better or for worse, there is relatively little systematic engagement by industry in shaping university curriculum and the student experience.  Yes, some departmental and college curricular committees consult with industry experts, often asking alumni to serve in advisory roles.  But the heavy lifting of curricular construction, whether at the level of degree requirements, and especially the content of individual classes, is left to faculty.

This leads to significant information gaps.   First, industry professionals tasked with hiring college grads and supervising them in early assignments don’t know precisely what a degree program provides.  They likely know the broad contours of a degree, e.g. how the preparation of a Marketing major differs from a Finance major, or how Electrical Engineering and Computer Science graduates have broadly different preparation.  But they could not tell you the details of the required curriculum, and certainly not the content of individual courses. 

Perhaps more important, employers may struggle to map what is learned in a course or a curriculum to the associated skills students develop.  That is, faculty design a curriculum by asking:  what should students know?   Employers approach the end product and ask: what can students do?  Clearly, what you know affects what you can do, but how one maps to the other is not at all clear.

At some level this is understandable.  Employers recruit from many campuses and from many degree programs so knowing them all in detail would be a daunting task.  As a result, recruiters use place and degrees as a screening device, drawing perhaps on anecdata from previous hires and in many cases, alumni affinity. 

That is to say, employers are likely to know which programs produce strong graduates, but that understanding may not extend to the question of whether *this person* is highly capable, or whether *this degree program* bears strong responsibility through its curricular construction for that capability.   Further, judging by survey response data in which employers decry the capabilities of the students they chose to hire, this crude screening mechanism is not working well.   

What Faculty Don’t Know

Faculty don’t know whether their graduates are well suited to particular jobs for which they apply, or whether adaptations to curriculum would result in students better suited for particular jobs.  Indeed, most faculty would be hard pressed to answer the question:  what types of jobs do our graduates take when they finish? (Seriously, try this.  Go ask a typical faculty member who isn’t directly involved in undergraduate placement: “What are the top five destinations for your recent graduates?”)

Because faculty don’t know these things, they are unlikely to know much about job requirements, particularly when those requirements are evolving rapidly and differ significantly across firms and industries.  Their grasp on the mapping between course and curricular content (what students know), the resulting development of skills (what students can do), and the market demand for those skills, is weak to non-existent.  

Faculty are also largely unaware of the central importance that professional skills play in students’ career outcomes, and as a result precious few courses provide intentional experiences to build these capabilities.  (One exception: requiring students to work, to write, to show up, and to meet deadlines may be one of the most important professional skills-building opportunities faculty can offer in regular courses. Getting back to that unflinching attitude and not putting up with a lot of nonsense would serve faculty and students well.)

Without detailed knowledge of how college experiences map into career outcomes, curricular and co-curricular design becomes an exercise in introspection, or a reflection of past practice, even if that past practice is increasingly ill-fit to current needs.   To be clear, in our experience it is not the case that faculty are unwilling to change.  It’s more a case of them saying:  ‘look, change is costly and change for its own sake can make things worse, especially if change is driven by some meddling administrators.  So, what is the evidence that a different approach would be better?’  

In our view this is a highly salient point: what evidence do we have that a different approach would yield better outcomes? In large measure, we don’t know, because we don’t collect data that would inform us on these points!

What Students Don’t Know

When students are choosing which colleges to attend and majors to pursue, they don’t yet know what their preferred jobs actually are, or their aptitudes for them. Nor do they know much about the experience of being in a particular degree program, or whether the choice of major X or Y or their choice of college A or B results in an increased likelihood of securing that preferred job. 

And that’s okay! A big part of college is to find out what you like, what you’re good at, and where you want to go.

But because they don’t know themselves or have much basis for evaluating outcomes, students tend to choose a college based on characteristics only weakly related to preparation for specific job outcomes, and majors and courses for much the same reason. Including, alas, because they are ‘easy’.

Worse, many students assume that curricular content is sufficient preparation for a rewarding career, and opt not to invest time in co-curricular activities that will build essential professional skills. We have had many conversations with students that go something like this… “If you thought it was really important you would require it.  The fact that these things are optional tells us they don’t matter.”  Which is, in some sense, completely backwards.  It’s doing the optional (co-curricular) things that really elevate students, and their capabilities, in the eyes of employers.  But somehow, students are not getting that message.

Is Everyone Really that Ignorant?

Given all this it’s sort of amazing that the ‘college to career’ pipeline works at all.  And it *does* work. Employers continue to hire college graduates, and those graduates continue to earn a significant premium in wages and employment relative to those who disdain a college experience.  

You might think we are overstating the ignorance of the central players in this drama. 

·       Students are increasingly jobs-focused, with their choices guided in part by placement rates and starting salaries.     

·       Even if individual faculty are not focused on placement data, academic leadership generally is, and they have hired a growing cadre of placement professionals to improve these outcomes.  We are also seeing significant shifts in the composition of majors, with small liberal arts colleges adding computer science, business, and engineering.

·       Industry professionals do learn whether individuals coming out of particular degree programs are more likely to be successful, and increasingly narrow their searches to institutions with a past history of success. And larger and more sophisticated employers are increasing the use of skills-based hiring to assess whether degree programs actually build the skills the employer needs.

Or you might think: as long as graduates secure employment, what’s the issue?   Perhaps placement success in the face of all this ignorance suggests we should be pleased with the broader value of a college education as opposed to focusing on difficult curricular change that might improve more specific preparation and student outcomes.

This sanguine view is misplaced. Nothing in the aggregate placement statistics speaks convincingly to the problem of a gap in skills preparation, one that might widen rapidly as the pace of technological change reorders job markets and fundamentally alters the returns to particular skills and capabilities.  Nor does it address the growing sense of dissatisfaction with preparation expressed by both industry and students. 

Far too many students begin college and incur expense and debt but do not complete a degree.  There is clearly an enormous gap in earnings across majors, even accounting for which institutions students attend.  The rapid rise in both skills certifications and enrollment in graduate programs that are more skills- and career-focused points to a broad dissatisfaction with the learning and career preparation that students received in their first four to five years in college.

All this suggests that curricular choices adapted to market needs really can generate better outcomes.  But the starting point for making better choices has got to be:  better information.   Next post: closing the information gap.

“Finding Equilibrium” is coauthored by Jay Akridge, Professor of Agricultural Economics, Trustee Chair in Teaching and Learning Excellence, and Provost Emeritus at Purdue University and David Hummels, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Dean Emeritus at the Daniels School of Business at Purdue.