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The Future of Work (and What it Means for Higher Education),
Part 2
Yesterday we looked at a few of the
hypotheses out there about how IT is destroying jobs (particularly: good
jobs). Today we look at how institutions should react to these changes.
If I were running an institution, here's what I'd do:
First, I'd ask every faculty to come up with a "jobs of
the future report". This isn't the kind of analysis that makes sense
to do at an institutional level: trends are going to differ from one part
of the economy (and hence, one set of fields of study) to another. More to
the point, curriculum gets managed at the faculty level, so it's best to
align the analysis there.
In their reports, all faculties would need to spell out: i)
who currently employs their grads, and in what kinds of occupations (an
answer of "we don't know" is unacceptable - go find out); ii)
what is the long-term economic outlook for those industries and
occupations? iii) what is the outlook for those occupations with respect to
tasks being susceptible to computerization (there are various places to
look for this information, but this from two scholars at the
University of Oxford is a pretty useful guide)? And, iv) talk to senior
people in these industries and occupations to get a sense of how they see
technology affecting employment in their industry.
This last point is important: although universities and
colleges keep in touch with labour market trends through various types of
advisory boards, the question that tends to get asked is "how are our
grads doing now? What improvements could we make so that out next set
of grads is better than the current one?" The emphasis is clearly on
the very short-term; rarely if ever are questions posed about medium-range
changes in the economy and what those might bring. (Not that this is always
front and centre in employers' minds either - you might be doing them a
favour by asking the question.)
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The point of this exercise is not to "predict" jobs
of the future. If you could do that you probably wouldn't be working in a
university or college. The point, rather, is to try to highlight certain
trends with respect to how information technology is re-aligning work in different
fields over the long-term. It would be useful for each faculty to present
their findings to others in the institution for critical feedback - what
has been left out? What other trends might be considered? Etc.
Then the real work begins: how should curriculum change in
order to help graduates prepare for these shifts? The answer in most fields
of study would likely be "not much" in terms of mastery of
content - a history program is going to be a history program, no matter
what. But what probably should change are the kinds of knowledge gathering
and knowledge presentation activities that occur, and perhaps also the
methods of assessment.
For instance, if you believe (as economist Tyler Cowen
suggests in his book Average is Over that
employment advantage is going to come to those who can most effectively mix
human creativity with IT, then in a statistics course (for instance), maybe
put more emphasis on imaginative presentation of data, rather than on the data
itself. If health records are going to be electronic, shouldn't your
nursing faculty be developing a lot of new coursework involving the
manipulation of information on databases? If more and more work is being
done in teams, shouldn't every course have at least one group-based
component? If more work is going to happen across multi-national teams,
wouldn't it be advantageous to increase language requirements in many
different majors?
There are no "right" answers here. In fact, some of
the conclusions people will come to will almost certainly be dead wrong.
That's fine. Don't sweat it. Because if we don't look forward at all, if we
don't change, then we'll definitely
be wrong. And that won't serve students at all.
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