Effective Graduates

One of the most tiresome debates in post-secondary education is about whether or not students emerge from their studies “job ready”.  To which the answer, of course, is that for the most part they do not. Education – including vocational education – is meant to prepare you for a long career rather than an immediate job.  Training for specific jobs?  That’s usually a job for companies themselves, and the fact that they underinvest in this area – notably by cutting out middle-manager jobs that used to function, silently, as the trainers of younger employees – is neither here nor there.  End of story.

That said, I hope it is uncontroversial to say that many students emerge from universities without the ability to take an idea from conception to execution.  In other words, whatever they have learned in school and however much they have achieved academically, they tend to still have difficulty devising and executing plans of any degree of complexity.  For lack of a better phrase, many have difficulty Getting Stuff Done.  Generally speaking, when you hear employers talk about students not having “critical thinking skills”, this is roughly what they are talking about: in a word, effectiveness (or ineffectiveness as the case may be). 

And I hope it is equally uncontroversial to say that this is a Bad Thing.  Universities shouldn’t be expected to produce job-ready graduates but they sure as heck can and should be held accountable for producing effective graduates, graduates who understand how to Get Stuff Done. 

There is a pretty basic reason why universities have trouble with this.  Although they are generally content to pass themselves off to government and the public as institutions which prepare students for the rest of their lives, universities are to a large degree run by and for the scientific disciplines they contain.  Curriculum is designed to turn out graduates who are reasonably versed in a particular discipline: it is not, whatever universities may tell you, designed to turn out effective adults (it’s a bit different in professional programs with external accreditation, but perhaps not as different as it should be). 

There was a time when “effectiveness” was something students would pick up through extra-curricular activities.  It was haphazard and uneven, and by and large the universities have as little to do with it as possible (contrast this with the US, where many extra-curricular activities have faculty advisers specifically because they understand how this aspect of campus life contributes to the formation of the “whole graduate”), but at least it was something occurring on campus. 

COVID, unfortunately, has done a real number on campus life, and fewer students avail themselves of these kinds of activities.  This is contributing to sliding levels of effectiveness.  And, if universities took the effectiveness problem seriously, it would lead them to think about how to incorporate effectiveness into the curriculum.

Can universities teach these kinds of skills?  Of course they can.  Work-integrated learning does this to some extent, though students don’t necessarily get feedback on their effectiveness.  But take for example Toronto Metropolitan University’s Zone Learning program, which I think is pretty interesting.  It’s an experiential learning course open to students from all parts of the institution but primarily taken by students in the Creative School.  It’s not billed as a course in “effectiveness”, but that’s more or less what it is.  Students design their own project – a passion project of some kind, usually, and take a term to try to bring it to fruition.  They are not graded on the outcomes or outputs of their projects; rather, they are graded on how they approach the problem and how they develop solutions that lead to some kind of output.  And of course, students learn from one another’s successes and mistakes in much the same way they do in extra-curriculars.

Great, you say!  So why can’t we just roll out something like this everywhere?  And the answer, in short, is academic disciplines.  Disciplines – in their corporate form as University Departments – are the gatekeepers of curricula, the ones who decide what kinds of courses that will be offered.  And to be blunt, none of them want to teach “effectiveness” because they don’t really know how and can’t be bothered to learn because it doesn’t fit within the disciplinary logic.  Zone Learning gets around this problem in the sense that it is taught by TMU staff who have PhDs but are not tenure-track professors.  There’s a trade-off here: instructors can teach without disciplinary hang-ups, but they are at the mercy of department chairs for permission to offer the courses and for the funds to make it scale well.  Without their own discipline, without a department, there is no way to get inside the Senate committee process that manages curricular change, or to capture any of the revenue linked to students taking these courses.

There is a way around the disciplines of course, but it’s hard.  If you had a particularly courageous Provost or President that a) agreed with the idea that universities should take a stab at molding students in ways to make them more personally effective when they graduate and b) thought Zone Learning (or something like it) was a reasonable way to take a stab at solving this problem, then you might have a shot.  These leaders could spearhead an attempt to expand these non-disciplinary offerings across the institution and find ways to fund them outside the departmental system.  If they really wanted to make a splash, they might want to make some kind of non-disciplinary curriculum a Unique Selling Point for their institution (I know “badges” are kind of out of fashion right now, but I still believe that curricular and transcript innovations which indicate how effective graduates are rather than just how many courses they sat through would be a big selling point for any institution that wanted to try it).

Some might find this idea scandalous: courses untethered from disciplines?  Thin edge of the wedge, etc.  But I think we are well past the point where we can say with a straight face that discipline-focused curricula do a great job at preparing students for life after university.  If universities want to maintain a reputation for relevance, I think more experiments in non-disciplinary education is probably well overdue.  Zone Learning isn’t the only way to do this, but the sooner people start experimenting in this area, the better it will be for everyone.