Colleges Should Teach Broader Skills to Prepare Students for Work Force, Report Says

Chronicle of Higher Education 1/11/07

By Erik Vance

The Association of American Colleges and Universities, a leading advocate for liberal-arts education, warned on Wednesday that college graduates are increasingly less prepared to compete in the global economy. The solution, the group said in a report, is for colleges to adopt a broader curriculum, with less focus on specific technical training and more on skills like critical thinking and problem solving.

The report, "College Learning for the New Global Century," which drew on a monthlong survey of both employers and recent college graduates, recommends a series of steps that colleges should take to prepare students for the modern work force.

"We are seeing a lot of graduates who have specific skills and interview well -- technical interviews," a corporate official who participated in a news conference about the report said. "What we rarely see is the ability to use the right-hand side of the brain -- creativity, working in a team," said the official, Wayne C. Johnson, a vice president at Hewlett-Packard.

In the survey, "How Should Colleges Prepare Students to Succeed in Today's Global Economy?", 305 executives companies that employ at least 25 people were asked what they looked for in a job candidate. The top three choices were "teamwork skills," "critical thinking and analytic reasoning skills," and "oral/written communication." Only 9 percent of those polled listed "able to work with numbers/statistics" as one of the top two skills they were seeking.

Recommendations in the report were loosely tied to the survey but were mainly a product of a project the association started in 2005, Liberal Education and America's Promise, or LEAP. The recommendations included the need for colleges to integrate the study of civics and sciences into the whole curriculum as well to offer hands-on learning, such as internships.

One panelist said the report was a wake-up call to much of the educational system, which is trapped in an outdated "cold war curriculum."

"It is still surprising and news to lots of people that the kinds of skills that are discussed in this report are the skills that are the bankable skills in the 21st century," said the panelist, Anthony P. Carnevale, a senior fellow at the Education Sector, a think tank in Washington. As evidence, he said, people who test well in problem solving tend to earn as much as $60,000 more per year than those who do not.

Representatives of the association said they planned to distribute the report to business leaders and college administrators, like career counselors. The report urges changes in colleges of all sizes, not only in the smaller ones often associated with the liberal arts.

One of the institutions praised in the report, for encouraging the development of entrepreneurship skills across academic disciplines, was the University of Rochester. Its provost, Charles E. Phelps, said the university had already incorporated the report's recommendations. In his health-economics class, for example, Mr. Phelps brings back high-performing students to act as moderators for groups working on much more difficult problems than are found in the homework. He said the groups must then find the answers on their own.

"It's deliberately a group-learning exercise," he said in an interview. The students "learn the material a lot better" than they would without the exercise. "I am morally certain of that," he said.