Human life and its aspirations are now being charted across timelines that are very different from those throughout most of the twentieth century. This is true even if we merely consider middle-class aspirations, which show a remarkable mutual affinity worldwide.
A range of well-known medical, economic, and sociological reasons are behind this change. The relevance of this shift to the relation between education, life and career is graphically articulated by Jeffrey J. Selingo, in his fascinating and provocative book, There is life after college: what parents and students should know about navigating school to prepare for the jobs of tomorrow.
‘Imagine a timeline of your life, with birth on the left and death on the right: our working careers are shifting to the right — we’re starting later and ending later.’
Not that our working lives are shrinking in time — quite the reverse is true — enhanced medical technology has prolonged human life and working potential beyond what was easily specifiable retirement age in the past.
One of the radical claims made by Selingo is that in the future, college will go from being ‘just one time’ to being ‘just in time’. That is, instead of a phase that begins in the late-teens and ending in the early twenties, it will simply be the beginning of a lifelong learning platform that one can step on and off whenever one needs additional education and training to further or switch careers. He gives the example of the ‘open loop university’, developed in 2014 by Stanford’s design school as a way of re-imagining the college experience. In this system, a student admitted to college would have six years to use however and whenever they wished to. They could start college whenever they felt they were ready — be it eighteen or twenty-four, pull out after two years, work for a few years, and then loop back into college. No matter where they lived when they were looped out, the students could use the remainder of their six-year college period to re-matriculate in their thirties, forties, or fifties. Not only would the fresh phase of education re-energise their personal potential and careers, but they would also accelerate research and learning on campus with their enhanced life and professional experience.
In a world where knowledge is constantly evolving at lightning pace, the concept of the open loop university raises the pointed question whether college should have a conventional end-point. And even if it should, whether that point should come so early in life and close off the option of renewing education for the rest of it. The question demands serious attention, and yet I’m not so sure about the end of the traditional phase of college education, if only because we’re primed to learn at that fresh phase between the teens and the twenties in ways that don’t quite return to us later, though it is beyond doubt that we continue to learn and grow in a range of other ways throughout life. Nonetheless, there is something real about this restlessness with the concentration of college education at a single, early phase of one’s life — particularly if that education is primarily targeted at preparing the student for professional life.
Fragmented career trajectory
It is going to be increasingly difficult for a one-time college education to prepare a student for the long trajectory of professional life that follows college, one that looks more and more fragmented in comparison with the single and linear career trajectories of the past. We now live in a world where it is impossible to predict what specific job markets will look like even in two or four years at a time.
And yet that’s the pitch one hears from the vocational majors — that they will get you a job. However, not only particular jobs, but the larger professional careers that frame them are now highly changeable and require a constant updating of skill and sensibility; to say nothing of the fact that now more than ever before, people are switching career trajectories entirely, or eagerly seeking to do so.
The rich years between teenage and adulthood still remain the best phase of life for a certain kind of sustained learning. This is not only due to reasons pertaining to cognitive development, but also with regard to the challenges and responsibilities, social, economic and psychological, that most people juggle in their lives. But in the face of a global reality where it is increasingly impossible to link a one-time college education to a singular career trajectory, much less a particular job, what is the best structure and content of this education? What indeed, is the best use of this phase of one’s life?
Depth with breadth
Selingo tells us about his conversation with Jim Spohr, a computer scientist leading IBM’s university partnerships, whose job is to ensure synergy between academic training and IBM’s needs, and to attract university talent to the corporation. Spohr says that the range of IBM’s industrial activities — nanotechnology, quantum computing, systems research, modelling of industries and entire cities — make it impossible for people specialising in a single subject to thrive in its environment. The expert in a single subject, the product of a traditional undergraduate education, is one who embodies pure depth, or vertical expertise in a chosen discipline.
The ideal employee, on the other hand, comes out of a college education that has depth along with breadth or range. The importance of deep expertise in a subject remains, but the complexity and the rapid changeability of today’s workplace demand more than that. Ideally, a diversified general education, a crucial part of a broad undergraduate education, should enable the individual to work with confidence across a range of challenging fields.
Such a wide-ranging, foundational undergraduate education is the best use of this crucial and sensitive phase of one’s life in view of the rapidly changeable professional worlds of the future. This is the best edifice of open loop education, which can be supplemented by brief modules of training at periodic intervals for the rest of one’s life.
The author’s most recent book is College: Pathways of Possibility (Bloomsbury, 2018). Twitter: @saikatmajumdar
