I was was recently reading Bryan Caplan’s article, “The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone” in the Jan/Feb 2018 Issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Caplan made a statement that stopped me in my tracks:
The disconnect between college curricula and the job market has a banal explanation: Educators teach what they know—and most have as little firsthand knowledge of the modern workplace as I do. Yet this merely complicates the puzzle. If schools aim to boost students’ future income by teaching job skills, why do they entrust students’ education to people so detached from the real world? Because, despite the chasm between what students learn and what workers do, academic success is a strong signal of worker productivity.
This got me thinking about my own academic experience…
I’m a proud ’00 graduate of Indiana University’s Instructional Systems Technology Master’s program. My two years in this program were thought provoking and expansive. I read mountains of material, engaged in rich dialogue with professors and fellow students, and developed treasured friendships that endure today.
Big shift
I went into the program thinking I would continue my career in K-12, but quickly realized that my passion revolved around Human Performance Technology, and in helping people in the workplace get better at their jobs, faster. I had no idea that that shift in focus was going to be one of the best decisions I would ever make. Perhaps I’ll share more about that later, but for now…
Three things were instrumental in this shift:
- My quick alignment with James A. Pershing, Ph.D., who, in addition to his academic pursuits, was working with corporate education programs in the U.S. and beyond.
- Working through his real-world case studies taken straight from his client deliverables.
- Having a curriculum where we, as students, were able to work on real projects, with real clients.
The result is that I was launched into my first job as an instructional designer at Walgreens in their Performance Development department with tools in my toolbox and the confidence to hit the ground running.
So, what’s my point?
The most important thing that made my IST Master’s experience incredibly useful was the fact that my main advisor had real world experience and put me in the position of doing school work that mirrored, fairly closely, what I was going to be doing when some company out there was going to start paying me.
I think I.U. is doing it mostly right. However, I wonder if they are really tapping into the real world as powerfully as they could be? For example, there are a lot of alumni out here doing the work. How could they leverage that? And, I wonder if other programs are setting graduates–at least those headed into corporate education–up for success?
For the sake of our future learners, I sure hope so.