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Does Higher Education Actually Prepare You For Your Career? Depends.

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This article is more than 9 years old.

Have we as a society become so perverse that we are now begging colleges and universities to “relieve us” of $150k to 200k for a basic bachelor’s degree? Is it a good idea even when we know that most degrees do not guarantee that we’ll find a job that could pay back that kind of money?

At the risk of causing trouble, I wonder if in the rush to get every kid into college, did we overdo it?

These are tricky questions, and the debate over the value of education does not stop at a bachelor’s level. At the master’s and Ph.D. levels, the mismatch between what students work on and what the industry needs is sometimes even more pronounced.

As venture capitalists, we are constantly approached by graduating students looking for opportunities at Artiman or one of our portfolio companies; undergraduate, graduate and doctorate resumes come through the door constantly. Quite often we find, especially at the master’s and Ph.D. levels, that many people tout experience they believe sets them apart from the competition but in reality is not what is important when it comes to addressing real world problems and developing innovative solutions.

As an extreme example, finding someone with a master’s or Ph.D. in Bioinformatics who is excited that they can marry EMR data with genomic databases is not as ground breaking as it used to be because there are quite a few genomic databases already available and quite a few data scientists who know how to marry the two. Additionally, there are numerous sequencers who are creating more and more detailed personal genomes and the cost of mapping a genome has dropped from $100,000 to $10,000 or even less. Essentially, many technological advancements that were groundbreaking a decade ago are now more and more commonplace and the corresponding skills have become more commoditized.

These types of rapid advancements are occurring in many professional fields, and they raise a larger series of questions about the kind of educational experiences needed to really set one up for success post-graduation. While this doesn’t sound like an issue on paper, the fact that most fields are doubling their knowledge base every five to seven years means education is going to have an incredibly hard time keeping up to prepare the next generation of workers.

Going back to medical sciences, many diseases that were considered untreatable just 30 years ago are now routinely treated and if not cured or contained. It’s amazing and encouraging to see how fast we can change our world. However, as these fields advance rapidly, we must ask: How quickly are schools and colleges adapting their curriculum to incorporate new learnings so students are immediately ready to progress the field after graduation?  The answer is quite clearly, not fast enough.

Another concrete example, the field of architecture, should be evolving rapidly to incorporate new materials, new computing paradigms, and new technologies to create new built environments that are truly next generation. But teaching techniques rarely foster research in these areas, leaving crops of traditionally-trained architects struggling to find jobs and spending a longer time working to get up to speed once employed. As a result, the field has ultimately stagnated. The lack of education on emerging advancements not only stifles the student’s ability to succeed, but the entire field’s rate of advancement.

Such scenarios are unfortunately true in many fields and if you think about how important so many of these practices are to our society’s everyday well being, the need to evolve education at college levels should be considered absolutely critical. Healthcare, construction and countless other professions could be more innovative, cost effective and more productive if we could simply help the educational process catch up to the current speed of innovation happening in other practices.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Several schools are starting to adopt practices to try and match the breakneck pace of advancement. Even more importantly, many schools have started multidisciplinary centers that are requiring professors and students to create programs that integrate disparate sciences with contrasting perspectives as a way to enhance learning.

For instance, Dr. Robert Calderbank at Duke University has brought together 30 faculty from humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, the Pratt School of Engineering, the Sanford School of Public Policy, the Fuqua School of Business, the School of Medicine, the Duke Library system, as well as representatives from the library and department of statistics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, to tackle “Big Data” in a remarkable way. While early days, the results are encouraging and many professors are beginning to find more ideas to work on.

Bringing it back to Artiman and our focus as investors, we believe that true disruption comes from these kinds of multi-disciplinary efforts and less from the traditional silos that still permeate so much of academia. Most importantly, breeding graduates in true multi-disciplinary environments will make them that much more attractive to the industry – as they’ve already obtained the skills that often translate into truly impactful results. We know the way forward, we now just have to commit our resources to preparing the next crop of innovators with the right tools to get there.