At the dawn of the 20th century, the emerging industrial economy demanded that American colleges evolve from a curriculum that had focused almost solely on preparation for a handful of professions, such as law and the clergy, to one that was more vocational in nature.
Entirely new higher-education institutions — including the land-grant universities founded a few decades earlier — were started with the intention that disciplines like engineering, education, and architecture were subjects and majors that students should pursue in college. In 1908, even Harvard’s president, Charles W. Eliot, endorsed the idea of electives in the curriculum, a clear indication that no longer could any one person really know everything worth knowing through a single major.
Now, more than a century later, higher-education institutions find themselves in a similar situation. This time, however, it’s the digital economy instead of the industrial economy demanding a new set of skills. The problem is that the taxonomy of academic majors that broadened significantly over the past hundred years can no longer keep pace with the churn of knowledge needed to compete in nearly every profession.
Assumption College is doing the former; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign the latter. Idea Lab looks at why, how, and what’s at stake.
As the work-force analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies showed in a 2015 report, so-called hybrid jobs — which require a set of skills that aren’t as neatly packaged as a major in college — are growing quickly. For example, the report said employers’ demand for skills in digital marketing and mobile development had doubled over five years, and demand for data-science skills had tripled. Even colleges known for reforming their curriculum are often unable to move fast enough, nor is it worthwhile for them to do so, given the speed of change in many industries.
The future of work calls for something more radical: the elimination of academic majors as we have come to know them.
While cross-disciplinary research has long been a focus of many scholars, majors for the most part continue to be controlled by departments that are cut off from one another. The current collection of majors is how faculty members are organized on many campuses, and how budgets are allocated between schools and departments.
One urgent need is to make what students study in college truly span all academic disciplines. Right now, in choosing a major, undergraduates automatically narrow their focus at a time when they need both breadth and depth. The learning that is called for has been referred to as T-shaped: The vertical bar of the T represents deep understanding of one subject (the current conception of the major). But just as critical is the horizontal stroke, which allows people to work across a variety of complex subject areas with ease and confidence.
Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University, in his book Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (MIT Press, 2017), has suggested a complementary learning model that he calls “humanics.” It blends technical, social, and data skills, and, in the process, develops “higher-order mental skills” like critical thinking, systems thinking, entrepreneurship, and cultural agility, enabling people to easily toggle among various jobs and tasks.
In such a scenario, we can imagine clusters of study designed around the knottiest problems facing the world — supplies of food, water, and energy; climate change; digital literacy; the future of work itself.
Dispensing with the historical array of majors might also ensure that colleges don’t simply copy one another’s lineups of programs, but rather create collections of subjects that play to institutional strengths.
Hybrid jobs, which call for a set of skills that aren’t as neatly packaged as a college major, are growing quickly.
Take, for example, Arizona State University, where I’m a special adviser to the president. It has created entirely new schools and colleges, where students can earn bachelor’s degrees in innovation in society and the science of health-care delivery. As the university’s president, Michael Crow, has asked, Why does every institution need a political-science department? A chemistry department? “We should be offering students various pathways for learning while retaining the grounding knowledge,” he says.
Another key reform is to put an expiration date on these new pathways of learning. Colleges are adept at starting majors but almost incapable of stopping them. Each new cluster of knowledge should be reviewed every year for necessary changes and every five years to determine if it should be dissolved or extended.
Finally, don’t force students to choose one of these knowledge pathways before they set foot on campus, as many colleges do now with majors. Give them an opportunity in their first year — or preferably starting through online exploration the summer before — to find the appropriate fit for their interests.
Over the past year, several national surveys conducted by Gallup and Strada Education Network have shown a disconnect between what students learn in college, their majors, and their ability to find a fulfilling life and career. More than half of 90,000 people surveyed, for example, said they would change their major, institution, or degree if they had to do it all over again. The more relevant their college courses were in their work and lives, adults said, the more likely they were to feel that their education was worth the cost.
Just as at the turn of the last century, higher education must respond with new educational pathways to match the complexity of society and the economy of tomorrow.
Jeffrey J. Selingo is founding director of the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership, a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University, and author of There Is Life After College: What Parents and Students Should Know About Navigating School to Prepare for the Jobs of Tomorrow (William Morrow, 2016).
