

College and Business Will Never be the Same - terrisv
http://steveblank.com/2011/02/15/college-and-business-will-never-be-the-same/

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PaulHoule
The flexible economy has been a threat to skill-building in many areas.

The energy industry, for instance, is facing a shortage of skilled welders. It
takes ten years of experience welding full-time to become the kind of welder
who can be depended on to weld natural gas pipeline segments or the primary
loop of a nuclear reactor.

These days, careers are so unstable that in ten years, somebody might get
shoved through job training 2 or 3 different times, never get good at
anything, and then we find that in our quest for short-term gain and the
delusion of compound interest, we don't have people with the skills we need to
keep our economy going.

~~~
droz
I can't help but think that you could manufacture robots to perform the kind
of delicate welding that you use as examples.

~~~
pjkundert
Precise, repeatable welding of carefully prepared, identical structures, in a
hygienic, controlled environment. Get a Robot.

Upside-down, lying in mud, your arms up in a noble-gas manifold, welding
titanium. Get a Man.

~~~
protomyth
Total agreement, it always amazes me how many people believe that something
that works in a factory will actually work in the field. It is unlikely that a
robot will be invented in the next 10 or 20 years that is as capable of field
work as a trained human. Skilled labor might not be academic, but it requires
a thinking mind.

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rubidium
Counterpoint: Teaching yourself how to become a domain expert is a life-skill
of the 21st century. Colleges should teach you how to become a domain expert
by teaching you the skills to do so, and giving you the opportunity to do so
in a specific domain.

"I'm good at collaborating but can't actually make anything" seems to be the
result of the system Blank discussed. You just can't replace 3 years of domain
expertise building with 1.5 and assume nothing will change.

Expect for the occasional project/elective during undergrad, I would leave the
learning of how to collaborate to post-collegiate studies. Learning how to
learn is the goal of college.

~~~
PaulHoule
Sure, but no matter how you slice it, you need to put 10,000 hours in to
become an expert in something. That's a lot.

~~~
protomyth
Has there actually been any rigorous study of the 10,000 hour figure? I really
don't believe it or the Gladwell's book because it discounts actual talent. It
seems like the great a way to keep someone from finding their actual talent,
much like giving awards for participation and having no "winners".

~~~
PaulHoule
I don't know about rigorous studies, but it seems like common sense to me
(though you might get that 10k down to 5k or 3k in some situations)

Most people take at least 5 years to get a PhD, pro athletes take at least
that long to get established, even Justin Bieber worked really hard at making
music when he was a little kid. 10k hours is also roughly the timescale
involved with children learning language.

You can certainly see people who seem come out of the blue, like Sylvester
Stallone's success with Rocky, you usually find that there was a lot of hard
work in the background. Stallone was playing bit parts, writing scripts, and
lifting weights for a few years before he got his break. Certainly his acting,
writing, directing, and bodybuilding progressed considerably after he got big.

~~~
protomyth
I really not sure it is common sense. I believe you have to have some talent
or any amount of practice isn't going to help. I could spend 10,000 hours
trying to sing, but it is not going to help, I just don't have that type of
voice. I don't discount people's hard work at improving a talent, but I don't
think the hours get you there. The all-it-takes-is-10,000-hours vibe of the
book seems to be incorrect.

~~~
PaulHoule
Sure, natural talent helps, but you need natural talent + 10k hours to get
world class performance. There's no shortcut, unless you count being in the
right place at the right time and having no competition.

~~~
protomyth
I don't think natural talent "helps", I truly believe it is a prerequisite.

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alexwestholm
The trend of focused education has arisen in tandem with ever increasing
numbers of people entering the workforce. In that light, it's hard to argue
that specialization isn't hard - not only is it difficult to train people to
be generalists, it's also difficult to hire them, and why bother if you're
just looking for a disposable entry level warm-body? The kind of general savvy
required to interact well with across disciplines isn't _that_ hard to
cultivate, and many top schools do, but it's probably not feasible for the
sort that attend trade schools like the one mentioned.

Not only would this be a strained approach for most students at such a school,
but it would detract from the number one goal of trade schools: providing
students with skills that can immediately secure a job. As mentioned earlier,
generalists are more difficult to hire... giving a solid credential indicating
that someone has base level design skills is much easier for the graduate to
sell than "Sure, I can do design a fabric for you. Then I can market it and
set up logistical channels to get worldwide distribution and ... all based on
my time at X university!"

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sudont
This is essential, I've seen way too many designers who couldn't understand
the dynamic medium they were designing for (web or desktop), and far more
developers who either forewent UX completely, or micro-managed the designer
into irrelevance.

There are broad-area programs out there, however they're generally lacking in
any functional depth. I graduated in a "marketing communications" program that
spanned design, business, marketing and web development. Unfortunately, coming
from a semi-autodidactic background I found it to be truly superficial. It was
painful to know the proper way to build a site, versus the default dreamweaver
snippets taught. The same for design, and I can only assume the business
component too. However, the upside is still important: flexibility in approach
and thinking, meaning graduates won't think to fix a solution in the only way
they were trained (nee: "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like
a nail.)

Blank's recommendation of both broad-area and foundation is better, and could
be seen to stem from the "a-words" around here: art school. The broad-area art
degree requires the student to learn both a core discipline, along with a wide
variety of other art areas.

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TGJ
Just moments ago I finished studying for a quiz on Wednesday over jellyfish
and earthworms. I'm trying to figure out why I need to be able to dissect and
name parts of small and microscopic organisms instead of writing my report for
my Environmental Techniques class. One of the few classes that I actually feel
will prepare me for my future career because of the experience I will gain in
writing scientific reports vs. essays. I will have also spent time using field
equipment that I will most certainly use again in just a few years. I feel
that only 10 out of the 25 classes I have to take will directly help my coming
career but there is no other way for what I want to do.

I believe college degree plans contain large amounts of fluff that do not
advance a students needs to get into the job field. It used to be that a
student took college courses to make them a better person. But I've seen over
the years in my own school years that teachers no longer seem to care or
bother. My biology teacher is a self identified lazy ass that frankly hates
teaching freshman biology, my geology teacher speaks exactly from the notes,
and in the only class I care about, Geographic Information systems (a computer
class) I know more about computers than the teacher does.

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edw519
Interesting thinking, but no matter how well intentioned, I can't get
Einstein's quote out of my head:

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we
created them."

The problem with formal education's applicability to the business world isn't
with the quantity, quality, or breadth or its theory, it's with it's _lack of
practice_. Every time I return to my alma mater to discuss my business with my
professors, I come away with the same reaction, "They just don't get it." It's
hard to understand that which you have never done.

Formal education doesn't need to improve it's delivery of theory, it needs to
combine it with real-world practice _before graduation_. A single internship
usually trumps all curriculum gyrations.

Two years of theory followed by two years of practice backed by theory would
make a much more effective B.S. Are there any educator's that think outside
the box enough to make that happen?

~~~
DTrejo
At my school, almost all CS students do internships during the summer. By
sophomore year almost everyone has an internship with a tech company lined up
for the summer. My school may be is an outlier, however.

~~~
henrikschroder
At my school, getting your Master's or Bachelor's degree requires a certain
number of weeks (12? I can't remember) of work related to your field of study,
which means that almost everyone gets a summer job or two in the industry.

However, you can do this at the end of your education, which renders it less
useful. Forcing people to take it in the middle of their education would be a
lot more useful, but on the other hand it would suck if the job market tanked
and a lot of students couldn't continue their studies based on some external
cause.

~~~
zacharycohn
I went to school at RIT where almost all students were required to have
several co-ops (paid internships, basically).

For a Computer Science, you had to have 4, which means an entire year of work.
(The CS program was a 5 year program: 4 years of school interspersed with a
year of work).

Many people would get coops at Apple, IBM, Google, Microsoft, etc.

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euroclydon
I sense a deeper contradiction at work. It's clear, despite how many time the
word entrepreneur is bandied about in the essay, that the school still see its
main mission as preparing students to be future employees. And, the U.S. still
fails miserably to draw a distinction between trade education and liberal arts
education.

If a person is entrepreneurial minded, then the real world sand-box this
program is trying to create, will only annoy them, especially when considering
the tuition costs. On the other hand, if the person isn't entrepreneurial
minded enough, why should they be in that type of program to begin with? They
should be pursuing trade or pure studies, depending on their capacity and
inclination.

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indrax
TL;DR: This person likes diagrams.

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DanielBMarkham
Is it just me, or does Steve always seem to over-complicate things so much?

It's not that I don't agree with his point, but I think the problem here is
much simpler: feedback loops.

We can argue what sort of feedback is appropriate -- whether colleges should
be judged for the amount of value they bring to life, or whether they should
be judged by the job prospects of the graduates, etc. But the sad fact is that
in most criteria, many people think that the product is mis-aligned with the
needs of the customers. This is because there is no feedback loop for colleges
to evaluate when they are doing something wrong and thereby correct it.
Without a loop in place, all the theorizing in the world isn't going to make a
better college, just a prettier org chart.

I think there's a difference between saying something that's probably true and
that we can probably agree with and actually observing the results to changes
in an organization. The first thing doesn't have much of a quality criteria
except for our concurrence. The second always produces results we don't like
and makes us challenge our assumptions. That's why feedback loops always beat
theory work.

~~~
euroclydon
I'm not sure the feedback is transparent for higher education. For instance,
the consumer might not always be the student. It could be the government,
faculty, or industry.

