University Education: Adapting to Emerging Job Markets
As the years go by, the world continues to experience technological transformations that affect all parts of our lives. However, one of the most important aspects that has not changed over the years is education. It is necessary to determine whether traditional universities are prepared to absorb new emerging jobs. To determine this argument, one must know that the school system as known today was invented during the 17th century. A competition system that ignores individual skills and forces students to learn information shown to them to later regurgitate it on a paper to determine their “intelligence”.
As mentioned previously, the school system was created during the 17th century. During this time people were being educated mostly to work in production companies. This method allowed having all students sit in rows, raise their hands to be able to ask questions, and regurgitate the information that was memorized into a multiple choice test. Although the argument of the school’s system being old and undeveloped is important when comparing advances on every field of our lives except schools. It is important to admit that schools present students with a lot of information on different fields to build a cultured and well-informed student rather than someone who knows nothing but what their field teaches them.
It is said that by 2022, 133 million jobs will appear due to advances in technology. Many universities base their way of teaching on a method of competition among students. All students compete against each other to get better grades than their peers. With high-demand majors, usually those students who have better grades than the others are the ones who are accepted to study such majors instead of focusing on skills and different learning methods. Many countries like Finland have acquired a school system that works more with students helping each other instead of competing with each other. Interest comes hand in hand with learning and studying. Meaning that those students who might have skills within the computing area might not be great at history courses and will be affected when trying to enter their field of study against students who have good grades in all areas.
Nowadays, school systems provide students with loads of information that they must memorize and show in a test. Many times all this information is forgotten or will not be present in the student’s life ever again. For example, mathematics, everyone knows that math is an important subject no matter what field you are studying, but classes like Calculus III or more advanced mathematics are useless unless someone is trying to be a theoretical math major. Fields like engineering, computer science, or others work and make calculations with computers. Meaning that in most of those jobs, software like Excel is being used to store information and make calculations, not a human’s brain. In the traditional way, students are accustomed to memorize what they are taught; this means that many people do not really understand what they see and over time forget it.
To conclude, universities are not fully qualified to absorb new jobs that are about to emerge. The universities have a very old educational system which makes a reconstruction of the educational system necessary. They also need more support in the technological areas to keep afloat in the near future. This is why you should opt for other types of more modern studies not only based on the old idea of having to go to university.