What good education is

There is a 'demand' that education provides real world experience. This is not a new idea, but has its limitations when it comes to college education. Real world experience can only be achieved in the real world, which means applying specific job skills. How much general knowledge and skills does anyone need to bring to the job? On average a company wants applicants to have a positive attitude plus proficiency in writing, reading, math and specific knowledge related to the industry. This means competency with written and spoken words, numbers, decimals, fractions, percentages as well as statistics and probability. While companies will teach any employee the specifics they need for a job, many industries require tremendous background information and analytical skills, including planning, implementing and trouble shooting. The latter are the realm of modern college education; professional degrees.

If colleges were to teach real world skills, why not go to the real world directly and skip college? Which begs the question what colleges could teach people that the real world would expect everyone to be able to do beyond basic reading, writing and math? What skills, abilities, essential knowledge, mastering unfamiliar ideas and concepts are people to have for '21st Century' jobs? Well, higher education learning includes

• learning to learn
• gathering knowledge
• developing creativity
• solving problems
• thinking logically, i.e., presenting, explaining and criticizing arguments

A word about critical thinking. Critical thinking is to education reform what survival of the fittest is to evolution. It is a caricature of the real thing, a gross over simplification and somewhat misleading. Colleges, it has been said, do not increase critical thinking skills (Academically Adrift, Arum and Rosak, 2010, U of Chicago Press). So if that is the essence of higher education, students and the nation indeed do not get what they are paying for. The problem seems two fold. Many degrees are indeed tailored towards industry training and thus teach professional development and not necessarily generic critical thinking. Second, most colleges, and in particular the well known (competitive) colleges attract students whose critical thinking skills are already well developed and thus higher education does not necessarily add do an already developed skill.

And a final note. Education reform often assumes that all students are evenly capable and standardized testing is able to test the value of education, often assumed to mean the quality of the teacher, the only variable in the reform movement (if we fire all the bad teachers based on this testing, so goes the reasoning, then all students will reach proficiency). Not reaching proficiency is therefore a seen as a sign of deficiency in instruction rather than student ability. A real threat to higher education is the outside expectation of it being an industry with a measurable product.

Next: International and national education programs