In our universities and other higher institutions, teaching, learning, assessment, and research must ensure graduates’ employability and marketability.
Universities should therefore focus their efforts on the needs of the working life by combining vocational training with theoretical and practical knowledge, with a special emphasis on innovative forms and methods of teaching, practical training, and collaboration with industry and other sectors of the economy.
For instance, students majoring in education should have “residency periods” spanning their four years of study at local primary and secondary schools that count toward their teaching practice evaluation. Work-life skills are not developed during the four-week teaching practicum! This applies to students in other faculties as well. The learning should be tailored to the needs of the labor market and involve the development of general skills and workshop experience, which are highly valued by employers.
As universities are at the centre of the educational-workplace continuum, they should reevaluate their curriculum, pedagogical approaches, modalities of assessment, ambience and aesthetics of their learning environment, and infrastructure adequacy. In the past five years, more people have enrolled in college, which is a positive trend.
However, this has serious quality implications, given that there have been no proportional increases in staff numbers and physical facilities, and the criteria for admitting students, particularly for postgraduate programs, now permits candidates who cannot meet the intellectual requirements of their courses to enroll. This has long-term negative effects on our nation’s socioeconomic well-being.
Many of our graduates are unattractive to prospective employers due to a lack of generic thinking abilities or soft skills (unless they join the public sector, where accountability for performance and deliverables is a “outlier” function!).
Employers today emphasize linguistic and literacy abilities, including soft skills such as communication ability, numeracy, critical thinking, learning, and basic computer literacy, according to a report by Unesco on graduate unemployment. As they are not part of the curriculum, our colleges generate graduates who are typically lacking in all or the majority of these skills. Universities must ensure that students acquire both content-specific and generalized abilities.
These competencies consist of communication, critical thinking and problem-solving, teamwork, information management, statistics and data analysis, entrepreneurship, and leadership.
Many grads utilize social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail, but not for conceptualization, mastery, or the pursuit of knowledge. Facts and theories included in books and periodicals have a short shelf life, thus learning skills are also essential.
University-acquired knowledge is purely latent, discipline-specific, and transferable only to a small and typically inconsequential section of the employment market. What is the usefulness, for instance, of our postgraduate programs’ evaluation standards of 70% tests (learning and repetition) and 30% ongoing assessment? How can a master’s or doctoral student stimulate his or her intellect?
Employers no longer use qualifications to select individuals for fixed and routine roles, and pedagogies must be process-oriented, as is the case in universities in Canada, the United States, Australia, Finland, and the United Kingdom, where a specific skills profile is embedded in the curriculum or a separate mandatory skills development program is conducted.
As a part of content delivery, university pedagogical strategies must incorporate generic skills.
The participation of students in the production of knowledge and learning of generic skills should be increased.
Lastly, nothing is more fundamental to the learning experience than assessment. Students devote less than 10 percent of their time to academic work that is not assessed. Studies conducted in schools have revealed that students with high exam scores are frequently unable to apply facts and formulas learned in the classroom to real-world situations.
It is time for colleges to abandon the current “jug and mug” model of education, which regards the lecturer as the distributor and the students as passive recipients.
The author is a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Texas A&M University.