Updated article originally published April 7, 2015.
In recent years, there have been a growing number of discussions surrounding the value of university degrees—especially in a world where employers now place such a high emphasis on skills. Often, the argument against degrees is first evidenced at the K-12 levels with problems of disengaged students who lack early classroom success and suffer a self-fulfilling prophecy deterring them from pursuing certain majors in university and college. Students who encounter difficulty with science and math in K-12 often resign themselves to that fate rather than overcoming their difficulties; these students are less likely to enter STEM programs in higher education. In this arena, there might be a lingering conception that actual degrees and skills are in conflict.
However, there is a growing notion that not all learning habits and skills are borne out of traditional classroom approaches. Many institutions are seeking out educational solutions in both the education research and edtech sectors, now incorporating more skills-based learning into their curriculums. Profiling some of these advancements may lend credence to university adoption of approaches more suited to different learners.
Where have Skills Been?
To some extent, skills-based learning has always been prevalent in universities. It is useful to think about how skills are embedded into academic training, but may lose their visibility in their contextual or disciplinary origin.
To start, what are the skills often referred to in the same breath as the “employability” buzzword? According to a field survey article from David Billing in the academic journal Higher Education, “much has been written about the importance of the graduates from our higher education programmes having the abilities which employers are said to prize most, and these are so-called generic skills such as problem-solving, communication, team-work and critical thinking”. These are sometimes referred to as “21st century skills’’, and because of their importance, assessment and teaching of 21st century skills is widely incorporated into contemporary instructional approaches. However, Billing questions the degree to which skills are actually transferable, noting that cognitive psychology “suggests instead that automatic transfer to new contexts of these desirable higher abilities should not be assumed, and procedures for generalisation should be in-built”. Thus, we may need to rethink some of the ways we teach skills.
Change and Innovation in the Classroom
Billing notes that due to these notions, universities have been pivoting some programming more towards vocations, and structuring programs to have these components built in. A simple example of this is cooperative education (co-op) programs, which place students in a workplace and value this in the form of credits. Some universities emphasize the role of these programs in their degrees, such as the University of Waterloo, which is renowned for its co-op connections to high profile tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook.
Cooperative education succeeds by emphasizing realationality between academia and real world problems, and aside from these programs, many instructors are applying creative teaching methods with the same aim. Such is the case with the University of Saskatchewan’s Sean Maw, who has been experimenting with the use of virtual reality (VR) in his engineering classes. VR offers a type of technological-experiential learning that can help students visualize problem-solving scenarios.
Higher education in general is showing observable shifts to non-traditional, applied programs and including offerings jointly awarded with colleges. The intent here is to take advantage of differing approaches, and find value in the immersion in both. Examples include partnerships between McMaster University and Mohawk college (Bachelor of Technology) Western University and Fanshawe College (Bachelor of Science, Nursing), York University and Seneca College (Bachelor of Arts, Journalism), and Carleton University and Algonquin College (Bachelor of Information Technology). Many of these programs even have cooperative learning components.
Valuing Degrees
While it could be said that degrees are secondary to skills, higher education certainly supports skill-building. Though always embedded into higher education, the emphasis on skills has become more pronounced through new program tweaks. This suggests that universities are reacting to the desires of employers, and thinking through ways to sharpen the general skills by way of a grounded and applied transferability
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