I played golf with a friend of mine yesterday who is considerably older. Successful financial planner that is closing in on his own retirement. We got to chatting about college and I told him I was going back to complete my degree now. That lead to a further discussion about college in general and he said to that, in his opinion, really the college degree is really nothing more than a formality to his business. In some cases, even a Masters degree is not significant enough to really add any value.
It got me thinking, can any place really teach a person the most critical skills that are needed to survive in the business world?
Most people would agree that you need critical thinking (which is really just problem solving), research skills, and communication skills to succeed in any job. The level of these that is needed depends on the job you are going after, but you still need these just the same.
I am starting to believe that no matter what the school teaches, you can’t really teach these skills. Someone is going to read this and get mad that I said you can’t teach research skills. Yes, you can teach people how to do simple research, just like you can point them to a stack of encyclopedias or google and tell them to look it up. What you can’t teach is the part of research where you have to identify the problem first, and then find the answer without asking you co-worker.
I do computers for a living, and half of the research that I do is not actually finding the answer, it’s finding the real problem so I can look for the right answer.
So if college, either UOP or otherwise, can’t really teach these skills, then why are we paying for the schooling in the first place.
