The topic for this month’s newsletter articles is the reestablishment of the connection between businesses and educational institutions. Businesses are loudly complaining today that university graduates aren’t qualified for employment, and we’ve been discussing how businesses and educational institutions should firmly connect or reconnect to begin solving the issue.
A vital part of this evolution must be that education undergoes a fundamental change.
Unusual Solutions Breed Unusual Solutions
In almost any field, you’ll find examples of the “unusual solution” chain phenomenon. A problem or issue arises, and an unusual solution is applied. Unfortunately, the only result that can come from an unusual solution is the need for another.
We see this all the time in business. A company adopts a complex CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software platform that users find difficult to interact with. After a while, salespeople just blow off the CRM and implement their own unusual solution: they keep track of their sales on their mobile devices, neglecting to log deals in the company CRM. Frantic to keep track of deals, the sales manager implements another unusual solution: she begins verbally checking in with salespeople to get the latest on their sales and updating CRM herself. The result is a very overworked sales manager putting in tons of unpaid overtime. She’ll probably implement yet another unusual solution of her own: taking sick time to rest up.
Let’s take a very real example in education. Some time ago, school, college, and university students started slipping and didn’t meet the standards they needed. Instead of finding ways to solve the real problem by assisting students in meeting those standards, educational institutions began lowering their standards. The first problem this created was an ever-increasing number of high school graduates who couldn’t qualify for college. After a while, colleges and universities began implementing the unusual solution of offering pre-college courses, qualifying students themselves, trying to make up for high schools’ lack of effort.
When college and university graduates weren’t employable, companies had to find unusual solutions themselves, such as implementing extra training for new employees to bring them up to an employable standard.
You can see how this one unusual solution of lowering school standards resulted in an endless chain of other unusual solutions.
Let’s Address the Actual Problem
The only way to finally solve the problem of students not meeting educational standards is not to lower them. Schools, colleges and universities must instead put the standards back where they were. They must then roll up their sleeves and do the hard work of assisting students in moving up and meeting those standards.
The Retention Issue
Education’s lowered standards have not only affected graduates’ ability to gain employment. In some cases, they may be able to get hired—but then it’s a matter of keeping that job. Unfortunately, many cannot.
When college graduates’ failure to hold jobs becomes a widespread problem, the government implements another unusual solution: forgiving student loans. This is certainly no solution for anyone, including the graduates.
Graduates meeting employment standards and being able to stay on the job cannot happen until the fundamental problem of educational standards is once again restored.
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