The state’s colleges and universities are under increasing pressure from the state and the business community to produce graduates who are ready for the work force.
But at a legislative hearing last week, Robert L. Carothers, president of the University of Rhode Island, warned that at a time of rapid change, focusing on job-specific skills, as many want the schools to do, could be extremely counterproductive.
“There’s a great deal of difference between how CEOs look at these questions and how HR people look at these questions,” Carothers told the House Finance Committee on Tuesday. “When CEOs talk about positions and look to the future, they are really talking about a classic liberal arts program where people develop thinking skills and learn how to adapt to change. They see the global picture in their people.”
Human-resources experts, on the other hand, “want to spend the least money they can on training within their organization,” Carothers said. “They’re looking, in a very finite way, at the skills they need to have for tomorrow, and I mean literally tomorrow, when [college graduates] come into that work force.”
Facing that disconnect, Carothers said, “we shouldn’t let ourselves be dragged into a narrow, time-limited way of thinking about what students should learn in school. It’s very important that they have the capacity to lead and manage in a world of constant, accelerating change, and that’s quite different than learning specific job skills.”
Carothers made his remarks at a special Finance Committee meeting to discuss the future of higher education in the state, with representatives of the R.I Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the R.I. Office of Higher Education, the R.I. Economic Development Corporation and the presidents of URI, the Community College of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College.
A similar meeting was held last December, that time focusing on the connections between elementary and secondary education, higher education and the business community’s needs.
“As colleges are saying kids aren’t coming in college-ready, businesses are saying that we’re not getting kids work-ready,” said Committee Chairman Steven M. Constantino, D-Providence. “In manufacturing specifically they’re saying … that colleges and universities aren’t meeting the needs of what we’re looking for. They’re not saying that in a contentious way, but maybe there needs to be some kind of articulation or change in that.”
But Carothers wasn’t alone in his hesitation to train too specifically. Jean Burritt Robertson, director of research and development at EDC, also noted the changing job market.
“People have to prepare for an ever-changing job scene,” she said. “You can’t really train for a single job anymore, because jobs change constantly, and workers need to embrace lifelong learning, because the innovation economy is something that changes so rapidly. The skills of today are going to be different tomorrow.”
Adelita Orefice, director of the R.I. Department of Labor and Training, said the issue isn’t necessarily a lack of vocational skills, but a lack of fundamental skills that allow workers to learn what they need to know for a specific job.
“The way we do work in this country has changed significantly,” she said. “It’s much more technological, it’s much more face to face, and there’s much more problem solving involved. So what you see and what you’re hearing is, it’s not just kids coming out of high school, but our incumbent work force people who need to improve their skills but don’t have the requisite math skills or writing skills to do that, because 20 years ago they didn’t need that level of math to do their jobs.”
Peter McWalters, the commissioner of elementary and secondary education, said Rhode Island is making strides on that front. “I have this image that we’re at least narrowing in on the issue of performance measures and transition placements,” he said.
And he added that if done correctly, basic skills and job-specific training may be able to work hand in hand, at least in elementary and secondary education, to develop a student who can go on to college or enter the work force.
“I would like to think that we would never start thinking we were training kids for [a specific] job. We can’t be doing that,” he said. “But at the same time, a carpentry training program can be approached as if you’re teaching carpentry dead-end or teaching problem-solving with the kind of reading and the kind of analysis that is still developing the right habits of mind.”
“When a young person ends that program,” he added, “they can be as well-positioned to be a lifelong learner as somebody coming out of a science program.”
