THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 21, 1997 TAG: 9702211085
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Keith Monroe
LENGTH: 80 lines
It's an old debate. At one extreme are ivory-tower academics who believe higher education should produce civilized minds. At the other are practical men of business who regard higher education as a glorified trade school and expect a reliable product.
Sounds like a caricature, but a new report suggests the stereotypes are alive and well. The Business-Higher Education Forum brought together Fortune 500 executives and top academics to try to bridge the gap. Their report is ``Spanning the Chasm: Corporate and Academic Cooperation to Improve Work Force Preparation.''
As the title implies, the ivory tower is in danger of being razed. Academics are under pressure from students, parents and employers to justify the high cost of higher education.
The report features research that shows how wide the chasm really is. Business leaders fault higher education for being unwilling or slow to change, for a narrow view of fields of study, for paying inadequate attention to career preparation, for expecting support without accountability and for running inefficient operations. Those are good, hard-headed business-like complaints.
On the other side of the divide, academics complain that business leaders expect major changes too quickly, provide vague descriptions of the skills and knowledge they seek, send inconsistent messages from different parts of the corporation, fail to differentiate between education and training and focus too much on profit.
You can almost see town and gown squaring off - or pinstripes and leather elbow patches. Each side is living up to its stereotype admirably. As the report states, ``Corporate leaders are convinced that university employees . . outdone, ``academic leaders are equally sure that corporations have little respect for the campus and that U.S. universities are in fact world-class.''
What we've got here is a failure to communicate. But luckily that's not the whole story. Employers actually concede that today's graduates are as good as their predecessors - maybe better - but that ``the expectations for performance are much higher today than ever before.''
Employers worry about communications skills, teamwork, flexibility and ethics. One CEO complains that ``deficiencies in composition, reading, logic and clarity of thought processes are becoming more pronounced.'' Interestingly, many of those are skills once highly prized and inculcated by the denizens of the ivory tower, so maybe the gap isn't unbridgeable.
Universities can surely be faulted for teaching too much trendy nonsense and for not demanding rigor. But too much TV, Nintendo and the Internet and not enough prose and poetry, mathematics and logic are not the fault of colleges alone but of public schools, parents, the culture and the students themselves.
Neither business nor academe can address such global problems, but some of the obvious tensions between the two can be alleviated. A third survey, this time of recently hired graduates, is illuminating. While the graduates pronounced the college experience worth the cost and a passport to better employment, they voiced complaints similar to those of the CEOs.
Graduates, too, were disappointed in the disconnect between academe and the workplace. In particular they complained about the quality of career and academic counseling, about the lack of faculty with hands-on experience and the shortage of ``courses directly related to the world of work.''
The solution isn't to throw Shakespeare, Mozart and Aristotle overboard. A liberal education in a core curriculum is still a fine preparation for many careers and for a rich life. But it is time for many universities to come down to earth and meet the world of work (and those who are paying big bucks to prepare for it) halfway.
The report calls for closer cooperation between faculty and corporate leaders, more course work in which businesses and colleges cooperate, more explicit demands from corporations for the specific skills they need and more feedback from recent alumni to campus on where their education has fallen short.
The report quotes the president of a community college, the sort of school that's a lot closer to the world of employment than most universities. He says ``We're training and educating people for economic participation, and the sooner we educators realize that, the better we'll do our job.'' Amen. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is editor of the editorial page of The Virginian-Pilot.