As funding for public universities drops and tuition prices increase, students are questioning the net value of a college education. The 2018 McGraw-Hill Future Workforce Survey found that fewer than half of both graduating students and potential employers feel that colleges are imparting the skills and knowledge students need in order to graduate job-ready. Students want assurance that their costly education will give them better job prospects and higher wages. Universities have therefore responded to decreasing enrollment rates by emphasizing in-demand job skills in their curriculums. This shift towards demand-driven education has brought with it an influx of courses on emergent technology.
Digital technology is a young field compared to subjects like math or poetry, which universities have had centuries to learn how to teach. The first computer science university degree program was established at Purdue in 1962. This is compared to the mid 1800s establishment the college itself boasts on its website. Often materials on emerging technological subjects just don’t exist yet, and when they do, they quickly become outdated. Google Scholar lists over half a million publications concerning machine learning released in the past three years alone, and the AI Index Annual Report for 2018 reports increasing growth in the number of papers published annually on the subject since 2014.
The process of curriculum change in universities isn’t equipped to handle such rapid change in relevant course content. The Chronicle of Education’s Alexandra Logue describes the hefty amount of objective scientific data behind standard course proposals, meant to prove to administration that new courses will foster student success. Emergent subjects generally haven’t been taught for long enough to collect such data. And yet according to a study sponsored by textbook overlord Pearson, classes on new technological fields are some of the fastest growing at universities.
If universities want to meet the demands of students and create financially successful alumni, they must create and maintain programs in rapidly advancing technological subjects. It seems likely that the financial necessity of demand-driven education will motivate universities to adapt administrative procedures to make this process easier. Whether untested or experimental tech classes will prove successful in preparing students for future careers will dictate changes made to their structure after their addition to curriculums.
Ley Aldinger 