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Lessons For and From Cuba’s Educational System

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

In January 2012, my wife and I traveled to Cuba with Cuba Educational Travel to learn about the island, its educational system, its buildings and the country’s history.

The trip began with an overview of Cuba’s history, its political and economic systems and a broad overview of Havana and many of its cultural attractions. (For more details on the trip in general, see my travel blog www.ActiveBoomerTravel.com.)

Our primary mission, however, was to learn about the country’s educational system. We visited primary and secondary schools and some of the workshops and vocational programs that complement them, as well as one of the country’s most prestigious universities. We had lectures by and extensive chance for open discussions and questions with teachers, principals and students.

Cuba’s Commitment to Education

Cuba places an incredibly high value on education. The country dedicates about 10% of its budget to education (compared with 2% in the U.S.) and literacy rates are 98%. Classes are relatively small, with classes averaging 12 students per teacher, with a maximum of 25. (These ratios average 1:1 for severely mentally and physically-challenged students.) Education is compulsory through the ninth grade (secondary school) and high school graduation rates, although hard to measure in Cuba, are relatively high, especially in Havana and other large cities.

All education, including university and graduate school (assuming the student passes admission exams) is free and the quality is high, with elementary and secondary students consistently testing at the top of OECD’s ratings for Caribbean and Latin American countries.

The higher education system is also relatively strong. The country has almost fifty universities, plus pedagogical and polytechnic institutes that graduate an average of about 40,000 students per year. Its education and medical schools, in particular, are renowned throughout Latin America and Africa—regions which send students to study in Cuban universities and to which Cuba sends large numbers of teachers and doctors as part of the country’s large “soft diplomacy” programs.

Those who do not live close to these higher education institutions can take courses through a distance learning program which offers afternoon and evening courses through 15 different centers.

This being said, the Cuban educational system, for all its strengths, certainly has faults. As summarized by Catholic University professor Enrique Pumar, educational resources are highly vulnerable to economic cycles and graduation rates vary greatly between urban and rural schools. Moreover, Cuban educational institutions are not exactly bastions of free thought. All education is managed by, and all schools are operated by the state. All programs are, as per the country’s constitution, based on Marxist ideology.

This being said, we were generally impressed by what we saw in Cuban classrooms and what we learned speaking with administrators and teachers.

Cuba’s Primary and Secondary School System

Students attend schools for nine months a year. The school day begins at 7:50 AM and lets out at 4:50 PM, with a two hour mid-day break. This, however, is only part of the educational experience. After school, students go directly to “workshops,” for about two hours per day and another three hours on the weekend.

These workshops, whose programs are coordinated with teachers to build upon what the students are learning in school, provide opportunities to apply their school lessons to real-world tasks. Writing classes, for example, are complemented by exercises in conceiving and writing stories for, and publishing (via desktop publishing) newsletters; literature courses by writing and producing short plays, art classes by performing and even writing music, and so forth.

In addition to such “applied” programs, these workshops also provide a number of more generalized programs, such as those that teach and help demonstrate the rights and responsibilities of citizens, the history and how to address some of the needs of their communities, ecology and, for older students, sex education. High school-level workshops, are tied more closely to trades, academic specialties or even professions for which students demonstrate particular interest and aptitude.

College and trade schools

Admission into trade schools and universities are open to all who demonstrate aptitude, pass required entrance exams and possess appropriate skills (such as dexterity for skilled trades like carpentry, plumbing and metal work).

Some students go directly from secondary school to university, and those with the highest grades, admission test scores and aptitude in particular disciplines, to graduate or professional school.

Others take a less direct route that blends vocational and academic tracks. I found one program to be particularly interesting. The Havana-based Escuela Taller, is a trade school dedicated to restoring buildings in the city’s World Heritage Site historical district. Its staff consists of highly experienced trades people (masonry, carpentry, plumbing, electricity, etc.) and professionals and instructors in associated disciplines (urban planning, Spanish architecture, structural engineering and so forth).

While the program is nominally open to any 15-23-year-old boy or girl with a ninth-to-twelfth-grade education, admission is extremely competitive, with only about five percent of applicants accepted. Those who are accepted are assigned to a specific discipline, where they work with experienced trades people to learn their trades, while simultaneously taking academic courses in related disciplines.

Those who graduate from the rigorous two-year program can take one of two routes. Some go directly into the trade they have studied. Others, assuming they have completed their secondary educations (either before or part-time in the evenings during their time at Escuela Taller), may qualify for admission into university. (Although the Escuela Taller program is tailored to the needs of Havana, and are open only to city residents, other cities and provinces have similar programs.)

The Cuban education system, as evidenced by workshops and programs such as Escula Taller, focuses on integrating academic learning and the development of practical skills.

While the vast majority of this combination begins with generalized skills in primary schools, they become increasingly focused on career skills later in the education process. There are, however, a few exceptions to this broad approach of beginning with general education and skills, and gradually migrating to specialized disciplines and trades. The government considers a few areas to be sufficiently important and early focus and practice to be so critical, as to provide integrated career training from very early in the education process. These are primarily in:

  • Arts, including music, dance, theater, visual and media arts; and
  • Sports.

In both these areas, the system attempts to identify those with particular talent at very early ages and provides highly specialized integrated training programs to nurture these skills. Students are admitted at an early age, and take intensive coursework and workshops that are aligned to their specialties. They undergo regular, increasingly rigorous tests, with only the best admitted to the next level. Education in the arts culminates at Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). This highly selective conservatory, championed by and built on grounds that were selected by Fidel Castro, is located on the old golf course of an exclusive country club and is graced by lovely (albeit also quite run-down) contemporary buildings designed by famous architects. The conservatory, which selects the best of the graduates of specialized high schools, provides a rigorous and comprehensive education, with tracks aligned to each of its four artistic disciplines. Many of those who graduate are destined for lucrative careers in Cuba’s leading theaters, orchestras and dance companies and for independent careers in art, jazz and other related fields.

Implications for the U.S. and Cuba

Although the U.S. has long since migrated away from the type of educational tracking Cuba applies to arts and sports, there may well be opportunities for us to learn from Cuba’s general practice of integrating academic education and vocational training to help students better grasp the real-world application of their coursework, deepen their interests, and identify and prepare for careers in which they have interests and skills.

Such, formal, integrated programs could produce particular advantages in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), areas in which the U.S. is facing an increasingly serious skills shortage (or at least severe skills mismatch). Such a system could help address the huge leakage we are currently experiencing in our STEM pipeline (see my recent blog, The United States’ Clogged Technology Education-to-Employment Pipeline). The advantages could be especially great if the private sector becomes more actively engaged in the education process, helping schools not only identify the types of skills they will need in graduates, but also designing the academic curricula, designing and sponsoring the practical exercises and providing volunteers to show how these skills are used in actual jobs.

Speaking of STEM, we have to wonder why Cuba does not appear to focus anywhere near the level of effort on developing its STEM talent as it does on developing its artistic and sports talent—and especially its medical and pedagogical talent. As shown in a 2009 report by the Cuban National Statistical Office, see Figure Pumar’s article), 34% of the prior year’s college graduates were in medical sciences, 33% in education and 12% in sports (although art represented only 0.28% of graduates, this is probably due largely to the national dominance and selectivity of ISA).

What about math and science (other than medical disciplines)? These are among the least popular of majors, with agricultural science accounting for only 1.0 and the broader categories of sciences/math a measly 0.8. This is despite the fact that agricultural goods (especially sugar), minerals and biochemicals and pharmaceuticals (along with tourism) are already among Cuba’s largest sources of foreign exchange. Why does the country not place the level of emphasis on disciplines such as metallurgy, biology and chemistry, as it does on medicine, education and sports?

Why does Cuba not provide the same type of systematic programs for identifying particularly promising students at an early age in these areas? Or in providing the type of integrated academic/practical approaches to developing such skills as it does in sports and art?

Perhaps one day—at least once Cuba finally gets and provides ubiquitous broadband Internet access to its citizens—it could also use its educational system to create another economic opportunity. That of using its highly educated, low-cost labor force to provide information technology services to other countries.

This leads to another question—just what is the state of computer and Internet usage in Cuba in general, and in education in particular?

Computers and Internet in Education

Although information is limited, from what we have been told and have seen, schools often have up to ten computers in central computer labs. After-school workshops often have one, or more depending on level and specialty. While modest numbers of elementary and high-school students have access to home computers, many university students apparently do have their own laptops. This having been said, the value they derive from such machines is limited. The primary reason—Internet access is severely limited by a combination of factors including the country’s lack of a reliable broadband communications infrastructure, the U.S.’s embargo, the high-cost of access and the government’s own restrictions on use by its citizens.

Caveats

Although most of our group was relatively impressed by the facilities we saw, the people we met and our guide’s answers to our questions, we were under few allusions. We absolutely understand that what we saw, who we spoke with, and probably, most of what we were told, was carefully selected and approved by the government. Since none of us have specific knowledge of the Cuban educational system, we have no way of determining exactly what is true, how true it is, or how representative what we saw is reflective of the broader educational system.

This being said, the country certainly seems to be saying and—from what we saw—doing a number of the right things.

A forthcoming blog will provide my thoughts on the Cuban educational system in the context of the broader perceptions of Cuba gained from our January trip.

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Expanding the Ranks of STEM Professionals

Monday, December 26th, 2011

The U.S. industry in general, and technology-based sectors in particular, have decried the lack of STEM professionals and have called on everyone from government, educational institutions and non-profits to take steps to address the shortages. As I’ve discussed in numerous blogs, a growing number of companies (including IBM, General Electric, Intel, Exxon Mobil and many others) are taking matters into their own hands. They are sponsoring competitions and after-school workshops, funding scholarships and fellowships, helping universities create curricula and train instructors and helping their own employees identify promising career paths by providing skills maps and classes designed to prepare employees for future jobs.

Although such efforts are helpful, we need more—much more—if we are to provide an adequate pipeline of qualified STEM graduates, through all steps of the educational system, into STEM jobs. The first steps are to understand:

  • Why declining percentages of American students graduate with STEM degrees; and
  • Why so many of those that do graduate do not end up in STEM professions.

Leakage in the STEM Education Pipeline

As discussed in my July 31 blog, The United States’ Clogged Technology Education-to-Employment Pipeline, our shortage of STEM professionals begins in primary and secondary school and gets worse in every stage of the education pipeline.

According to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, less than one-third of elementary school students are considered to be either proficient or advanced in science. This percentage declines steadily, to 21%, by the time they reach 12th grade. These declines are highlighted in international comparisons, with the OECD’s 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings placing U.S. 15-year-olds below the median ranking among 30 OECD countries in each of the three tested areas. They rank 16th in reading, 21st in science and 29th in math.

These deficiencies, however, have not discouraged college-bound students from pursuing STEM majors. Despite the fact that the 2011 ACT test found only 45% of graduates prepared for college-level math courses, and only 30% prepared for science courses, the percentage of incoming freshman who initially plan to major in STEM fields has increased dramatically (to 34% in 2009) from their lows in the 1980s and 1990s.

These plans, however, don’t last long. After getting a sampling of the rigors of college-level STEM classes, many switch majors to less demanding disciplines. In fact, while the number of college graduates has increased by 29% from 2001 through 2009, the number of engineering graduates grew by only 19% and the number of computer and information science grads actually fell (by 14%). A 2011 study by McKinsey Global Institute, “An economy that works: Job creation and America’s future,” generally confirms these trends, citing a meager 0.8% per year growth in the number of STEM graduates—significantly less than fields such as business, social science, humanities and arts.

Worse still, many of those that do graduate do not end up in STEM careers. According to one of the most comprehensive U.S. studies to date, only one-third of STEM graduates actually end up with jobs in these fields (see the below cited Lowell and Salzman study).

Causes of STEM Pipeline Leakage—Follow the Money

A preponderance of industry experts, analysts and educators, as discussed in the above-referenced “Pipeline” report, place the primary blame on a range of factors. These include:

  • A culture that does not sufficiently value technical skills;
  • A student body that shuns hard work and study required of STEM disciplines; and
  • Big gaps in all levels of the educational system—from a lack of qualified teachers and mentors in primary and secondary schools, a disconnect between colleges that educate future professionals and the companies that hope to employ them and a large pool of STEM graduates that lack the skills required for the jobs companies are looking to fill; and
  • Corporate training and educational systems that are ill-suited to the continual education, skills refresh and new skills training requirements of a dynamic jobs market.

This skills mismatch, or skills gap, is becoming severe. According to McKinsey’s “An economy that works” study, 40% of companies with plans to hire in the next 12 months have had positions open for six months or longer, because they couldn’t find the right candidate—candidates with degrees in the appropriate field and/or relevant work experience. Although these needs span all types of jobs, the most difficult occupations to fill are in management, science and engineering, followed by computer programming and IT. The study also highlights a big emerging gap in statisticians and mathematicians who can handle “big data” and, in the future, fill the rapidly growing need for health care professionals.

There is, however, an alternate school of thought, not only as to the causes and remedies of a STEM skills gap, but also as to whether such a gap even exists. For example, a 2007 and a 2009 follow-up study by B. Lindsay Lowell and Hal Salzman, Steady as She Goes? Three Generations of Students through the Science and Engineering Pipeline, claim:

  • There has been no decline in the total number of STEM graduates;
  • The number of graduates is sufficient to meet demand; and that
  • Many of these graduates are adequately qualified and prepared for available jobs.

According to their research, the primary problem is that only one-third of these graduates end up taking jobs in the fields in which they graduate. This drop-off, which began in the 1990s, spans all levels of students, from lower through upper quintiles. The drop, however, is particularly steep among those with the highest SAT/ACT scores and GPA averages—i.e., the best and the brightest of STEM graduates. Although their research does not show the reasons for this leakage from STEM careers, the authors see two possible reasons:

  1. Growing numbers of graduates are going into jobs that, while not specifically categorized as STEM, entail STEM skills—jobs such as patent law, medical sales and management in technology firms; and
  2. Growing numbers of the most qualified graduates end up taking jobs in fields that offer higher salaries (such as finance), more prestige and more varied experiences (such as consulting) or more flexible career paths (such as management).

In their view, the conclusion that today’s graduates are not qualified for STEM careers is “not supported by this data.” They believe that the primary problem is that the rewards of STEM careers are not sufficiently attractive to retain the best and the brightest graduates. Their primary recipe for attracting these graduates to STEM careers: increase pay.

Lowell and Salzman’s diagnosis of the problem and prescription for the solution are shared by others. Vivek Wadhwa of Duke and Berkeley Universities, in particular, has long argued that there is no shortage in STEM talent. The problems, as he lays them out in a TechCrunch face-off with ex-Intel chief Craig Barrett, are three-fold:

  1. Much of the nation’s talent is “bottled-up” in the form of postdocs (post-doctoral fellows hoping to get a faculty appointments) who are locked into a broken university technology education system;
  2. U.S. government policy makes it increasingly difficult and unattractive for foreign-born graduates of U.S. universities—who account for half of all U.S. STEM Masters and PhD graduates—to remain in the U.S.; and
  3. Technology firms do not pay top graduates what they are worth, particularly relative to finance and consulting companies.

Causes of the STEM Pipeline Leakage—A Skills Gap

Not all studies come to the same conclusions. The U.K., which faces a similar issue in which half of its STEM graduates take jobs in other fields, launched a series of studies into the reasons. Although these studies certainly admit a loss to higher-paying career paths, they, as concluded in a 2010 study, Shaping Up for Innovation: Are we delivering the right skills for the 2020 knowledge economy, also find some evidence for the possibility that some STEM graduates do not have the skills required to meet employer needs.

The authors cite a 2008 CBI (Confederation of British Industry) study finding that 42% of employers see the quality of graduates as a major barrier to STEM recruitment. A 2009 study that examined The Demand for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Skills, meanwhile, found that the occupations in which many of these STEM graduates actually end up, pay significantly less than jobs in STEM and finance. (A Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce compilation of U.S. salaries and unemployment rates by college major shows that STEM and finance jobs also tend to pay significantly better than, and have lower unemployment rates than, do jobs in most other fields.)

So, if STEM and finance pay better, and offer better employment prospects than do other fields, why would so many STEM grads shun these higher-paying fields to take jobs outside of the areas they had studied? According to the Demand for STEM Skills and the Shaping up for Innovation studies’ authors, there must be “some kind of mismatch between the type of skills STEM graduates have, and the type of skills sought in science occupations.” They do, however, plan to commission additional research to determine the extent to which these patterns are attributable to a skills mismatch, rather than individual choice.

What are these mismatches? Although they vary by sector, the CBI survey shows that employers’ primary concerns relate to candidates’ technical and practical skills. There is, however, a broad overarching concern that STEM candidates lack a number of softer skills in areas including problem solving, commercial awareness, team working, communication, interdisciplinary perspective and empathy for different points of view. (Note that this list is quite similar to that posed in my October 30th blog, Core skills Required in a Knowledge Economy.)

This all leads to a number of questions that I will address in subsequent blogs and in my planned book—what can be done do address these skills gaps and mismatches? What should students do today to ensure that they are best equipped to capture the jobs and build the careers of the future?

Posted in Creating the 21st Century Workforce, STEM Careers, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Helping Colleges and Universities Educate Tomorrow’s Knowledge Workers

Sunday, November 27th, 2011

My last blog reviewed some of the IBM Almaden Co-Evolution conference’s primary conclusions around the shape of the American job market, especially:

  • The state of today’s jobs market;
  • Where the new generation of jobs will come from; and
  • The types of skills these jobs will require.

This blog examines some of the conference’s follow-on conclusions, particularly around:

  • The capabilities and limitations of colleges and universities in helping students learn these skills;
  • How they will have to evolve to accomplish these goals; and
  • The type of cooperation—with primary and secondary schools, businesses, non-profits and governments—that will be required for colleges and universities to prepare knowledge workers for jobs that will be increasingly defined by the combination of globalization, technology and the growth of self-employment.

The Changing Role of Colleges and Universities

Colleges and universities are generally viewed as the primary, although certainly not exclusive source of many of the skills—both functional and foundational—that will be required for tomorrow’s jobs. True, the foundations for these skills must certainly be laid in secondary and even primary schools. Businesses, meanwhile, must help employees hone and refresh these skills. Most importantly, individuals will have to take primary responsibility for attending the schools, selecting the classes, choosing an employer and selecting the combination of extra-curricular activities that will help them develop these skills. For most, however, post-secondary institutions will remain as the single most important linchpin in the individual’s education-to-employment pipeline.

Many conference participants, including a number of university professors and administrators, concluded that few schools were currently fulfilling their missions. Their indictments and recommendations were generally in line with those of Clayton Christensen’s team’s February 2011 Disrupting College report.

Thousands of colleges, suffering from a type of “Harvard-envy”, short-change students by trying to simultaneously accomplish three primary missions: knowledge creation (research); knowledge proliferation (teaching); and helping prepare students for careers. While Harvard and perhaps one or two dozen other universities have the endowments and the cash flow to fund quality required for each, the vast majority of schools lack the resources and the skills to perform each of these tasks well.

Rather than trying to do all, most schools should focus on their core missions of knowledge proliferation (teaching) and preparing students for careers. They must also do so more cost-effectively, delivering quality education in a way that students and their families can afford without going deeply into debt. This will require the use of additional, more leverageable sources of learning, such as that from peers and tutors, and especially from learning technologies—including the potentially disruptive enabling technology of online learning. This will help free instructors from creating and even delivering lectures, provide them with insight into individual student needs and allow them to focus more time on addressing each student’s unique needs.

These schools, however, must also do much more—not only to prepare students for careers, but also to make them more “employment-ready” upon graduation. This requires deeper coordination with the private sector, not only in identifying the skills that are required for success in their companies, but also in providing more opportunities for “experiential learning” in which students have the opportunity to combine classroom, book and online education with experience in working on real-world problems, both in school (as in inter-disciplinary research centers) and in companies (as through apprenticeships and internships). Schools must determine how to give credit for these real-world experiences and also to apply (once they are developed and generally agreed upon) quantifiable metrics that assess educational outcomes. They should also, according to the Institute for the Future and my own research, specifically integrate the teaching—and especially the learning and reinforcement—of variants of the Institute for the Future’s ten foundational skills specifically into college curricula.

Cross Domain Educational Collaboration

Although colleges and universities are certainly critical links in the education to employment pipeline, they are not the only contributors. Primary and secondary schools must teach basic skills and provide a solid foundation for and passion for lifelong learning. They should also extend their current missions to provide solid groundings in the types of foundational skills that all employees—especially knowledge workers—will require in the new economy.

The private sector also plays a critical, but unfortunately diminishing role in educating their workforces. But although overall private sector investment in employee education rose slightly in 2010 to $52.8 billion, or $1,041 per learner, it has generally been falling since a high of more than $60 billion in 1999. Even so, a number of companies including Boeing and IBM (both of whom presented on their employee development efforts at the conference) continue to invest heavily (see, for example, my 2009 report in IBM’s Role in Creating the Workforce of the Future).

These and a number of other companies also work closely with schools, and invest in them—from primary to post-secondary—to help them develop curricula, fund teacher and instructor training, and develop workshops and internships to provide students with real-world learning experiences. Many companies, as discussed extensively in my blog, have partnered with secondary schools to improve IT education and train teachers on effective use of technology, with community colleges to prepare prospective employees for specific jobs and with universities to develop courses, curricula and entire degree programs.

Although such bilateral partnerships are certainly important, the conference concluded these are just the start. Corporations and schools must also partner with:

  • Foundations, such as Gates and Illuminata, to define desired course outcomes and develop metrics;
  • Non-profits, such as the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (both of which presented at the conference) to create pathways to help individuals create the educational experiences required to prepare for and advance their careers; and
  • State and local governments to identify the types of businesses they wish to attract, identify the resources and skills that will be required to attract employers, encourage and help local schools provide the required education and training and ideally, create online databases that help students and workers identify jobs and careers that will be available, the types of skills that will be required, and how these skills can best be learned and developed.

Although the Federal Government could, at least in theory, play an important role in identifying, mapping resources and coordinating efforts, the reality is that most economic development and education policy is done at a state and especially a local, rather than a national level. The most effective education-to-employment pipelines will probably require close cooperation by and deep commitments from mayors, university presidents, local business executives and local Chambers of Commerce.

 

Summary

U.S. colleges and universities must undergo huge changes if
they are to prepare graduate for tomorrow’s jobs—and do so at a cost that both
the students and the county can afford. For many, it will require a fundamental
rethink of their missions and their established practices. It will also require
much closer collaboration with the businesses that are likely to hire these
graduates.

 

 

Posted in Community/Other Colleges, Job and Career Opportunities, Other Schools, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Universities and Grad Schools | 1 Response »
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Tomorrow’s Jobs Require Tomorrow’s Skills

Monday, November 14th, 2011

 

At the end of September, IBM’s Almaden Research Center sponsored a conference on the future of jobs, the skills required for these jobs and how colleges, private sector companies and governments can individually, and in partnership, prepare people for these jobs.

The conference, titled Regional Upward Spirals: The Co-Elevation of Future Technologies, Skills, Jobs and Quality-of-Life, attracted participants from each of these sectors and from a number of think tanks. All focused on themes surrounding:

  • The growing shortage of educated workers;
  • How technology is transforming jobs;
  • Skills required for the jobs of today and tomorrow;
  • The role and challenges of colleges and universities in preparing a new generation of knowledge workers;
  • The role of the private sector in educating, training and helping employees refresh existing and develop new skills;
  • The need for partnerships among private and public sectors, academia and non-profits in closing the nation’s “skills gap;” and
  • The need to equip policymakers with better tools to model quality-of-life improvements generation over generation in regions, as infrastructure, skills, jobs change together.

The U.S.’s Growing Skills Gap

IBM’s Chief Economist, Martin Flemming, kicked off the conference by putting the current recession into historical perspective and aligning it with economist Carlotta Perez’s Waves of Technology Change, postulating that the economy is now in the transition between the installation and deployment phases of telecommunications and IT—between the initial implementation of these technologies, toward their use in fundamentally transforming business processes and societal institutions. Although such transitions typically result in slower investment and growth, this effect is now being compounded by our attempt to emerge from the financial recession.

A representative from McKinsey Global Institute then honed into our current employment problems by outlining some of the key findings of the group’s recently published report, An Economy that Works, explaining, for example, the unprecedented toll this recession has taken on jobs. This toll is particularly steep among those in low-skill/low-pay and mid-skill/mid-pay jobs. However, the unemployment rate among college graduates is still relatively low (4.2% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report) and the number of college graduates with jobs has actually grown by more than 1 million over the last two years.

In fact, many companies are unable to find all the educated workers they need—at least those with the skills they require. Forty percent of companies have had job openings for six months that they have been unable to fill due to lack of the proper skills. This is particularly true for specialized technical skills in science, engineering, computer programming and other areas of IT.

This skills mismatch, is likely to get worse before it gets better. McKinsey estimates that if the economy does improve, employers will face a shortage of about 1.5 million workers with college degrees (especially STEM degrees) by 2020. At the other end of the education spectrum, there will be a surplus of almost 6 million workers without high school degrees.

Skills Requirements

Just what skills are employers looking for? Clearly, as has been discussed endlessly over the last decade, employers have a deep, apparently endless need for STEM skills. Silicon Valley, as we always hear, has been continually ratcheting up the salaries (not to speak of the benefits) it provides the most promising computer science graduates.

Companies including Dow Chemical and IBM are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing curricula, funding courses and sponsoring research projects and fellowships in areas including chemical engineering and business analysis, respectively. At the conference, McKinsey highlighted the need for math and analysis skills by projecting a need for almost 3 million people (including more than 150,000 highly-trained “data scientists”) to extract business insight from “big data”.

In its An Economy that Works report, McKinsey groups these and hundreds of other job opportunities into six primary segments of the U.S. economy that it claims, will account for 70-85 percent of the up to 22.5 million new jobs (assuming strong growth) the country will create over the rest of the decade: healthcare (by far the largest), business services, leisure and hospitality, construction, manufacturing and retail.

There is, however, a caveat to even these projections. As Irving Wladawsky-Berger discuses in his blog on the conference, University of California Berkeley professor John Zysman discussed the ways in which “the algorithmic revolution” (the ability to codify activities underlying services and embed them into software) is fundamentally transforming the nature of mid-skill services jobs. The componentization of continually higher-level services functions, for example, is already making it easier to automate and offshore these functions.

Meanwhile, new innovations, such as IBM’s “Watson” has the potential of bringing this algorithmic revolution up into specialized realms of qualitative research and even expert knowledge. One of its first uses, for example, is likely to be in medical diagnostics, such as where a doctor can input lists of symptoms, medical histories, and a broad range of other relevant information to identify possible illnesses and recommended treatments. This, as I discussed in a previous blog on Watson, is only the first step in transforming medicine and the nature of knowledge jobs across all domains, and in changing and upgrading the types of skills tomorrow’s knowledge workers will require to ensure long, engaging and rewarding careers.

Just what skills will be required? Although each industry, and each job within it will certainly require specific combinations of functional skills, another presenter, from the Institute for the Future, cited its report, Future Work Skills 2020 to posit ten more generalized, foundational skills that will be required of most knowledge workers:

  1. Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed;
  2. Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions;
  3. Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based;
  4. Cross-cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings;
  5. Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning;
  6. New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication;
  7. Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines.
  8. Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes;
  9. Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques; and
  10. Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence.

Meanwhile, in another IBM conference on Leadership being held the same week in New York, Tom Friedman set the skills bar even higher, claiming that “Everyone has to bring something extra, being average is no longer enough. . . Everyone is looking for employees that can do critical thinking and problem solving . . . just to get an interview.  What they are really looking for are people who can invent, re-invent and re-engineer their jobs while doing them.”

This leads to yet another change in the job market that will require even more skills of tomorrow’s knowledge workers—companies’ growing reliance on part-time, contract and freelance employees as an alternative to hiring full-time employees. This means that more and more of tomorrow’s knowledge workers will, whether they want to or not, have to run their own companies or partner with others to create small business services companies. Not only will they need the skills required to manage a business, they must also have the skills required to work independently. Most importantly, they will need the sills to continually market and sell themselves, their ideas and their unique skill sets.

This is a very tall order. What must schools do to help students develop these skills—both functional and foundational? Are today’s schools really capable of doing so? How can other institutions, including companies, foundations, non-profits and governments help? These and a number of related issues will be discussed in my November 27th blog.

Posted in IBM, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Core Skills for Knowledge Workers in a Global Economy

Sunday, October 30th, 2011

The U.S. education system was created primarily to teach analytical, and to a lesser extent, communication skills. The vast majority of this education, especially at the university level, is segmented into specific domains. Although these domain-specific content and skills are certainly critical, many additional broad, foundational skills are required of a generation of knowledge workers that are capable of delivering high-value in a global economy.

Exactly what are these skills and why are they so important? I discussed some of these skills at a high level in my November 2009 article, Right-Brain Skills for 21st Century Jobs and discussed some of these and others in a number of articles over the last couple years.

Although nobody of whom I am aware has published a comprehensive list of such skills (as if there ever could be such a thing), I would include capabilities such as:

  • IT fluency, where familiarity and comfort with tomorrow’s tools is so deep that technology becomes the de facto, go-to tool to address virtually any business need;
  • Quantitative analytics, especially higher-level math, statistical analysis and analytics;
  • “Integrative imagination,” the ability to integrate information and ideally methodologies from disparate realms to create original new insights;
  • High-level thinking skills including focused research, information filtering and prioritization, critical and adaptive thinking, creative problem-solving and analytical systems thinking; and
  • Soft skills, such as written and oral communications, teamwork, social intelligence, leadership and cross-cultural awareness and sensitivity.

But what are the precise skills that will be required? How do the combinations of skills vary among occupations, industries and positions? Nobody really knows. Nor do they really know how these requirements will evolve in the future. There is, however, one thing we do know. Far too few people entering the workforce, or even that are currently in it, have a sufficient base of such skills.

These broad skills, although necessary, are not sufficient to prepare an individual for an interesting and fulfilling career. They must be complemented with deep domain knowledge in a particular field AND sufficient knowledge of a broad range of other disciplines and fields to provide an inter-disciplinary perspective enable cross-domain collaboration. This domain knowledge, however, must be built atop the core skills that are applicable to virtually any field.

But, to address the current “core skills gap” we must first answer some fundamental questions:

  • Which of these core foundational skills are most critical and most universal?
  • What are the best stages in one’s education and career to learn these skills?
  • How can they most effectively be taught and learned?
  • What responsibility for identifying and learning these skills should be assumed by the individual —and what by primary, secondary and post-secondary schools, by businesses or by other types of organizations?

Much of my ongoing research and writing will focus on these and related questions.

Posted in Skills Requirements, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools | No Responses »
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Scaling Infosys’ Educational Programs

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

Infosys, as discussed in my September 11 blog, has developed one of the IT industry’s largest and most comprehensive talent development programs. Although the program was created I India, and is by far the most mature, multifaceted and far-reaching in India, the company is now bringing parts of the program to other countries in which it operates.

From India to the World

Infosys has, for example, implemented versions of its CampusConnect program (which help colleges develop and launch business-relevant curricula and courses) in other countries in which it has Delivery Centers. It is, for example, working with Malaysian university faculties to improve IT education and with Mexican faculties to develop an IT curriculum to make programs more industry-relevant.

Just this month, it entered into an agreement with Singapore Management University (SMU) to jointly develop content, case studies and learning labs for both Infosys employees and SMU undergraduate and graduate students. They also plan to conduct joint seminars and tutorials and collaborate on currently unspecified research and pedagogy projects.

Infosys, however, is focusing the vast majority of its Out-of-India efforts on China, the county in which it has already hired 3,500 employees, with plans for another 8,500 in three years. For example,it  opened a Development Center in Shanghai and an Education Center in Jiaxing. This new Education Center, which will eventually accommodate 3,000 students at a time, will generally replicate the company’s Mysore curricula and courses, but tailor them to the specific needs of Chinese recruits. More than 650 recruits have already completed the Center’s foundation training program and another 350 in process.

The company is also beginning to work with Chinese universities. It has, for example, launched a Chinese version of CampusConnect and is working closely with local governments to extend the program to more schools in other regions of the country.

Multi-Lateral in India

Infosys is also working to scale its education programs by partnering with third parties. These partners include:

  • Individual companies, such as Microsoft, which is now participating in SPARK; and
  • Non-profits, such as NASSCOM, where it is sharing best practices with the group’s Education Council, for deployment across India; and
  • Pan-national organizations, like UNESCO, to share learnings and identify best practices that can be applied across many different countries.

The company also forges more informal cross-border relationships. For example, it regularly invites industry bodies and faculty from other countries to visit Mysore. They have hosted a range of countries, from barely emerging (like Bhutan and Rwanda) and solidly industrializing countries (such as Thailand and Colombia) to learn and deploy capabilities in their own countries.

Applying Indian Learnings to Developed Countries

Cross-border learnings on employee development and most other business processes typically flow from more developed countries (which typically have the educational institutions to create and the corporations to test and develop best practices around these processes) to less developed countries.

Perhaps, however, it is about time for more such learnings to migrate in the other direction. Companies ranging from Proctor and Gamble and General Electric Medical Systems have developed products specifically for emerging countries that have since been migrated to developed countries. There are similar opportunities for migrating business models, such as Li & Fung’s supply chain practices and Bharti Airtel’s use of variable cost, virtual infrastructures.

On one hand, it may seem strange to suggest that countries like the U.S. and England—countries that virtually invented and still have some of the best colleges and corporate talent development and management practices in the world—could learn much from India. That country’s IT services sector, for example, is prospering only because the private sector was forced to develop capabilities that the public sector was not capable of providing.

But in many senses, developed countries are now facing some of the same challenges as developing countries. These include a sclerotic education-to-employment pipeline that does not seem capable either of:

  • Preparing students with the skills that will be required in an increasingly global knowledge economy, or of
  • Reskilling current workers who must learn totally new skills to qualify for new jobs in their current industries, much less those in new growth industries.

This is certainly not to suggest that emerging country companies have some type of inherent advantage over developed country companies, either in helping schools to graduate more employment-ready students or in proactively developing the skills that current workers will need for tomorrow’s jobs. After all, Western IT services companies such as IBM, HP and Accenture, were faced with many of the same challenges as their Indian counterparts in growing the Indian talent pool. These companies addressed their Indian needs in much the same way as did the Indian IT services firms. All of these companies–both Indian and Western–are now applying similar practices to develop their Chinese labor forces.

Some Western companies–especially IBM in universities and Microsoft in secondary schools—are at least as active in partnering with U.S. schools as Infosys is in partnering with Indian schools. It is, however, a shame that such actions are not ubiquitous, across not just the technology industry, but all industries.

Given the seemingly intractable challenges faced in reforming our education system and in addressing the worsening mismatch in the skills that students graduate with, versus those needed by employers, this country’s education system seems to need at least as much help from the private sector as do those in China and India. In fact, in some ways it needs even more, since U.S. and European students are increasingly turning away from the type of STEM educations that Indian and Chinese students crave.

Perhaps many more companies, across all industries and countries, have something to learn from the Indian IT services industry’s experience in educating, developing and managing talent.

Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Infosys, IT Industry Role in Education, STEM Careers, Universities and Grad Schools | No Responses »
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Lessons from Infosys’ Employee Development Program

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

While India certainly has a few world-class universities (especially in technology), its overall educational system is, to say the least, limited.

Despite these limitations, Indian and Western IT services firms have managed to build a million-person IT services industry that is the envy of the world—rapidly progressing from providing basic, low-cost services, to delivering not only world-class development capabilities, but also sophisticated business consulting and process reengineering skills.

How were these companies able to shape such a limited supply of human resources into a world-class talent development machine? By directly assisting engineering institutions and business schools and, especially, by taking over many of the educational tasks that are typically handled by educational institutions.

Although all of the major firms—both Indian and Western—are assuming similar roles, Infosys is clearly one of the leaders, both in how it partners with educational institutions and in its own employee development program.

Pre-Employment Education

Infosys’ employee development process begins well before it actually hires a person. In some cases, the process can track back to its corporate philanthropy programs, as with programs such as SPARK (one-day introductory experiences for high-school engineering students, hosted at Infosys development centers) and Catch Them Young (a two-week program in which 9th-grade students learn the basics of information technology). Through these programs, which have touched more than 320,000 students in the last 3 years, Infosys has also donated technology, including almost 1,000 PCs, to schools.

The company’s primary work with educators and students, however, focuses on colleges and universities. Its CampusConnect program, for example, helps Indian colleges develop and adapt courses and curricula that teach more “industry-relevant” skills. The company develops curricula, courseware and methodologies which are published on its CampusConnect portal. The program trains faculty to deliver these courses through activities including:

  • Bringing college student and faculty groups to Infosys centers for training and exposure to Infosys practices and technologies;
  • Funding train-the-trainer programs and two-to-three-month faculty sabbaticals on an Infosys campus; and
  • Sponsoring regional meetings and monthly Webinars to inform faculty of new developments and provide opportunities for them to communicate and establish communities among themselves.

Students who don’t have access to the program through their colleges and universities can access the CampusConnect portal themselves, where they can download and work through Infosys courses on their own. Since its launch in 2004, the program has worked with more than 6,500 faculty members in more than 500 colleges and universities, reaching more than 135,000 students.

Although the vast majority of the company’s campus outreach efforts are targeted at engineering institutions, it has smaller, more focused programs intended to reach those in other disciplines. B-school Connect, for example, is intended to help business schools create bridges between theory and actual business needs and particularly to show the critical roles that IT plays in management, such as by helping them create topics in business analysis. Project Genesis, meanwhile, is intended to help science, commerce and liberal arts majors develop analytical and communication skills required for careers in Business Process Outsourcing.

All of these university programs, not to speak of the company’s own in-house programs, also have a critical sub-theme and objective—to help students and employees develop confidence in their own abilities and to improve their ability to make contributions to their employers.

These campus programs are not specifically tuned to teaching skills that will benefit Infosys or to directly promote Infosys as an employer. This being said, however, they do provide visibility into the company and, through its engagement with institutions, helps the company attract promising students. They can also lead to internships, both domestically and internationally through the company’s InStep program. These internships often lead to full-time jobs.

The company, in fact, typically relies on its 500 CampusConnect partners for up to half its new recruits. These partner schools however, are primarily second- and third-tier colleges and universities. After all, the tier-one schools, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology, with which we have become so familiar, don’t really need all that much help. Moreover, their graduates are more likely to go to graduate school, than they are to seek direct employment.

Learning the Infosys Way

Infosys begins its formal employee education process as soon as it hires a new graduate.

Each new engineer is enrolled in the company’s 23-week residential program (there is a separate, shorter program for new BPO recruits) at the company’s Mysore Development Center. All go through a basic software engineering course before being assigned to deep dives. Software engineers, for example, will typically focus on a particular application (particularly SAP, Oracle or Microsoft) or technology (Java, Mainframes, cloud, mobility and so forth). New business analysts, meanwhile, will go deep into a particular cross-industry domain (such as finance, human resources or procurement) while project managers focus on project management techniques and Infosys processes.

This, however, is only the first step in a career-long continuous education process. Roughly 95% of those who successfully complete the Mysore program are then assigned to specific groups where they begin to learn how to apply these skills to the needs of Infosys’ clients. Each employee gets regular reviews and options for different career paths. They are also required to take continuing education courses and meet defined certification criteria.

The company currently offers 1,500 such courses in each of the technologies and business domains on which the company focuses, plus a growing number of courses in soft skills, such as communications and presentations. But while most initial training focuses on technology and soft skills, they become increasingly exposed to iness-based courses, in areas such as business value and specific functional and industry processes, in their later years with the company.

In fact, each employee must meet all the milestones and complete all of the certifications required for their current roles before they can be considered eligible for a promotion. These promotions can be either vertical (more responsible positions in their current role) or lateral (such as from software engineering into consulting or technology architecture).

As expected, Infosys provides selected fast-track employees with special attention. Identified leaders are enrolled in the Infosys Leadership Institute, which provides highly customized assessment, personal development and mentoring programs. This program, however, covers only about 850 of the company’s 130,000 employees and is limited to three tiers of employees:

  • Tier One, who currently lead departments;
  • Tier Two, who are likely to lead departments in three to five years; and
  • Tier Three, who are likely to become Tier 2 employees in three to five years.

All employees, meanwhile, are encouraged to provide some contribution to India’s educational system. SPARK classes, for example, are taught by more than 10,000 Infosys volunteers in a given year. Volunteers also play key roles in Catch Them Young and other programs conducted at Infosys Development Centers. The company also helps employees who would like to make deeper commitments, as by paying 50 percent salary to those who dedicate their sabbaticals to teaching at educational institutions or working at non-profits.

As expected, the vast majority of Infosys’ efforts are dedicated directly to working with Indian schools and Indian employees. But, as I discuss in my next blog, it is expanding a number of these programs to other countries. It is also partnering with non-profit institutions and other companies to scale its programs, both in India and around the world.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Corporate Social Responsibility, Education System and Institutions, Infosys, IT Industry Role in Education, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | 1 Response »
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The ACM Computer Programming Competition: Lessons for America and from IBM

Sunday, August 28th, 2011

My previous blog, The United States’ Clogged Technology Education-to-Employment Pipeline, provided a number of examples of how U.S. students, from K-12, to college to grad schools), are falling behind their counterparts in other countries across virtually all segments of STEM education. Although these deficiencies are troubling in their own right, they only begin to suggest a much bigger, much more troubling problem for the U.S. economy.

The educational system is, after all, the primary pipeline through which corporations receive the steady flow of talent they need to keep America competitive in a global economy. And since this competitiveness will be based on innovation, this talent must be fluent in the language of innovation. STEM is that language.

Although I have spoken with many people and have read and written much on the challenges facing U.S. STEM education, I never really had a chance to see the manifestation of these challenges for myself. Therefore, I was happy to travel to Orlando Florida to learn about and see the world finals round of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).

This blog briefly describes the contest and its outcome, and provides my view of the implications for the U.S. Its primary focus, however, is on corporate support of these competitions and on their role in supporting the recruitment activities of their sponsors—in this case, IBM:

  • Why, for example, has IBM sponsored and funded this competition for the last 15 years, and why it has committed to continuing to do so for at least the next 5 years;
  • What value does IBM get from this generosity and what is it doing to maximize the value it derives from it; and
  • What are the implications and opportunities for other tech vendors that hope to promote STEM education and improve their own chances of recruiting the most promising graduates?

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest

The contest is a multi-stage competition that started with more than 300,000 students. It begins with dozens of local competitions, and progresses through six geographically-aligned regional competitions (this year, with 24,915 contestants from 2,070 universities and 88 countries). It culminates in a final competition that, this year, consisted of 315 students on 105 teams.

These teams compete not only with each other, but also against tight time constraints and limited resources (one computer and three calculators per team) in an attempt to solve eleven real-world problems. They must often deal with ambiguity, exercise judgment to assess when to submit an answer (to avoid penalties for incorrect submissions) and continually reassess their strategies to determine on which problems to focus their energies. Success, therefore, depends not only on speed and accuracy, but also on teamwork, resource prioritization and allocation, quick thinking, and adaptability.

The questions are designed with varying levels of difficulty, from a couple that require relatively moderate skills to a couple that would challenge many of the best, most experienced programmers in the world. In the end, after five hours of intense work, ten teams answered seven questions correctly, and two teams managed to answer eight, an impressive feat for college students, especially under the constraints imposed by the rules.

As has been the case in most years since the competition went international, this year’s winner’s circle was led by teams from Russia (four of the top ten teams) and China (two of the top ten, including 1st place Zhejiang University and 3rd place Tsinghua University). In fact, combined, these two countries represented half of the top 26 teams (7 for China and 6 for Russia), with two other perennially strong countries, Poland and the U.S., taking two spots apiece and another, Ukraine, capturing three.

U.S. schools, who typically make quite respectable showings, qualified 18 teams for the finals. One, North American regional champion University of Michigan Ann Arbor, took 2nd place in the world finals and three others (Carnegie-Mellon took 13th, MIT 32nd and Princeton 48th) in the top 58 (all of whom had at least 4 correct answers). The remaining 14, each correctly answering fewer than four questions, received Honorable Mentions.

As would be expected, men overwhelmingly dominated the competition, with women accounting for fewer than 10 of the 315 contestants. This year, however, a woman was part of the Zhejiang University championship team. (As I discussed in my previous blog, U.S. women, while expanding their inroads in science and especially medicine, are poorly represented in math, engineering and IT.)

Challenges for the U.S.

Although one must not try to read too much into the results of one competition, Russian and Chinese (and more broadly, Eastern European and East Asian) schools are traditionally among the winners. U.S. teams, meanwhile, typically do make quite respectable showings. Approximately 20 U.S. schools typically make it to the finals, and in eight of the last 15 years at least two U.S. universities have won medals (i.e., placed among the top 12). In fact, at least three U.S. teams medaled in four of the last 15 years, with one winning the championship and five placing second.

Respectable: yes. But as the results of this competition (not to speak of the educational statistics cited in my July 31 blog) make clear, companies that need access to the best talent must look well beyond U.S. citizens and U.S. schools. After all, non-U.S. universities, as is clear from the competition, already contain much of the world’s best programming talent. (Meanwhile, some of U.S. teams, including the Number 2 University of Michigan team, included students from other countries.) These non-U.S. students and schools promise to become even more competitive as Asian schools, in particular, continue to improve, attract more world-class professors and become more attractive destinations for the world’s most promising students.

Meanwhile, as discussed in my July 31 blog, U.S. students (with the notable exception of Asian-Americans) are moving away from STEM disciplines and U.S. universities now count on non-U.S. citizens for rapidly growing percentages of their undergraduate science and engineering classes–259,000 new undergraduate students in 2009/10 alone (not to speak of an absolute majority of their PhD candidates).

That creates a problem: The U.S. is producing fewer of its own world-class programmers and IT engineers. Meanwhile, U.S. companies are finding it increasingly difficult to bring world-class talent from other countries into the U.S. Where then will these companies find the talent they need to grow?

This brings us full-circle back to the ACM competitions, and specifically to IBM, which sponsors the competitions.

Opportunities for IBM

IBM has been sponsoring the ACM competition for the last 15 years and has just committed to extending this sponsorship for at least the next five years. Why does it devote so much money and so many of its people to this work? It hopes to:

  1. Recognize and spotlight STEM skills;
  2. Inspire more students to study and develop their problem-solving skills in these fields;
  3. Encourage and facilitate cross-cultural exchange among schools and students; and
  4. Identify some of the best STEM talent in the world, expose them to IBM and the types of problems they would work on at IBM and improve IBM’s ability to recruit these people.

IBM, as exemplified by its rapidly expanded focus on donating money, products and expertise to educational institutions, and as demonstrated by programs such as its Academic Initiative and its newly announced P-Tech high school partnership with New York City, is deeply committed to encouraging students and helping all levels of schools to improve STEM education.

But for all of its philanthropic efforts, IBM is also intent on reaping its fair share of the rewards from such efforts. It wants the best and brightest of these graduates to join IBM. This is more of a challenge than it may appear. True, IBM is clearly one of the leading and most diversified IT companies in the world. It is also consistently rated as one of the world’s top brands and one of the best companies for which to work. Still, it is generally less visible to students than are more consumer-facing brands, such as Microsoft and Google and does not offer the type of pre-IPO lure of companies such as Facebook and Twitter.

The ACM competition provides IBM with a unique opportunity to meet and to present itself to many of the most promising college-age programmers in the world. It is, therefore, no surprise that IBM leverages the competition to introduce itself to these students. It provides demonstrations of some of the company’s cutting-edge technologies and research, and populates the conference with a number of IBM employees who are alumni of the ACM competition and of some of the schools represented in the contest.

It has also set up a separate recruiting process, separate from but coordinated with the company’s primary recruiting efforts, to learn what interested contestants are looking for in their careers and to help identify how they can accomplish their goals at IBM. This year, the company went a big step beyond recruiting. In addition to monetary rewards (of up to $12,000 per team) from ACM, IBM, this year, made open job offers to the top 12 placing students—three members from each of the Top Four teams in the competition. The company will offer them jobs or internships in whichever IBM group (IBM Research, Software Group, etc.) and whichever country (subject to IBM operations in and government permissions) they choose.

IBM’s partnership with ACM provides yet another example of how a company can do well by doing good.

Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, IBM, IT Industry Role in Education, STEM Careers | No Responses »
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The Future of Community Colleges

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

Online College Courses has just released its list of Ten Predictions for the Future of Community Colleges.

Although the list certainly does discuss (correctly) the importance of online education, it goes far beyond the group’s primary focus to emphasize a number of other critical changes that, as we had discussed in our 2010 series on the future of community colleges.

The list includes, but is not limited to the:

  • The growing need for community colleges as an alternative to the exploding cost of attaining four-year degrees;
  • Changes that will be required to meet the needs of rapidly growing numbers of non-traditional students;
  • Increased coordination with local businesses;
  • Growing focus on identifying and preparing students for high-demand jobs, regardless of whether or not these jobs require degrees;

The list is well worth checking out.

Posted in Community/Other Colleges, Education System and Institutions | No Responses »
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The United States’ Clogged Technology Education-to-Employment Pipeline

Sunday, July 31st, 2011

We are being continually bombarded with news of the failures of the U.S. educational system. Although concerns span virtually all subjects, they are particularly severe in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)—the language of technological innovation and the foundation of most of the country’s competitiveness in global markets.

The problems, particularly for U.S.-born students (with the sole exception of Asian-American males), seem to compound at every step of the educational ladder and are now beginning to profoundly affect the workplace

Primary and Secondary Education Shortfalls

These shortfalls begin in our elementary and high schools. Consider, for example, that:

  • The 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress exam found that fewer than one-third of elementary and high school students have a solid grasp of science. Worse still, students are falling further behind each year of study, with only 34% of 4th-graders, 30% of 8th-graders and 21% of 12th-graders being proficient or advanced;
  • The OECD’s 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) found U.S. 15-year-olds near the mean for test scores and below the median ranking for each of the three tested areas, ranking 16th of 30 in reading, 21st in science and 29th in math;
  • The New York State Education Department found that only 37% of all students who entered high school in 2006 graduated with math and English scores high enough to qualify them for college. The figure was worse in most cities, where 21% of New York City, 14.5% of Yonkers and 6% of Rochester students would qualify.

These primary and secondary education system shortfalls in science and math education flow inevitably upward, through all levels of college and university education. And this was all before the current slashing of public education budgets, teaching staffs, school hours and classes—cuts that span all levels of the education spectrum, from K-12, to community colleges, state colleges and even Tier-One public research institutions, like the University of California at Berkeley.

College STEM Challenges

Although the percentage of high-school freshman who actually graduate from high school is falling, there are indeed some positive trends among those who do graduate. First, the percentage of high-school graduates who go directly to college is steadily increasing (from 57% in 2000 to 63% in 2008). Even better, the percentage of incoming college freshman who plan to major in STEM-related fields has recovered from a decline in the 1980s and ‘90s, to approach Cold War levels, reaching 31% in 2004 and 34% in 2009. Amazingly, these percentages are almost identical among Whites, Asian-Americans, Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans. In fact, the only major demographic group that is underrepresented in the “quantitative sciences” is women.

This is where the bad news begins. Among those freshman who initially aspire to a STEM degree, fewer than one-third actually graduate with these degrees within five years. Most of these entrants either drop out of school, change majors to less demanding disciplines, or take longer to graduate.

These are multiple reasons for this fall off. Many who did well in high-school classes (especially those who were not enrolled in AP classes) find themselves ill-prepared for the rigors of a STEM education. Many have to take remedial courses before ever getting to degree programs. Fewer still are prepared for the demanding workloads or are willing to accept the lower grades these courses typically produce. As we have seen in study after study, the U.S. educational system—from elementary schools through universities—is migrating to fewer classroom hours, less homework and easier grading. College students, in particular, increasingly view college at least as much of a social opportunity, as an educational opportunity.

It is in this period, between entering college and graduation, that demographic differences become pronounced. Although similar percentages of all racial groups initially aspire to a STEM degree, the differences in the percentages from each group that actually earn these degrees in five years are huge:

  • 42% for Asian-Americans;
  • 33% for Whites;
  • 22% for Latinos; and
  • 18% for African Americans.

Meanwhile, women, who now account for 58% of all U.S. college students, and an even larger percentage of honors degrees, are increasingly opting out of quantitative disciplines. True, they do (at least as of 2006) account for a majority of bachelor’s degrees in sciences including psychology (78%), agriculture (51%), biology (62%) and chemistry (52%) and are well-represented in some emergent engineering disciplines, such as environmental and biomedical. They, however, represent only small—and declining—minorities of quantitative degrees. As of 2006, for example, women earned only 20% of engineering, 21% of physics and 22% of computer science degrees. Their participation in computer science, in particular, plummeted from 37% to 22% over two decades (1985 to 2005).

And this does not even begin to assess the many problems that are plaguing the nation’s community college system—a system that is required to provide the skilled labor required to assist engineers and to produce and service innovative products. (See my series of blogs, beginning with The Community College Contribution.)

U.S. Graduate Schools as Magnets for Foreign-Born STEM Aspirants

These trends are further magnified in graduate STEM programs—but with another, big, new wrinkle.

U.S.-born racial/ethnic minorities and women have long accounted for small minorities of U.S. STEM graduate classes. Although U.S.-born minority students are gaining some ground (from 29% in 2000 to 34% in 2007), most races continue to be greatly under-represented as a percentage of all graduate students. For example, as of 2007, only 8% of all African American, 12% of Native American and 13% of Latino graduate students are enrolled in engineering, physical sciences, and biological sciences programs.

Whites are also increasingly under-represented in these programs, accounting for only 16% of total U.S.-born White graduate program enrollees. The big gainers, not surprisingly, are Asian Americans, with 29% of all of those enrolled in U.S. graduate programs studying in engineering, physical sciences, or biology.

Although women are also gaining some ground in quantitative graduate programs, their numbers and percentages remain small, accounting for fewer than 10% of all U.S. PhDs in electrical, mechanical and aeronautical engineering. (They do, however, represent more than 25% of chemical and industrial engineering doctorates and more than half of all social science and biology PhDs.)

Although U.S. born Asian-American males are rapidly ascending the STEM educational ladder, even they are being overwhelmed by Asian-born, naturalized U.S. citizens and especially by Asian citizens who chose to study in the U.S. In fact, while 90-95% of all STEM bachelor’s degrees are now awarded to U.S.-born students, 55% of all STEM PhDs now go to foreign-born students.

Although some of these foreign-born candidates are naturalized U.S. citizens, the number of foreign citizens studying in U.S. STEM graduate schools has exploded. The number of STEM doctorates awarded to temporary visa holders, for example, grew by 50% (compared with 18% in those to U.S. citizens and permanent visa holders) between 2003 and 2008 and now account for 38% of total degrees.

Even these totals, however, are dwarfed by numbers in specific fields. Visa holders, for example, now account for 45% of all physical science doctorates and 57% of all engineering doctorates awarded by U.S. universities. (A 2010 Congressional Research Service study suggests that even some of these percentages may be too low. By the time one combines those in the U.S. on permanent, as well as temporary visas, 67% of all engineering PhDs are granted to non-U.S. citizens.

Where Do We Go From Here?

This all sounds very ominous. It appears, from the numbers, that the U.S. is rapidly losing its ability to produce its own technical talent and that we will be forced to rely on “imports” for the scientists and engineers that will be required to rejuvenate our economy and compete in an increasingly technology-driven, global economy.

But is the situation really this bleak? What is the current state and the future of the U.S. technology workforce? What can U.S.-based technology companies do to address the nation’s and their own talent requirements? What role can non-U.S.-based companies play in addressing our talent shortages? Can the U.S. government help, or should it just get out of the way.

I will address these and a number of related issues in my next several blogs.

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