Tag Archives: college

The future of work: what you do will not define who you should be.

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My series on WYPR continues here.

As parents, we want our children to be happy after college, just not in our basement. Given the cost, it is reasonable to expect one benefit of college to be a better job—and college graduates earn, on average, $1M more over a lifetime over those with no college education. 

But technology is creating new jobs and eliminating old ones. No college can give you all of the content that you will need in 10 years, because a lot of it has not yet been discovered. The future is unknown. But it will involve technology.

If you want to be prepared for the future job market, focus on the places where computers do less well. You will still need to be able to interface with computers and understand data analytics, but the future of work is about being complimentary to technology.

So an modern education should help you ask better questions. Computers will increasing be able to answer our questions faster, but thinking of new and more creative questions to ask is something humans are likely to be better at for a very long time. It is our ability to leap into the unknown that provides the advantage.

Technology is also changing the nature of work. Artificial intelligence might make your job obsolete, but might also make work obsolete. Here again, determining not only what CAN be done, but what SHOULD be done, and what is worth doing—these will remain fundamentally human decisions. Education should also provide the tools to create meaning in life. Helping students understand who they can be and not just what they do is an essential part of college.

Discovering your Accent with Study Abroad

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My series of public commentaries on WYPR continues here

Here at Goucher, we require all students to study abroadbefore they graduate. We do this in part because employers want graduates who can navigate working with people from different cultures and backgrounds, but also because study abroad provides an almost unique opportunity for self-discovery, reflection, and growth.

One of the first things we notice when we leave home is that everyone else in the world speaks with an accent. Then we realize that we too have an accent. Upon further reflection, we get the big reveal—that everyone has an accent. There is no neutral way of speaking, and everyone speaks in a way conditioned by culture, geography, and experience. 

This is equally true for how we all think—everyone also has a thought accent and study abroad brings us face to face with our assumptions and how they differ from those in our new surroundings. We can exchange one thought accent for another—just as we can learn a new spoken accent—but the insight that we all have assumptions that are invisible to us is fundamental to critical thinking. 

Initially, this can seem crippling, especially for students whose high school experience was all about a single truth or a single right answer. But understanding that different is often just different is a critical path to many things. Study abroad is not just about visiting difference, it is about encountering your own difference, your own assumptions and learning that everyone thinks with an accent.