“When am I ever going to need this?” may be a common refrain among students struggling with long division, biochem, or book reports. As they get to college, it turns out, they probably aren’t retaining information at all if they don’t think it’s relevant to their future career.
According to academic publisher Wiley’s latest State of the Student Survey, of 5,000-plus students and over 2,400 educators, 55% of undergrads and 38% of grad students reported that they were struggling to remain interested in classes they believe don’t teach practical skills. Many also said they struggle to retain material.
But, students said, their professors could easily spur greater interest in class materials if they were able to relate them more closely to their future careers. Specifically, lessons incorporating “real-world applications” would improve engagement the most, a quarter of the student respondents suggested.
That’s the case no matter what your major is, Smita Bakshi, Wiley’s senior vice president of academic learning, told trade journal Inside Higher Ed. That can look like incorporating today’s primary coding languages or software into STEM classes, or debating modern issues like student loan forgiveness or usage of ChatGPT in a philosophy lecture.
It’s never too young to take that lesson to heart. Donnie Piercey, a fifth-grade teacher in Lexington, Ky., has evidently taken Bakshi’s advice; in one exercise, he assigned his young students to try and outwit the ChatGPT “robot.”
“This is the future,” Piercey told the Associated Press. “As educators, we haven’t figured out the best way to use artificial intelligence yet. But it’s coming, whether we want it to or not.”
As students age, it’s unsurprisingly difficult to focus in a classroom setting if you can’t be sure exactly how the lesson will help you get a job, Bakshi told Inside Higher Ed. That’s to say nothing of the fact that students have so much on their minds as is, that “they’re not bringing their whole self to the classroom.”
Instead, they’re plagued with uncertainty—and the grim economy awaiting them at graduation doesn’t help. Nor does the pervasive skills gap many HR professionals say they’re seeing in the hiring pool.
According to a separate Wiley report, Closing the Skills Gap, 68% of C-suite executives say their organizations see a gap between what candidates can do and what the role demands. Nearly seven in 10 managers said they regularly deal with a workforce that lacks the required skills. Everyone loses here; especially the college students who end up graduating without the hard and soft skills those managers are looking for.
It’s something professors don’t seem aware of: Almost two-thirds (64%) of instructors said they believe their institution is preparing students well for their professional life, but just 46% of students agreed.
Students feel especially behind in tech; in an international survey of 15,000 Gen Zers by Dell Technologies last year, more than a third (37%) said their education didn’t prepare them with the digital skills they need to propel their career. Plus, the majority (56%) said they had very basic to no digital skills education at all.
“There’s a glaring gap in accessibility and application of tech education resources between lower-income and affluent students—a gap that was widened by the pandemic,” Rose Stuckey Kirk, Verizon’s chief corporate social responsibility officer, wrote for Fortune. “And we know this gap is more than an academic or social justice issue.”
If the skills gap doesn’t close, both workers and companies could continue to struggle for years. The best chance of fixing it might be found in the classroom.
