What’s missing from the conversation about Wingard and Temple

A few years ago, I visited a middle school classroom as part of a career day, exposing kids to different professions. The teacher organizing the event wanted me to answer questions like: When did I know what I wanted to do? How did I prepare for that career path? Did I have a mentor along the way?

As someone who got a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy, then worked in information technology and software development for a decade before going to graduate school for geographic information systems, my message to the students was this: Most of you will have more than one career in your lifetimes. Most of you will end up in a career that you haven’t heard of yet, or a career that doesn’t even exist yet. The best way to prepare for a career that you don’t know about is through a broad-based, liberal arts education.

I’ve been thinking about this with regard to the recent turmoil at Temple University and the resignation of president Jason Wingard. Just eight months ago, Wingard wrote in a piece called ”Higher Ed Must Change or Die” that companies often pass over college graduates for younger high school graduates who had completed short, inexpensive online certifications. Discussing the precipitous enrollment decline of the previous two years, he argued that the value of a college degree ”has reached its peak and is on the wane.” Among the causes he identified for this wane were a lack of ”curriculum relevance” and “rapidly evolving skill needs.”

I should be a receptive audience for this message. I run two professional science master’s programs at Temple University geared toward workforce development and real-world skills, including geographic information systems and geospatial data science. And yet, when we ask our external advisory board (which includes professionals from industry and government) about what we should be teaching to keep up with industry trends, they tell us that what they are looking for is soft skills. Those include social skills, time management, creative thinking, and networking — things that aren’t typically covered in short certificate courses.

There are many job candidates who have the technical skills necessary to complete a job. Wingard is right that many people can get some of these skills through short certifications. But employers need people who can write clearly, speak publicly, work collaboratively, and communicate complex ideas to nontechnical colleagues and lay audiences.

Yes, we teach geographic information systems, spatial analysis, data management, and statistics, but because our professional master’s programs are based at a university, they can include more than the typical online certification course, such as collaborative assignments, written and oral presentation of results, and student-created technical workshops. In a required course on ethics, students grapple with the social implications of the technology we use, including location-aware software, data ownership, and predictive algorithms.

Of course, there is a place for a skills-focused education. I wouldn’t be teaching in a professional program if I thought otherwise, and I am proud of our track record of successful placements after graduation; in 2019, 96% of graduates were working in the field.

I agree with Wingard that “The key to retaining the value of a degree from your own institution is ensuring your graduates have the skills to change with any market.” But I disagree that institutions aren’t already doing that. I studied philosophy before switching to software development — something that was common in the early days of computing (1950s and ‘60s), before universities even had computer science programs — and was surrounded by colleagues who had degrees in English, history, physics, and philosophy. None of us could have predicted the explosion of the web, and then suddenly many of us were web developers.

When I spoke to that middle school class, I told them that everyone in today’s society needs written and oral communication skills, an understanding of the scientific method (so that they can distinguish science from pseudoscience), a working knowledge of statistics, and, frankly, a little bit of computer programming. Computer scientists should be taking humanities classes, even if they’re not planning on becoming novelists. English majors should be taking programming, even if they’re not planning on becoming software developers.

The middle school teacher told me that she hadn’t expected someone working in a technical field to come in and make a pitch for a liberal arts education. She thanked me for it, as well as for my message to the students that you don’t have to know in middle school — or high school, or college, or even a few years after college — what you will “be” for the rest of your life.

Instead, students should strive to think critically and deeply, and never stop learning. What I hope to teach my students, above all, is how to learn.

Lee Hachadoorian is a geographer at Temple University, where he is assistant director of the professional science master’s in geographic information systems and geospatial data science.