Southern Vermont College

In a recent conversation with another colleague in higher education, she suggested that “workforce development” –as that term is commonly used–is not the goal at her institution. At her college, she stated, they educate leaders. At her college, they foster critical thinking skills, analytic development, problem solving and creativity (in addition to substantive knowledge acquisition).

Since I am president of a college that prides itself in producing graduates who enter the workforce, I found this approach off-putting. It made me think about how some powerful voices in higher ed trivialize what some smaller institutions, like Southern Vermont College, work hard to do — graduate students who become police and corrections officers, healthcare professionals, social and juvenile justice workers, and entrepreneurs and owner/operators of small and medium sized businesses.

The unspoken assumption is that our career-launched graduates lack skills in critical thinking, quality problem solving and creativity.

I beg to differ. I think we, too, educate leaders. And, if we don’t provide our graduates with these thinking skills, they will be the ones pushed out of the workforce. The recent editorial from Thomas Friedman speaks to these very issues.

Workforce development is not a demeaning term. It is not synonymous with vocational education. Instead of a false and damaging dichotomy between leadership (and liberal arts) education and workforce development, these terms need to converge, and we need to create quality workforce development. The 2008 Nellie Mae study on Success in the 21st Century makes that very point.

If private, liberal arts colleges are to thrive and help their graduates succeed, we need to embrace, not shun, the fact that students will have careers and enter the workforce. What we need to do is fashion a career launching education that embodies critical thinking, analytic approaches and creativity. If we both fail to acknowledge the importance of quality career-launching education and the need to deliver on the skills to make that happen, we will render ourselves and our students obsolete.