While Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University has obviously been concerned with preparing students for careers, this semester I learned that we are explicitly moving away from the idea of education having intrinsic value and instead embracing workforce readiness.
To be fair and balanced, this can be seen as an acknowledgement of reality: most of my students have always been rationally focused on education as a means to a career. This also has clear practical value as our students, for unless they have inherited great wealth, will need to labor to survive. But a case can be made that the main beneficiaries of a university focus on workforce readiness are businesses and the political right.
First, workforce readiness helps shift the cost of workforce training from businesses to students (and taxpayers). The old model was that universities sent students to their employers ready to learn the specifics of their jobs. This seemed a reasonable approach, as the specific skills needed varied with each job and could change over the four (plus) years required for a student to graduate. This is still true, which is why most businesses now want employees with experience—they have specific, current skills and the business does not need to spend resources to train them. My university has started requiring all majors to include an internship as an elective, which can benefit the students but will, one infers, provide businesses with free labor.
It is well worth considering some of the practical problems with trying to train students to be workforce ready. One concern is that education focused on workforce readiness can become obsolete. Students take 4+ years to graduate, and it takes time for departments to update and implement curriculum. There is also the obvious problem of trying to get students ready for a diverse range of jobs that require different skills and knowledge that previously required on the job training. Since philosophy majors could go on to do jobs ranging from managing a business to being the vice president, it is not clear how one would workforce ready students in a way that differs from the current approach to education.
My university is also embracing AI, which makes sense. However, readying students for the workforce in the age of AI presents a dilemma. If AI is a bubble that bursts, then getting them ready for the AI workforce that will not exist will leave them unprepared for the world that will be. But if AI is not a bubble (or is an enduring bubble) then we might also be preparing them for jobs that AI will replace. The example of AI can be generalized to the workforce dilemma: If we do not prepare them for a specific job, they are not workforce ready and businesses will not want to hire them. Instead, they will continue the practice of hiring experienced workers. If we prepare students for a specific job, that job might not exist when they graduate or their skills might be obsolete. In pushing for workforce readiness we might find that we are abandoning an imperfect educational approach in favor of one that is even worse.
A second benefit of a focus on workforce readiness is that if it succeeds, then it will decrease the value of labor. This, obviously, is a benefit for businesses and not students. This devaluing will arise from two factors. One arises from the positive focus on workforce readiness. If this creates more workers, then the value of each worker is thus diminished—which will benefit businesses. The other arises from a negative factor, which is the effort to reduce or eliminate degrees and programs that are perceived as not focused on creating workforce ready products for what will be the true consumer of education, the businesses. Success in reducing or exterminating such programs will provide benefits to business and the political right. Students who would otherwise have entered these programs will probably end up getting workforce ready degrees, thus increasing the workforce and decreasing the value of labor in these areas. The areas targeted for reduction or elimination often produce graduates who are critical of the harmful practices of businesses (like exploiting labor, polluting the environment, and producing harmful products and services). Hence, thinning their numbers is advantageous. These graduates are also often critical of racism, sexism, inequality, fascism, authoritarianism, and other such evils, which tends to put them at odds with the political right (who tend to favor business as well).
As a philosopher, I unsurprisingly think that education can have intrinsic value. You know, the idea of the examined life and all that stuff. However, there are also practical reasons to be concerned. While a focus on workforce readiness might yield short term benefits, there are long term harms to be considered. After all, as fans of Western civilization themselves love to point out, the old universities have been critical in making this civilization, its economy and its technology possible—and this goes back to Plato’s academy. There is also the very practical concern, as noted above, that workforce readiness might simply not work—especially with the uncertainty about AI. In closing, while I do understand why businesses want to shift training costs onto students and the taxpayers (as many of them have shifted costs by exploiting the SNAP and welfare systems), this is unethical. Businesses should pay to train the workers who will provide them with their profits. They have the resources to do so and, from a practical standpoint, they would be the best at providing the very specific and most current skills needed for their very specific job.