The Dispatch
Can degrees keep up with career paths?
As the rate of technological change increases exponentially, the lag time between new tech and the creation of a specialist university programme for it is growing. Can unis keep pace, and more importantly, do they even need to?
By Nick Harland
It’s September 2027, and the first cohort of a brand new Master’s programme are settling in. Over the next year or so, they’ll be learning all about what the World Economic Forum has termed one of the jobs of the future: prompt engineering. In layman’s terms, prompt engineering is all about inputting the right prompts into generative AI tools to get the best outputs. In 2024, that seems like a pretty valuable skill to have.
The issue is that in 2027 - when this mythical degree begins - we don’t know whether prompt engineering will still be so in-demand. As Oguz Acar has argued in Harvard Business Review, the AI tools themselves could soon make prompt engineering obsolete: “Future generations of AI systems will get more intuitive and adept at understanding natural language, reducing the need for meticulously engineered prompts.”
It’s indicative of the challenge facing schools. With an ever-growing number of career paths out there, how can they make sure their degrees are evolving to keep up? And - perhaps more importantly - do they need to keep up?
"The DNA of the university is firstly to provide general, universal knowledge to students. It’s essential that the university does not become limited to a collection of purely vocational pathways."
Universities are not just having to grapple with an increasing number of career paths. They’re also faced with more competition than ever before: firstly from other institutions, but from non-traditional sources too (think online microcredentials, corporation-led training programmes and the re-emerging appreciation of on-the-job experience). Jamie Krenn, an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University in the US, believes the traditional degree must adapt to ward off those threats.
“Degrees risk losing their significance if institutions don’t evolve or add to their current menu of majors,” she argues. “If universities don’t adapt, the role of formal education will diminish as students opt for direct, hands-on experiences or heavy skill-based courses.”
Mathew Georghiou is the founder of MediaSpark, who provide gamified educational solutions to companies. He believes people are turning away from traditional degrees in favour of more flexible options. “More people are questioning the value of a university education that is slow, costly, and has a high dropout rate,” he says. “Universities are already struggling to compete now that students are moving more to online courses and can enrol with any school in the world.”
The challenge facing universities is also one of perception. If students are seeing reams of new jobs out there that universities aren’t catering for, they could be seen as out of touch. Universities have a certain responsibility to the cities and communities that they represent. If they can’t act as a pathway to these new and emerging careers, what exactly is their role in society?
It leaves schools at a crossroads. Creating new degrees is a time-consuming process - Stéphane Bouchonnet of France’s Ecole Polytechnique Paris estimates it takes at least three years from inception to launch. That means if a student wanted to start a Master’s in prompt engineering this year, work on creating the programme would have had to pre-date the launch of ChatGPT. Presumably the creators of that Master’s would also hold an MA in Crystal Ball Studies.
There are alternatives to creating fully-fledged degrees, of course. Some universities are offering new modules within existing degrees, often taught by external lecturers from the private sector. Others are placing a greater focus on continuing, or executive, education: shorter, industry-focused programmes aimed at current professionals. In both cases, the time from inception to launch could be less than 12 months - a much more realistic timeframe to respond to changes in the job market.
But perhaps we’re missing the point here. "I'd make the argument that degrees shouldn't keep up with career paths," says Carli Fink, a Certified Career Development Practitioner. "The data demonstrates that most people's careers don't follow a linear career path. If we think more of careers in this non-linear way, then I believe degrees prepare people for careers very effectively."
As Fink argues, the idea of a job for life looks increasingly like a relic from the past. Research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US found that baby boomers held an average of 11 jobs by the age of 40. Millennials not only expect to surpass that figure by their early 30s, but are also predicted to switch career paths multiple times. A student may be looking for a job in prompt engineering today, but that doesn’t mean they’ll stick with it for the rest of their career. And when it comes to making a career change, a specialised degree won’t necessarily help them do it.
"When you have a shorter programme it prepares you to do the one really specific job you're training to do,” says Fink, “but it doesn't prepare you as much for the broader context that you could operate in. It means it's harder to make those non-linear transitions."
To prepare graduates for this new world of short-stay, transitory employment, more specialised degrees may not be the answer. Instead, perhaps we need to change our perspective about the modern day role of universities. It can be easy to think of them as a kind of student production line; one which churns out workforce-ready graduates year after year. In truth, that has never been and never should be the role of universities.
“We can't endlessly expand the number of programmes,” says Stéphane Bouchonnet, Head of the Master of Science and Technology programmes at Ecole Polytechnique Paris. "The DNA of the university is firstly to provide general, universal knowledge to students. It’s essential that the university does not become limited to a collection of purely vocational pathways.”
The key to this, then, would seem to be transferable skills. Ones that can be applied across a wide range of functions and industries, allowing students to excel in various different careers. According to Adnan Rasool, Associate Professor at the American-based University of Tennessee at Martin, a degree remains the best - and arguably only - way of acquiring those skills.
“The issue is the myth that has been perpetuated to young folks around the world that somehow these skills will be gained through some magical course,” he says, “and not through a sustained and organised curriculum that nearly every single university runs."
But Professor Krenn at Columbia University describes these transferable skills as just ‘a starting point’. “The challenge is balancing them with the technical knowledge and industry-specific expertise employers increasingly demand. I see a need for hybrid approaches: general competencies plus specialised, career-focused training.”
Bouchonnet also points out that the modern student is different from even a decade ago. Faced with rising tuition fees, they are more discerning and more demanding than ever before. Maybe there will never be a degree out there that gives them the kind of multifaceted, multidisciplinary education they’re looking for. The answer may be a kind of flexible, on-demand qualification, where students acquire different skills from different institutions. For instance, they might study data analytics in Paris, finance in New York and - why not? - prompt engineering in San Francisco.
On the other hand, perhaps the true value of a university degree is actually its open-ended nature. “The thing about university education is that it builds social capital and gives you a toolkit,” says Professor Rasool. “How a student uses that toolkit is entirely up to them."