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The “L” Word
By Mark Gottlieb, on Manufacturing.Net (January 31, 2007)
An editorial by Mark Gottlieb posted to Manufacturing.Net, a news site for manufacturing industry executives, revisits common complaints about the “level of obtuseness among today’s college graduates.” Many business leaders, Gottlieb writes, believe that “young people now see education as merely preparation for their first job” and think that too few of these students “give thought to the long-term value of a broad and wide-ranging liberal arts education.” But the blame for this situation does not lie entirely with the students or with the educational system, he says; the attitudes of business leaders have contributed to the problem as well.
As an example, Gottlieb cites a national survey of business leaders conducted in 2006 by AAC&U. While 63 percent of those surveyed “noted that many new graduates do not possess the skills necessary to compete successfully in a global economy,” “a mere 33 percent . . . placed a high value on critical thinking and reasoning abilities” and only 30 percent “saw value in oral and written communication skills” when making new hires, he says. The most important skill identified by business leaders was “teamwork,” which Gottlieb describes as “the ability to subsume oneself within a group, to turn off one’s critical faculties, to find common ground and cooperate with others.”
Gottlieb advises business leaders to give more weight to the intellectual foundation provided by a liberal arts education when making hiring decisions. Such an education promotes “the development of intellectual flexibility, adaptability to change, critical thinking, creative problem-solving and a global perspective”—all of which, he says, are essential in today’s global economy.
The full text of Mark Gottlieb’s article is available on Manufacturing.Net.
AAC&U’s national surveys of business leaders and recent graduates were conducted for the Liberal Education and America’s Promise campaign. For more information, see the full report on the survey findings (PDF) and a chart of the liberal education outcomes on which employers want colleges to “place more emphasis.” |
