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TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-12-02
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2irSBECc-4
mbmbam thank you very much to the very appropriate in some a cheeky introduction Sophia and good to be here guys thank you very much for having me I'm here today to talk about %HESITATION what is the value of a university degree and trust me %HESITATION the irony of being at Macquarie university talking about effective I certainly not lost on me I'm what I'm planning to do
so they guys he's bring an element of visibility and objectivity to this very question to look at what is being taught particularly a higher education level is it useful for the students and is that what the world needs I think that for probably the last fifty years we've had a cultural paradigm in our societies that suggests that universities almost inevitable stepping stone to creating a life
in a career that is meaningful and successful and in my view that is becoming less true academia use to %HESITATION lead the way in terms of thought leadership in regards to most feel to be a business or science or rocks or whatever the case may be and by virtue of the rate of change in the real world to die and how dynamic you know the whole
planet has become a what the research is now telling us is that traditional education institutions by virtue of this size and by virtue of their bureaucracy I set up and are educating people perfectly for a world that no longer exists if we were to look at higher education institutions in a traditional sense out through a commercial lanes we would probably Dame them to be mature enterprises
which is %HESITATION quite large very comfortable %HESITATION resistant to change and sometimes overpriced the world is now starting to respond to this problem at one of the things we've seen recently is one of the most prestigious and %HESITATION largest accounting firms in the world and still young and has removed their criteria full and needing a university qualification in order to apply for a job the reason
they did days was that they had very high char and %HESITATION yeah human resource department go through the research and actually indicated that success in higher education did not call a light to success in a career or building a successful life so I think we need to question for up and coming generations what is being taught is it worth it and now we genuinely preparing students
for the real world that that will inevitably one day stepped into right now the sentiments of %HESITATION it particularly industry in the business sector is that there is a skill gap between what is being taught it university and bodies I'm going to make somebody valuable in the workplace forty two percent of employers believe the graduates are adequately prepare it meaning that somewhere along the line there
is that %HESITATION eh a gap between what we are learning within the four walls of a university then what is actually required when we stepped out into employment now the solution for this up until now has been work placements where students throughout you know the university degrees will go out into a workplace for a couple of weeks or a couple of months a chia and get
their real life experience by going out into the real world I environment that is a very useful tool however for those that speak to students in the room today is full of students and I know that you will speak to each other what these work placements unfortunately often are achieve is that the student gets to the end of their work placement and then purely is questioning
why am I studying at university given that what I have been learning within the four walls of the university didn't actually prepare me north Corel light to what I was required to do with the Phoenix king or the level of conversation easily output required when I stepped into this workplace environment so they're actually coming back into the classroom disheartened after going into these work placements and
rightly so you know they questioning should I even %HESITATION is this the most effective path for me to engage in education as I said rightly so fifty three point six percent of graduates a coming out solve a university and college globally and they are unemployed or they are under employed meaning they they don't have a job or they are working in a job that doesn't require
them to have the degree that they've just worked and paid for for three or five or seven or eight years or whatever it might be in order to a tank what this means is that the values of a tertiary qualification in today's world is far less than what it used today in previous generations having a university or college qualification a higher education qualification almost guaranteed that
you would step in to a job in that particular field however that is no longer the equation by virtue of their being far more degrees in formal qualifications out there in the marketplace and by virtue of a changing world in the global financial crisis and all of these different forces that are now coming into play I would bet that there's a lot of people in this
room that have you know traveled in taxis with taxi drivers that hold an MBA qualification and there's nothing wrong with driving taxis but that's not why somebody goes to university for five or six or eight years the world is now %HESITATION very rife with people who are over qualified and have skills that no longer cholera light will have any direct application to the real world and
by virtue of so many more people going through a higher education structures today I think that as educators particularly at a higher education level we can be doing more to support an impound the students in order to become the best version of themselves develop themselves in an emotional intelligence level and ultimately equip them with the practical skills that can be used out there in the real
world we've got jobs that don't have people and we've got people that don't have jobs and ultimately comes down to a skills gap in the curriculum based education that most of us are currently going through although the values going down the price is not in the last thirty five years higher education is increased %HESITATION its price is the inflated price by live eleven hundred and twenty
percent this makes higher education %HESITATION the fastest growing price so there is no good or service that is groaning prize of the van higher education to this degree in the last thirty five years right the challenge with that is that students now you're going to stir in in America for instance you to death is going over a trillion dollars in a strategy about thirty billion dollars
the problem is not the day the day is not the problem the problem is what is the value those that have received to date received in transaction for that date that now I am now late in the week but this comes back to what I believe is the number one challenger it across higher education and probably all levels of education globally from my research and you
know years of exploring higher education institutions years of working with high schools and years and years of consumer insight at a student level for those that attend university %HESITATION and just conversations with everybody from faculty to Danes to students in my view the number one problem we have at a higher education level is that right now hiring education is a full point four trillion dollar industry
globally and very few people are looking at what's being talked large industry it's become almost a machine in a based in and of itself over in my view education is what happens at the interface of teacher and student rock what is the teacher talking about how they deliver in the education how they teaching it in is the student getting out of a learning it on the
growing from it in the is it useful that is the interface of where education happens however we have an industry with very few if any people are looking at what is actually being told in some universities the KPIs are actually back which if they develop a piece of content it's about how long can we take that piece of content imply full so in a lot of
instances faculty a incentivized to not update content and curriculum which is scary given the right to change in the real world this point is probably best highlighted if we look at the most respected university in the world have it at university of in Boston and if we go back to two thousand and twelve no tell you whine a second if you go back to two thousand
twelve hava did revenues of four billion dollars that financial year %HESITATION don't worry the revenue continues to increase in two thousand fourteen was four point four billion dollars however bring up two thousand twelve because they see the need for billion dollars in revenue that same year one of the professors a cockle Clayton Christensen was speaking to other higher education Appropriations Committee in Utah and he was
talking about how he believes higher education for the first time ever is now ripe for disruption because it's no longer serving in a commercial sense that can shoot out which is of course the student what Clayton was saying was he believes the number one reason for these is because we have large institutions that are spending a lot of money and investing a lot of money in
a lot of things however at Harvard for two thousand and twelve as is the case for most other institutions as is the case for every you previously their budget that year in two thousand twelve when they did four billion dollars of revenue their budget that you for making teaching Bessa with zero dollars I recently went over to Babson college in %HESITATION Boston right right right knee
hobbit and for similar reasons I'm always sort of researching world's best practice when it comes to education Babson held up globally as the world later when it comes to entrepreneurial education am we were in one of their entrepreneurial finance lectures that were using case studies from corporate America the from thirty years ago so entrepreneurial finance is relating to early stage high growth businesses however the case
studies and therefore the lecture and therefore the education that we're discussing is from corporate America say looking a balance sheets with tens of billions of dollars from thirty years ago and is somebody that's been in business for themselves now for about eleven years I can tell you that those case studies I simply not useful if anything that counterproductive for those looking out to go out and
embark on an option for no real Korea the world is already finding its own solution to this education problem right am I believe that higher education as Clayton Christensen suggested out will be disrupted and will continue to change in the coming years and as we saw with Ernst and young unite corporates and businesses and culture eight yet what he eats it's all starting to shift what
concerns me as still a young person a in an up and coming generation is that what hasn't shifted is the cultural paradigm that we should all go to university if we're accepted into it almost without question almost at any cost and that's the paradigm that I think we need to shift university can be incredibly productive universally adversity can be incredibly useful however I think we need
to look at it objectively and ask what is being taught is it going to be useful from a a what posses ride for me if I talk to upcoming generations of students for a second the three pieces of advice that I would give to this particular problem is this number one question approach your education with the same objective thinking that your university encourages you to apply
to your assessments in the world of love no longer can higher education get away with not relying on a cultural paradigm for their value in two thousand and fifteen so question and in questioning it you might still decide to go to university which it might which would be a great decision provided it's been made for using the rock criterion thinking through the right lenses for those
of you that decide not to go down a higher education powerful not to engage in higher education you will still do your apprenticeship and I don't mean in a formal sense I mean in a practical sense right I am a massive advocate for education massive advocate I think that you know to grow as people into a Volvo as human beings is the number one reason why
way FIA run it's just that we need to take responsibility for our own education and look at university higher education is one piece of that puzzle and think about how while we educating ourselves and how are we growing into the person that will ultimately be able to build a successful Korea and make a valuable contribution the second thing it's Mazda main take it's been proven that
the skills gap that exists between higher education and industry I tend be closed by those we do real work experience so if you were going through a higher education and process at the moment one of the most valuable things you can do is go and work full organizations while getting your education even if that means working for free and we're not going to walk into a
dream job straight away however we will be around the right people having the right conversations we will stop to get visibility of how the real world works and how real employment places work in order to determine what could be half ice water we good at what our strengths water at weaknesses and where do we fit within all of that how can we contribute and add value
must amantes to learn from somebody with pain that done that experience and is probably the richest learning experience any of us can have and lastly is embrace failure traditional education at every level teaches that father was not a good thing right somebody else has the ounces you don't know given to you in a textbook you then do an exam and they'll tell you if you got
the ounces of rifle wrong and if we get it wrong then we filed and that is not a good thing at a paradigm and conceptually contextual and will this is almost the opposite to what goes on in the real world for those that want to pursue a meaningful career for those that want to become the best versions of themselves for those that want to build a
successful life found yet ease and inevitable stepping stone towards success right it is part of the game and eighties live so culturally we need to change a paradigm to ward five via and toward making mistakes and start to be a cut with that for those of you that are ambitious and do seek out you know really meaningful career in a meaningful life found it will be
an inevitable part of that and that is absolutely a cat it was Nelson Mandela who said education is the most powerful weapon with which we can use to change the world and I with every cell in my body believe that to be true if traditional education is no longer leading the way in terms of education all it means is that we need to take more responsibility
is up and coming generations even if we are going through a universe in going through college and all that stuff we need to take more responsibility over our own education and our own growth so that we can grow into the people we no we can become so that we can contribute to the world at large and solve some of the challenges that are coming up and
