The Future of Education
trying to market themselves and be
the perfect kid for the right college,
they lose sight of who they really are,
what their questions are, what they’re
curious about.
Meanwhile, the kids who don’t
compete because they’d rather work
with their hands or don’t think they’re
smart enough feel like losers. Twenty
percent of our students don’t com-
plete high school. An additional thirty
percent graduate from high school
and go on to minimum wage jobs. Of
the approximately seventy percent of
the high school graduates who enroll
in college, nearly half drop out before
they complete any degree, often
having acquired enormous debt along
the way. Lacking skills or preparation
for a trade, most of them can only
manage to find minimum-wage jobs.
But what about “the winners,” the
kids who manage to graduate from
a four-year college or university and
then head off into the labor mar-
ket? Having attended schools where
acquiring knowledge mattered most,
how well are they faring in the innova-
tion era? A growing body of evidence
suggests that, in fact, the majority of
our college graduates are stunningly
ill prepared for the jobs of the present
— and even less so for the jobs of the
future, when computers and artificial
intelligence will have taken over virtu-
ally all routine work.
A couple of examples should suffice
to tell the story. Back in the early days
of Google, when everyone still thought
we had a knowledge economy, the
fledgling company sought to hire the
smartest kids in the world and so only
hired kids with Ivy League degrees
and only interviewed those who had
the highest test scores and GPAs. But
then along came Laszlo Bock. As se-
nior VP of people operations at Goo-
gle, he analyzed all of the data related
to hiring and job performance and dis-
covered that the indices they had been
using like GPAs and test scores were
“worthless.” Today, Google no longer
asks for your test scores or college
8 essentials | summer 2019
The essential education challenge today
is to reimagine learning and teaching
for the innovation era
transcript. They don’t care whether or
not you went to college, and 15% of
their new hires in certain departments
do not have a college degree. What
Google cares about today is not what
you know, but what you can do with
what you know, and they now use
multiple structured interviews to make
hiring decisions.
When I learned this, I thought that
perhaps Google was an anomaly. But
then I was invited to speak by Deloitte
to business leaders in Ho Chi Minh
City several years ago. Prior to my
presentation, I was invited to lunch by
the CEO. She knew of my affiliation
at the time with Harvard and had a bit
of fun with it, telling me, “You know,
we used to hire the best students from
the best universities, but it turned out
that they did not work out so well.”
She smiled and then continued, “Now,
we put prospective new hires through
a summer-long boot camp to see how
they solve problems collaboratively,
and then we decide whether or not to
offer them a job.”
For college graduates who do not
know how to solve problems collab-
oratively and who lack other essen-
tial skills required to succeed in the
innovation era, it is hardly the “full
employment economy” that everyone
touts these days. According to a recent
article in the Wall Street Journal, for-
TONY WAGNER will present “Creating
Innovators for the Future of Learning”
on Wednesday, October 23 at the
Opening Plenary of EDspaces in
Milwaukee, WI.
Sponsored by
ty-three percent of college graduates
ages 25 to 29 are either unemployed
or underemployed. What does under-
employed mean? They are baristas
or bartenders — earning an average
salary of about $33,000 — $10,000
less than jobs that actually require a
BA might pay. Most have college debt
amounting to an average of $35,000
or more. Many are living at home and
likely to default on those debts.
The mantra of policymakers for
the last decade has been to ensure
that all kids graduate from high
school “college ready.” The assump-
tion is that the more education a stu-
dent acquires, the better positioned
they are to succeed. But the reality is
that students today need a different
kind of education, not necessarily
more education.
The essential education challenge
today is to reimagine learning and
teaching for the innovation era. We
need to work together to understand
what we must do in order to gradu-
ate all students “innovation ready”
— ready for the challenges of work,
learning, and citizenship in the 21st
century.
n
TONY WAGNER current serves as a Senior
Research Fellow at The Learning Policy
Institute. Previously, Tony held a variety of
positions at Harvard
University for twenty
years and was a
high school English
teacher for twelve
years. Note: This
article is copyrighted,
no unauthorized use
is permitted.