A proposed undergraduate science/engineering curriculum

I have suggested to several people lately that American undergraduate education is, in general, not worth what it costs. It’s not that a college degree doesn’t open up better job opportunities – it obviously does. It is that much of the education one gets during those undergraduate years (at $30,000 - $50,000 or more a year) is of little practical use in either life or the workplace. And, in fact, I would argue that the real reason for all those required “distribution credits” isn’t really to “broaden the liberal education”, but instead to assure adequate enrollment in less poplar subjects and courses, and keep students in college longer (producing more income for the college). I note that in Europe an undergraduate degree only takes six semesters.

I have argued that at least for the sciences and advanced engineering, probably something like four semesters would be adequate to prepare people to enter graduate school, if those four semesters were packed with practical subjects. So what “practical” undergraduate subjects would I include in those four semesters? Of course they would continue to take science or engineering courses, but here is a suggested list to of additional subjects to add to their undergraduate curriculum:

(1) Continuing math, with particular attention to probability and statistics. Most people, including even some “statisticians” don’t really understand probability and statistics. Certainly most gamblers don’t, most lottery ticket buyers don’t, most investors don’t and most journalists don’t. That is why there are “lies, damn lies, and statistics”, and why statistical measures are so often completely misunderstood and misused in popular and political writing and argument, and even by some otherwise very competent scientists.

(2) Technical writing. Most Americans are abysmal at writing, and this is especially true of engineers and scientists, for whom nevertheless clear, concise, organized, accurate, readable writing is very important.

(3) Basic civil law. Everybody with a college education ought to understand how to read and understand a contract or a mortgage, make a will, form a simple corporation, write a note, etc, and what to expect (and not expect) from a lawyer.

(4) Run a meeting. It is amazing how few people can organize and run an efficient meeting, with a clear objective, tight management of time, effective capture and assignment of actions and issues to be worked after the meeting, etc. That is why meetings so often are such a long, drawn-out waste of time. But this is a trainable skill, of immense value in the workplace. Moreover, even if one is only a participant in a meeting, rather than its leader, one can help improve an ineffective meeting if one understands the dynamics of meetings.

(5) Management A - people. At some point many of these graduates will need to manage people, either in their own company or in a corporation. They need to learn how to mentor people, assess them realistically, understand them in the workplace context, use their strengths and cover for their weaknesses, encourage them, help them work in teams, and even occasionally discipline them. And indeed even when not managers they need to learn to work effectively with others, and interact effectively with their own manager. This is a trainable skill that so very few people seem to have.

(6) Management B - projects. The course above is about how to manage people effectively and get the best out of them. This course focuses instead on the mechanics of management, the issues a good manager needs to attend to: budgeting and budget tracking, scheduling and schedule tracking, employee development, time management, action capture and tracking, etc.

(7) The sociology of corporations and businesses– A course to prepare people to function within the corporate culture, to understand office politics, to gain some basic skills in how to successfully advance a point of view or a proposed project within an organization, what really matters to the corporate structure and how to leverage that, how corporations decide whom to promote, etc, etc. I have never seen such a course, but I can see what ought to be the content, and I can see how immensely useful it would be to newly-graduated college students who are so naïve about how things really work.

(8) A course on becoming an entrepreneur. How to strike out on one’s own as a contract specialist, or form a new company. What needs to be done, where to find financing, how to build an effective business case, what the legal issues are, where to find talent, how new companies typically fail and how to avoid that, etc, etc. This would be a fascinating course to assemble, and ideally would include talks by real successful (and perhaps unsuccessful as well) entrepreneurs on how they did it and what they overcame.

This post focuses on science and engineering education. Clearly other fields might have other requirements, though in fact many of the topics I have suggested would be of use to almost anyone entering the world of work.