Page title

Intellectual Cross-Training: What College Students Need

Main page content

Written by
Brent L. Iverson, Dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies & Warren J. and Viola Mae Raymer Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, The University of Texas at Austin

I grew up in a quiet middle class town named Palo Alto, California.  Yes, that Palo Alto, and yes, it was quiet and middle class back in the 1960s.  My father was an electrical engineer, and fresh out of engineering school he went to work for the one company where he would stay for over three decades until he retired.  

His career could be described as a single long road from beginning to end.  In other words, my father’s career was like a marathon, one step after another in the same steady race.  As with much of the high-tech industry in the Santa Clara Valley at the time, his work centered on national defense and helping the United States win the Cold War.  And like training for a marathon, my father’s education only needed to focus on a single technical path that turned out to be the one he followed for his entire career.

In 1990, my wife and I moved to Austin, Texas, to pursue my dream of becoming a faculty member at a major public university.  Decades later, two of my daughters have retraced their grandfather’s path back to California, entering the high-tech workforce in what is now known as Silicon Valley.  

That is where the similarities with my father’s journey end.  Like many in my daughters’ generation, they share no expectation of staying at a single company.  In fact, between them they have held 7 different jobs in six years, with each earning a master’s degree in between.  

My daughters are thriving, but in a very different way than my father.  Rather than staying within a single technical area like my father, their early careers have already resembled much more of a triathlon, with entirely different career phases involving distinct intellectual skills and technical knowledge.  In fact, both daughters are working in jobs with descriptions that did not exist when they graduated from college.

My daughters’ experiences are not unique.  A longitudinal study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found today’s workers have changed jobs close to 12 times by age 48, and that trend is accelerating.  Today’s graduates are expected to change careers in the process.  In fact, odds are that current students will retire from jobs that will not even be invented by the time they graduate from college.  Think about that for a moment.

In other words, a growing consensus predicts that the one constant in the future workplace will be change, and that highly disruptive future technologies in a number of fields are being developed right now.  Above all else, future graduates will need to be agile, adaptable, and versatile enough to succeed in all the phases of a career triathlon.

Just like triathlon preparation requires cross-training to prepare for the swimming, biking and running phases of a race, it is important that the education of today’s college student incorporates “intellectual cross-training” to prepare for each of their different career phases.  In other words, today’s graduates will need a wide variety of complementary educational experiences, not just detailed technical training in one field like my father received.  

You might think that most current college students and their families would see what is happening across all professions and realize the importance of this cross-training approach to higher education.  Paradoxically, too many students come to our campuses right now focused on getting a stream-lined college degree by taking the path of least resistance, intentionally avoiding courses and experiences that take them anywhere out of their tightly defined fields and intellectual “comfort zones.”  The hypercompetitive college admissions process has contributed to such attitudes by discouraging academic risk-taking due to fears of GPA erosion. The bottom line is that, in 2019, too many students are still approaching college like marathon training, as if they were preparing for a single career event like my father.   

In my role as dean, I have had students ask me why I think a given class that covers material outside of their majors will help them, and I always respond by asking why they think it will not.  They have no answer but then listen and nod when I explain the constantly changing professional world they will enter and how they should prepare for it.  Most will have to rely on educational breadth and the confidence to change professional direction, probably more than once.  The ability to thrive in such a dynamic environment should derive naturally from taking rigorous college classes in several different disciplines, which is exactly what many current students actively avoid.  In the December 6, 2015 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Clune beautifully captures what is happening with an article entitled, “Degrees of Ignorance,” which describes what he calls the “Gutting of Gen Ed.”

All students should be actively encouraged to seek educational breadth and to break out of their academic comfort zones.  STEM majors need to take courses that teach critical thinking and how to write with clarity and sophistication.  Students in non-STEM areas need to be familiar with technology as well as being fluent in quantitative reasoning skills.  All of our students must be able to deliver powerful public presentations, engage in independent inquiry, and practice ethical decision-making.  We live in a complex, global society and our students need to understand the diversity of cultures that exist around the world and in our own country.

It is our collective responsibility as educators to provide the “intellectual cross-training” students will need to succeed when they must transition to different and likely unpredicted new phases in the triathlons that will constitute their professional lives in the 21st century.