Employers’ Challenge to Educators: Make School Relevant to Students’ Lives

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/06/employers-challenge-to-educators-make-school-relevant-to-students-lives

while critical thinking and communication are important, Wagner said schools are in danger if they stop there. “Above all, they need to be creative problem solvers,”

a bottom-up and top-down strategy should be implemented
the bottom-up strategy will only work, if it’s accompanied by business leaders clearly articulating the outcomes they’d like to see and helping align accountability to those outcomes.

Recently elite liberal arts colleges like Hampshire and Bard have announced they won’t consider SAT or ACT scores if they’re submitted with an application, because admissions officers don’t believe the tests are a good measure of students’ potential.

The survey found that student who felt supported — that their professors cared about them as individuals, that professors made them want to learn, that they had a mentor — were three times more likely to thrive as those who did not feel supported. Only 14 percent of college graduates answered that all three of those qualities were present in their college experience.

Even fewer college graduates found their higher education experience to be relevant to life and work after college. Only six percent reported with strong affirmatives that they worked on a long term project (at least a semester), had an internship where they could apply skills, and were very engaged in an extracurricular.