I was just reading an article in the Boston Globe, “The Leadership Thing”, about how a professor at Tufts is trying to change some of the curriculum at colleges and the way they judge students for acceptance.  Colleges now obviously focus on academics on grades, both in their curriculum and their admissions.  But there are so many important skills that one needs for a job and for life that colleges do not teach.

I always try to ask myself what is the purpose or goal of anything I do so I know what to try to get from it.  It seems to me that a lot of kids go to college just because thats what you’re supposed to do.  They have no idea what they’re going to do after college, what skills they need, and the college doesn’t try to teach them those skills either.

In an earlier post, I said I thought one of the most important skills in life is to be able to separate imporant information from unimporant information.  I think another one is knowing when to stop work on something.  The last 5% of a project always takes longer than the first 95%.  I know the perfectionists out there will disagree with me, but at a point I think the cost/benefit ratio says you should stop working on something.  Anyway, these are examples of some skills that someone should teach maybe?  Probably more important are social skills and dealing with your boss, etc.  I certainly like their ideas for have the admissions be more based on problem solving and creativity than academic scores.

I guess the question is, what is college for?  To prepare you for a job?  To prepare you for a happy life?  To teach you academic knowledge?  I do think that the co-op program at Northeastern does a good job of preparing you with some skills for jobs and things, you certainly have a much better idea what a job will be like, what you need to know for it, and what you want to do after working at a couple different companies.  And it changes what you take out of your classes. But there are some skills that colleges are missing as well.