Stuff and Nonsense

Or How Much Do You Need to Know

Graduates pop out of the University sausage factory, clutching their certificates, and weeping with the exhaustion of juggling a 20 hour job to pay for courses that cost as much as a family starter-home, while slogging to get a First, without which you cannot be short-listed for any decent job. But employers (what a demanding bunch they are!) still insist that graduates these days know very little Stuff.
That is nonsense. Graduates have never known enough Stuff.
It seems the problem is getting worse, because in the internet age, employers have realised how much Stuff is out there, a whole Googleful of Stuff, several internet universes and galaxies of it.
Stuff is what is all around you and happening all the time. You can never know all of it because it is constantly changing, there is new Stuff every day.
Employers want graduates to apply their specialist knowledge to new Stuff. In some quarters (the high tech industries) this is known as 'innovation'. But in most service-oriented companies such as banks, it means that young recruits must hold their own at a cocktail party and make intelligent pronouncements on topical and ethical issues. Topical is important: the best Stuff is what is in the newspapers, it’s what everyone is talking about. You need to have an opinion on President Obama’s health reforms in America even if you have always used the NHS, because you need to understand that Obama’s reforms can affect the direction of US politics. You must know about the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and how they are impacting on Life As We Know It, you must be conversant on the Great Climate Change Debate (if you don’t know what happened at Copenhagen, bone up on it now) so that you can knowledgeably discuss economic losses from global warming (if you are an economist) or legal implications of (if you’re studying law).
All that is Stuff.
In the old days, before Facebook, and before newspapers and TV were dominated by vacuous celebrities, you got most Stuff from the news media. Early lessons in developing instant opinions on Stuff came from hearing Dad shout at the TV.
But that was then and this is now.
You no longer pick up Stuff. You have to go in search of it. Usually via Google, which does not necessarily provide the best overview of Stuff you need, much of it being out of date. Stuff has become pretty random, and therefore elusive and even more sought after than before.
The need to know Stuff has become so important, it is being taught.
New courses are springing up on campuses, like weeds between the cracks of education, and some of them are at quite prestigious institutions, too.
The London School of Economics has just started its own Bluffers guide to Stuff opaquely called “LSE 100”. (100 what? 100 facts? 100 lessons? 100 per cent?). It is compulsory for all students a bit like “study skills” tends to be, but packaged as “skills graduates need in the modern world”, a marketing slogan that could apply to anything in education.
LSE 100 will involve “group work, debates and exercises” so that students form opinions about events around them and are able to articulate them. In other words, they will talk to each other. In that sense, it is completely different from other undergraduate interactions like snooker, table football and karaoke.
Why does the LSE need to do this? One reason is that it has set the grade barrier so high for entry, particularly in Economics, that it is getting too many number-crunching nerds and not enough communicators who can tell you why on earth they are crunching all these numbers. Students need learn to debate, predict and to “think”. Now there’s a thing - a world-class institution where students aren’t particularly good at “thinking”.
The LSE has a particular problem because its courses are mostly delivered in huge lectures with next to no interaction between lecturer and students. Its “teaching”, unlike its research, has consistently been given low marks by students. In other words the only value added that LSE seems to provide, is its brand stamp on the CV of its students, not on their knowledge or thinking. That did not matter in boom times when graduates went straight from the LSE into the top banks and consultancies. It does now when employers are picking and choosing.
Imperial College has for some time had “communication skills” as a course for its students. Many science degrees at other universities include some non-science – philosophy or history of science is popular. They must not only prepare for careers in theoretical physics these days, they must also apply their scientific learning to Stuff and be able to tell non-scientists about it in an interesting way.
Less specialised institutions are so concerned that their students are lacking in Stuffing that they are redesigning courses, some are even talking about introducing liberal arts degrees, which can be anything you want them to be, and are generally a foundation course in Stuff. Other institutions are introducing general courses in the first (or even second) years of study. General courses cover a fair bit of Stuff, which, after all, used to be called General Knowledge.
Employers are a canny bunch, they are adept at spotting where there is a shortage. So, for example, they shout about British and American graduates not having foreign languages, and demand fluency in at least two before they will hire, even if recruits never, ever use those languages again. Because employers see fewer and fewer interviewees who can hold their own on Stuff, they want candidates to have a lot of it, whether or not they need it.
I have a theory, when books have disappeared, and have been completely replaced by Stuff, most of it only digitally available, employers will be looking for recruits who are proficient in Literature and only books of 500 pages and above will count.
Institutions like the LSE that do not now do so, will add literature and philosophy courses. They will have to, or their students will be well and truly stuffed when they come out into the real world of never having enough.