Three Disruptive Facts Revealed as Not Liberal Talking Points

This week our president admitted what fact-checkers have been saying since he took office: he is a liar. 

Not only not a liberal talking point (it has always been a fact-checker observation of many more lies than any previous president)…but now even beyond that it is the president himself telling us he is a liar.

Of course, he already told us this before the election when he said, after years of insisting the opposite (aka lying to our faces over and over again), that President Obama was indeed born in the US.

Also not a liberal talking point? The president’s tariffs are likely to spark a trade war that will hurt American consumers and businesses….the opposite of making us great. And what liberal wacko dares to call the president a misinformed liar here? The US Chamber of Commerce. Communists.

A third non-liberal talking point to put a damper on Fox Noise driven outrage? Current claims—that are the foundation for a destructive assault on higher education—that only STEM majors get jobs and promotions…have been found (in a study by that well-known anti-business group called Google) to be inaccurate. The tops seven skills students need to master are all skills they learn in a well-rounded liberal arts education emphasizing the social sciences, humanities and arts.

For more on this Google study, check out this blog....

Google Finds STEM Skills Aren’t the Most Important Skills

January 5, 2018 by Lou Glazer

Terrific Washington Post column on research done by Google on the skills that matter most to its employees’ success. Big surprise: it wasn’t STEM. The Post writes:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, both brilliant computer scientists, founded their company on the conviction that only technologists can understand technology. Google originally set its hiring algorithms to sort for computer science students with top grades from elite science universities.

In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last.

The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

Those traits sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major [or conflict transformation program…or any social science degree] than as a programmer. Could it be that top Google employees were succeeding despite their technical training, not because of it?  After bringing in anthropologists and ethnographers to dive even deeper into the data, the company enlarged its previous hiring practices to include humanities majors, artists, and even the MBAs that, initially, Brin and Page viewed with disdain.

This, of course, is consistent with the findings of the employer-led Partnership for 21st Century Learning who describe the foundation skills for worker success as the 4Cs: collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity. And the book Becoming Brilliant which adds to those four content and confidence for the 6Cs.

And consistent with the work on the value of a liberal arts degree of journalist George Anders laid out in his book You Can Do Anything and in a Forbes article entitled “That Useless Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.”

It’s far past time that Michigan policymakers and business leaders stop telling our kids if they don’t get a STEM related degree they are better off not getting a four-year degree. It simply is not accurate.

(Not to mention that many of their kids are getting non-STEM related four-year degrees.)

And instead begin to tell all kids what is accurate that the foundation skills––as Google found out––are not narrow occupation-specific skills, but rather are broad skills related to the ability to work with others, think critically and be a lifelong learner. The kind of skills that are best built with a broad liberal arts education.

The Post concludes:

No student should be prevented from majoring in an area they love based on a false idea of what they need to succeed. Broad learning skills are the key to long-term, satisfying, productive careers. What helps you thrive in a changing world isn’t rocket science. It may just well be social science, and, yes, even the humanities and the arts that contribute to making you not just workforce ready but world ready.

Exactly!

Here is a link to the above blog.

Here is a link to the Washington Post analysis referred to in the blog.

Here is another blog on this.

Here is another article about the Google analysis called Project Oxygen.

Here is a link to The New Education building in this data and referred to in the blog.

The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux, by Cathy Davidson