Graduation and the employment dilemma: Let’s change the pedagogy

ACROSS Africa, students arrive on campuses full of hope that a university degree will improve their lives. The reality is far less certain.

The Herald of 15 October 2019 ran with the headline “President to engage graduates” in which he was quoted instructing the Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare to compile a database of graduates countrywide. This database is to ensure that graduates secure employment and funding to start projects in line with their areas of qualification.

The premise of this noble action was on the backdrop that 10% of the graduates capped every year secure employment. I repeat, 10 percent of everyone graduated in each year gets a job.

Technically this means of the 2 465 students who graduated at the National University of Science and Technology; +/-247 will be employed and for Lupane State University, at least +/- 95. Sadly and startling truth, isn’t?

Then another issue rings to mind, is this 10 percent the only “employable lot” or the job market is skimpily available or it’s an indication of the lean chances of prosperity, present for anyone who sacrifices their 8 semesters studying/ training for the job market?

After following a series of graduation ceremonies recently, and the ebullient shares of celebration pictures by friends and random citizens, I revisited a phenomenal piece in “The Conversation” blog, by the duet of Seth Trudeau and Keno Omu, both scholars of note from the African Leadership University. They argue that it takes an average of five years for a graduate to find a job. Yet business leaders frequently say there are jobs, just a lack of skilled talent to do them. Just as the duet asks: How can this be?

Trudeau and Omu explain that there are two commonly cited explanations. The first is that financial, human capital and infrastructure constraints have a negative impact on the range and quality of skills students graduate with.

The second is the disconnect between what universities teach and the skills needed in the market. However, another more fundamental explanation has to do with how students are educated, irrespective of what they study or the resource constraints they face.

How students learn matters to employers because it shapes how they think and what they do at work.

From their seminal advice on the state of graduation and the employment dilemma in Africa, we extract that a growing number of employers are no longer looking for graduates with the most impressive degree certificates. In fact, trailblazers like Ernst & Young have removed degree classifications from their entry requirements because they do not believe that academic success is always a sign of professional success.

Well, this is another emerging discourse on process versus outcome that is yet to reshape Africa’s embrace of education.

The later millennium has taught that employers are now looking for graduates who can think for themselves, integrate into fast-paced work environments, learn new ways of working and develop creative solutions to real problems. These abilities depend more on how they were taught than what they learned — perhaps this argument boarders on decolonising education (especially the pedagogic methodologies that need to be rethought).

While I continued to read the piece, the lesson kept on mounting. Trudeau and Omu further lecture that we are at a unique moment in the history of education. Information was once scarce but is now everywhere.

This is true, because in the last 15 years, we have also made a giant leap forward in our understanding of how the brain works and how people learn. These developments have radically altered the way we think about higher education.

In the traditional university model, “learning” meant access to information and knowledge, education resources and teaching expertise. Today, technology has made it easier for anyone to get information, knowledge and learning resources. The advantage retained by the traditional university is in producing and organising knowledge. But academic researchers form a very small percentage of the knowledge workers needed in the information age.

What then should happen to change the 10% in Zimbabwe to a better number, you may ask?

As Trudeau and Omu say, universities need to rethink their approach to learning if they are to produce people with the critical thinking, leadership, collaboration and problem solving skills needed for modern life. Learning in many universities in Africa still happens in large lecture halls and rewards the ability to remember and repeat information. Researchers such as Nobel Prize winning physicist Carl Wieman have shown that this is one of the least effective ways of learning.

Effective learning takes three things. First, students must be able to reflect on what they are learning. Reflection helps students assess what they know and what they don’t. It also helps them to integrate new ideas and concepts into their body of knowledge. When students reflect, they strengthen the neural pathways in their brain, and build new pathways that link information that was previously not associated. These links enable critical thinking.

Second, true learning happens when students stop being passive recipients of information and become active experimenters. When students take an active part, they take responsibility for the results and ensure that learning is relevant to them. They develop habits that help them learn later in life, such as selfregulation, motivation and curiosity.

Third, learning happens when students apply new concepts or skills. This is the most natural test for a student’s comprehension of what they are studying. Doing something, receiving feedback about it, refining the approach and then doing it again also builds neural pathways for retrieval and association.