General Education Has a Bad Rap

In each country, every college course that a student took provided skills that could be applied in a specific field, as well as information about their match quality with the field itself. If students focused earlier, they compiled more skills that prepared them for gainful employment. If they sampled and focused later, they entered the job market

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Vocational schools are, by definition, focused on training people to a specific set of skills. They don’t necessarily offer everything that a college student would receive from an undergraduate education, especially one with a liberal arts focus, which (theoretically, anyway) prepares students with foundational skills like critical reasoning and pr... See more

What are some of the biggest misconceptions about specialization or generalization? There's this feeling that because there's more knowledge in the world, you should specialize more. I think people often don't feel like they're specialized enough when, in fact, a lot of the research shows that there's actually more opportunities than ever for broad... See more

For various reasons, though, the specialist era is waning. The future may belong to the generalist. Why’s that? To begin, our highly interconnected and global economy means that seemingly unrelated developments can affect each other.

Nothing can substitute for depth of analysis, and there's proven value in specialization – it's what education, career paths, scientific research, and technological innovation are built on – but generalism is a secret talent.

People who appreciate diversity, who are in the know about the wider world and who understand how things interact are invalua... See more

I think there’s a prevalence of generalists, people who have moved between different careers, and it’s a reflection of our macro-historical moment. Don’t get me wrong, the silos of the industrial society are still here, but they have melted to some extent. So you have people trying to understand how to exist in that murkiness where society’s tradit... See more