The Challenge
The current tertiary educational system is becoming increasingly inefficient, and grows closer over time toward true obsolescence. A system that teaches job-knowledge once over four years for $300,000 is running quickly toward a cliff. It certainly cannot, in the long term, serve the career preparation needs of any but those who enjoy the luxury of excess time and money.
We see that the primary focus of conventional tertiary education and supplemental STEM programs is to impart knowledge to the student. This is a flawed approach for a number of reasons:
Developing a core foundation of psychological and cognitive skills breaks through these problems. Students strong in these attributes and skills perform well in complex work of all kinds, and are more able to adapt, learn by their own initiative, and reskill as the future changes–taking advantage of the inexpensive and widely available training that now exists online, and using the latest tools such as generative AI to help them perform, rather than being crushed by those tools.
Unfortunately, the university system is highly entrenched, and is unlikely to reform itself to develop these foundational skills–it looks as if it will continue to inefficiently impart knowledge to students. To help students prepare for the future workforce, a supplemental or alternative approach is needed. This alternative will need to drive success for a broad audience in order to gain traction. This is particularly difficult for students who cannot afford tertiary education themselves, or see the risk of an unconventional approach as too high to commit the funds for.
The Futures Forge Scholarship Fund exists to:
Help build a critical mass of student success stories to build real traction for a skills-first approach to higher education, and
Make attendance possible for lower- and middle-income students who will take great advantage of this opportunity.
Specific knowledge is becoming commoditized and a less necessary core tool. Free and low-cost online resources, plus generative AI, make even complex knowledge instantly accessible.
Knowledge and job-specific skills have rapidly shrinking shelf lives. Many of the jobs of 2030 do not exist today, and many of today’s high-income jobs (software engineering, law, finance and analysis, etc) may be disrupted. Most complex jobs will require constant reskilling.
The foundations of performance in both learning and work environments are core psychological attributes and general cognitive skills. Excellence in these attributes and skills has a greater impact on job performance than the amount of previous training in the job-specific skill.
