Outdated teaching link to joblessness

In the past three years, politicians, television commentators, university vice chancellors, and business leaders paid great lip service to the perceived lack of employability of Kenyan tertiary education graduates.

Feelings surged that the skills acquired in diplomas and degrees do not prepare university leavers for the real world. Advisory boards were formed, employability studies conducted, conferences held, and roundtables shown on television.

Unfortunately, many observers attribute the inability of tertiary institutions to keep up with the times as a difference between teaching theory versus practical knowledge. However, such sentiments are oversimplified and often erroneous. Theory assumes a determined outcome, while practice allows a student to test the theory and see its accuracy and applicability. Learners need both.

An example might revolve around an organisation suffering from high staff turnover. Management theory provides several possible remedies for the problem, including improving quality of work life, enhancing employee autonomy, altering reward systems, and changing levels of employee involvement in decision making. Learning theory is not bad. Theory is highly useful in knowing all the options that can cause an outcome. However, experimental and applied practical learning built on top of theoretical knowledge does prove better than theory alone since a learner gets to understand which theory best can impact a particular organisation or situation. So, let Kenyans emphasise a combination of theory and practice at university.

A failure to understand the difference between theory and practice often allows institutions to hide from accountability. The issue more often is really a situation of teaching irrelevant concepts, outdated theories, or theories proven wrong. An irrelevant but widely taught methodology in Kenya includes the moderation formula in manual multiple regression to see if an effect, often external, impacts the strength of the relationship between all the independent variables as a group and a dependent variable. But in the age of computers, top researchers want to see the moderation effect of each independent variable against each dependent variable separately rather than as a group. Failure to teach such statistics warrants masters and doctoral student research results far more irrelevant than should be the case.

An example of outdated teaching comes in the form of undergraduate computer science students learning Pascal programming instead of vastly more usable C++, C, JavaScript, Python, etc.

Also, outdated theories include employee motivation theories that focus on extrinsic monetary rewards for performance and ignore newer proven theories on stimulating employee performance through intrinsic emotional, autonomy, and identity rewards. Theories proven wrong include the finance theory of debt indicating that firms should hold 1/3rd liabilities and 2/3rd equity.

Let us place different relevance on the theory we teach. Recent finance graduates can name formulas for net present value, different margins, financial projection assumptions, but knowing formulas is less relevant in the modern era whereby Excel and other computer programmes calculate simple formulas, allowing finance professionals to build large complicated models.

Finance alumni should also use software to build complicated financial projection models and test their own models rather than knowing simple equations that sales minus cost of goods sold equals gross margin.... On the other hand, typically entrepreneurship graduates can name all the components of a business plan inside and out, but do not know how to do product testing, design thinking, or staff hiring. Lecturers often teach much less relevant content than what is required in the real world.

Students should ask their academic departments the following questions: Does this class teach the latest theories developed and proven under a consensus in the literature within the last five years? Does this class focus on learning what industry uses at the present time? Does this class use learning in the same way as industry? Does this class uncover what industry does now and how industry can improve? Does this class incorporate applied practical learning?

Learners should hold institutions answerable and accountable.