Continuing with the series that started here, I am amazed that I lasted this long in higher education while writing commentaries in which I was championing the ultimate loser--liberal education. All through my life in India, I didn't know that there was something out there called liberal education, but that's exactly what my heart had always been after. Once I found it, I latched on to it pretty strongly.
Now, liberal education at my university is rapidly sinking and there is no flotation device for me who doesn't know how to swim!
The following commentary of mine was published in March 2016.
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The price of crude oil and of gasoline have been tumbling to levels that most of us would not have thought possible. Eight years ago, a barrel of petroleum was selling for $147 and “experts” predicted that soon it would reach a stratospheric price of $200. Now some of those same “experts” are wondering whether it might get closer to $20. There is also a strong feeling that when the prices climb again, $50 might be the ceiling.
A belief that oil prices would climb forever propelled large enrollment increases in petroleum engineering programs. The near-guarantee of well-paying jobs lured young people to the discipline.
But over the past few months, news reports have been less than encouraging. “Petroleum engineering degrees seen going from boom to bust” was CNBC’s report. The Wall Street Journal asked, “Who will hire a petroleum engineer now?” Oil and Gas Investor, a trade publication, discussed enrollment declines in U.S. programs offering degrees in petroleum engineering.
This is not new. The oil price crash of the 1980s led to significant enrollment declines in those degree programs. By the end of the 1980s, only about 1,400 students were majoring in petroleum engineering programs across the country. As the price of oil rose, and as it stayed in the $100 range, enrollment soared to more than 11,000. But with the recent oil price collapse, “petroleum engineering degrees will lose attractiveness in the years to come” said Penn State University’s Turgay Ertekin, according to Oil and Gas Investor.
There is an important lesson here, above and beyond oil prices and enrollment in petroleum engineering. We live in a world where economic activities cannot be predicted. As Yogi Berra said, it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. What might be the price of oil a few months from now, leave alone a few years from now, is unknown.
It is not merely about a particular resource. We need to think about technological change, geopolitical issues, the health of the global economy and more, all of which make predictions highly suspect.
Students pursuing any field of study, including petroleum engineering, need to understand that the economic conditions of today and their implications for employment are not the best indicators to prepare for the economic conditions and the jobs that lie a few years down the road. Even a few years make a huge difference -- the freshmen who began studying petroleum engineering four years ago face the reality that perhaps half of them might not find jobs in the oil and natural gas industry.
Students and universities betting on “employable” majors based on the economy’s current characteristics are betting against the only thing that we know for sure -- the future will not be the same as today. The bets get riskier as we head into the distant future. From steel workers to office secretaries and engineers, the experience of the past years has been that jobs can disappear in a hurry, leaving people worrying about their futures.
What, then, can young people do? And what should universities do for the young? As the American Association of Colleges and Universities wonderfully put it, the challenge is “educating for a world of unscripted problems.” They’re unscripted because we do not know what the future holds.
But we do have a sense of how we might be able to reasonably prepare for that future: We can do it by developing skills that will help people to constructively engage with the unscripted problems.
Yet contemporary public policy discussions on higher education and workforce preparation rarely involve serious and sustained thinking about the “world of unscripted problems.” When, for instance, a semiconductor manufacturing company comes to town, we conclude that we need more engineers and materials scientists, only to realize a few years later -- as was the case with Hynix in Eugene -- that the entire factory could close down. We seem to consider only the latest fad, without preparing for the longer-term uncertain future.
It is not that petroleum engineering graduates will be jobless and unemployable. If their universities have educated them well for a “world of unscripted problems,” those students will have skills that they will be able to apply in industries completely different from those they had originally aimed for. If only we can use this example to understand that higher education is about more than a major. It is, instead, about preparing for a “world of unscripted problems.”
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