(2019-06-21) Guinn A Modern Liberal Arts Vocational Curriculum

Rusty Guinn: A Modern Vocational Curriculum. When I wrote Starry Eyes and Starry Skies a few weeks back (2019-04-29-GuinnStarryEyesAndStarrySkies), I made the argument that adequate vocational (votech) training for just about every financial services job I could think of would take several months (at most). A few readers asked me why I didn’t think that a longer, more in-depth liberal arts education had value. They clearly didn’t read the piece. Still, it’s worthy of an answer: I do think it has value. But its value is caught up in the conflicted mess of the three products being sold by American universities: mind-expanding liberal education, vocational training and credibility signaling.

When you try to solve for multiple problems, you are almost always solving for only one.

the CEO of Presto, a hospitality technology company

If you could redesign college education for smart people who don’t know what they want to be, what would it look like?

here’s my answer: an intensive set of three separate quarterly sessions over a period of nine months, structured not to identity what is most important but to target the fundamental modern skills that are not necessarily more easily acquired in a work-place setting, and which provide the easiest ramp for additional hard- and soft-skill development in other areas once in that professional environment

Quarter 1

Quarter 1, Module 1: Professional Writing

Quarter 1, Module 2: Calculus

there really are a lot of jobs that benefit from understanding the calculation and implications of rates of change

Quarter 1, Module 3: Fundamental Managerial and Financial Accounting

Quarter 1, Module 4: Interviewing, Public Speaking and Debate

Quarter 2, Module 1: Capital Markets

Quarter 2, Module 2: Statistics and Probability

Quarter 2, Module 3: Programming in Python

Quarter 2, Module 4: Modern Sectors, Industries and Trade

Quarter 3, Module 1: Project / Experiment Management

Quarter 3, Module 2: Databases and Data Analysis

Quarter 3, Module 3: Business Law

Quarter 3, Module 4: Hospitality: No fourth module this quarter. Instead, everyone works a food service job.