"Low-Egoing" Is As Important as "Up-Skilling"

Claire Cain Miller had a great recent piece in the New York Times entitled "Why Men Don’t Want the Jobs Done Mostly by Women," highlighting how as Harvard's Larry Katz states, men have "retrospective wait unemployment." Men wait for the job they used to have. But in today's extremely fast-moving world, low-egoing is as critical as up-skilling. As General Assembly founder and sociology major Matt Brimer said in an interview for my forthcoming book, The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World, "your education should always in beta." In non-engineering speak, you're never done learning. We live in a world where developing a passion for continuing education, and learning to love learning is increasingly vital. While policymakers call for narrow vocational STEM training –for commendable reason with the very real skills gap that does exist in the short-run– we must also consider the longer-term implications. Creating expectations that technical literacy is the antidote to irrelevance overlooks the fact that the world is only accelerating. We need critical thinkers and learners more than ever. The Liberal Arts and STEM are not oppositional, they are mutually concurrent. We need both. We need sociologists writing Python and R, and we need engineers reading Kant.