Educating for the Wisdom Economy

Could technological change actually underscore the value of the liberal arts?

In their 2021 book, The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future, Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt warn that American colleges and universities risk obsolescence, primarily because they are “built for the industrial era rather than the emerging knowledge economy” — an economy that features “a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources.”¹

In the view of Levine and Van Pelt, higher education hasn’t changed drastically in the last hundred-some years. Restructured in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to meet the needs of an industrializing America, the college or university is still modeled on an assembly line, “tied to the clock,” and overly concerned with standardization.

By contrast, they say that postsecondary education geared to serve the needs of a knowledge economy would “[emphasize] outcomes over processes. Outcomes would be fixed and the process and time to achieve them would be variable. The focus of college would shift from how long students are taught to what they learned, from teaching to learning, and from the professor to the student.” While the industrial era university supposedly offered a “one-size-fits-all approach to education” built around the credit and the four-year bachelor’s degree, the knowledge economy requires flexibility, with students learning at their own pace and demonstrating mastery of skills through a wider variety of credentials, including “microcredentials” like badges, as they retool to adapt and compete in a fast-changing economy.

As a historian, I’m not sure the Industrial Revolution actually carries all the explanatory power that Levine and Van Pelt think it does. And it was interesting to see my students initially embrace the outcomes-first approach and then start to work out its many shortcomings when we read The Great Upheaval in our spring seminar on higher education.

But even if their basic argument were correct, I think their book itself would already be out of date — since some observers argue we’re already moving from a knowledge economy into a “wisdom economy,” which may actually require a still-older form of education that is slower, more integrated, and less obviously practical than what “disruptors” like Levine and Van Pelt champion.