I just read an interesting post about skills that colleges don’t teach. I have a lot of opinions on the skills they present, and I don’t necessarily agree with the author. But I found a more interesting list in the comments.

*I’d add some skills to the list that are far, far more important than the ones you list: communication and people skills *

Someone else responded to that additional list.

Arguably they do teach … those, at least at my college: The class was called “Introduction to Human Communication”. This was a BS gened class though that no one really cared about (I’m not saying this was a good thing - but it’s just a fact).

When we throw students into courses they don’t care about, they will learn less. We’re talking a lot about engagement and motivation in CS courses, but we’re still ignoring the gen-ed classes (for good reason- we need to focus on our core competencies before these secondary concerns). But soon we should really start thinking about how to tune these courses to our majors. We need to find ways to foster intrinsic motivation in the skillset required, rather than let English and Communication professors guess at how to work with these alien students from CS.