Job market demands five-year curriculum

By Victor Quintanar-Zilinskas

In theory, part of the mission of most universities is for graduates to be highly competent global citizens with the potential to make important contributions to the world in their respective occupations.

Santa Clara's core curriculum reflects this. For example, the courses satisfying the diversity requirement lead students to become intellectually engaged in issues of diversity and social justice, and more importantly, present frameworks for encountering these issues later in life.

The traits that a good Jesuit education passes on to its students encourage better citizenship.

Crafting a curriculum that achieves this is an indispensable objective.

While an outdated cornerstone of pedagogical planning is making sure students can graduate in four years, the interdisciplinary nature of the most important workrequires more extensive preparation. I expect that universities nationwide will eventually realize this and plan a truly cutting-edge five-year education.

I examine this issue in my area of deepest knowledge, biology, but every aspect of this analysis has parallels in other disciplines.

Biology and medicine are becoming extremely interdisciplinary.

Historically, biologists and biochemists have had great successes in reducing biological complexity to component parts whose relationships can be precisely tested.

Techniques to do this, the meat of Santa Clara's biology program, will always be relevant, but the areas of greatest development are interdisciplinary.

In bioengineering, the development of prosthetic arms that a patient's brain can directly control involves cutting-edge electrical engineering: specialty hardware, neural code statistical elucidation and some AI.

Other aspects of biology combine sophisticated chemistry, physics and materials science.

Stepping back, one notices an explosion of data in all fields. One also notices that approaches combining multiple types of data have the most predictive merit.

It should be clear that there is a trend in our world toward interdisciplinary thinking. University pedagogy lags behind these trends.

Leaders from all fields of work and scholarship are calling for universities to address this immediately.

Just as hard scientists can't be on the leading edge anymore without multi-disciplinary training, social scientists also need to reach new levels to properly think about today's complex world.

The knowledge in medicine has forced a number of medical schools to unofficially adopt five-year curricula.

It is undeniable that students today need more training than students two decades ago, and the proper amount of training just can't be crammed into four years.

Various departments have privately acknowledged, for example, that their math requirements are not all-encompassing enough to properly prepare students for serious work in their field, but given the four-year constraints, they've done what they can.

It is difficult to justify sacrificing subject-specific content in an already tight curriculum.

Fortunately, individual students are seeing the writing on the wall: Minors are popular, more students are double majoring, our last three valedictorians were multi-disciplinary and many engineering majors are getting a fifth year of training before entering the workforce.

Educational programs are getting longer out of necessity, and Santa Clara must more aggressively adapt its pedagogy to better prepard its graduates from all disciplines with general breadth, a broad and deep field-specific background and the intellectual methods of tomorrow's world.

A fair number of professors agree about modernizing and especially expanding training, but official changes will not be immediate.

We students, however, are unencumbered by bureaucratic inertia, and with individualized faculty input can plan our own preparations for the world of 2020.

Ultimately, the most interesting people I know from a wide variety of areas and institutions are all multidisciplinary.

As far as expanding one's college education to the fifth year is concerned, broad awesomeness should be motivation enough.

Victor Quintanar-Zilinskas is a senior biology and mathematics major.