Postgrad courses must cultivate emotional and organisational traits too

Modern work – the reason most of us embark on the costly and challenging task of earning a higher degree – increasingly demands mindsets and skills centred on our personal attributes.

These include the so-called “soft skills”: trust and self-discipline, the ability to build and sustain networks, compassion and empathy, a curiosity about and awareness of the world, and to be able to collaborate as well as compete. In this complex environment, who you are is as vital as what you do – not only in the upper edges of leadership but in every role.

In the UK, postgraduates represent almost one-quarter of the student population, which stood at 2.32 million for 2016-2017. By 2030 there will be 414 million students in universities worldwide – and these numbers are projected to keep on increasing.

Universities have historically taken their role in forming people very seriously: the process of education includes building habits of mind and character as well as higher-order reasoning. And universities are, in many parts of the world, places where in each generation social and democratic foundations are re-laid.

But not all postgraduate degrees currently cultivate a person’s capacity for trust, purposeful leadership, or building sound connections with others. Some might promote creativity, problem solving and team work. Others immerse a person in task-orientated, stressful and competitive contexts. But few offer all of these things.

Does the ultimate postgraduate qualification, then, focus on developing emotional and organisational traits as well as cognitive skills? What if there were ways to incorporate the “who we are” bits as well as the “how we work academically” bits? What if interpersonal and high-level emotional literacy became a fundamental of assessed degree work and of our aspirations for university education? What would that help us do?

If the UK is to retain a first-rate, distinctive higher education sector in a fast-growing international field our challenge is two-fold. For starters, we need to focus more on the whole-person building that happens within and around formal curriculums. Second, we need to formalise how we teach and learn about the complex interior landscape that students and staff draw on every day: trust, networks, professionalism, compassion, and leadership. This means altering our understanding of assessment and meaningful programme design, and having a much bigger conversation about what university is really for.

• Alison Wood is academic director of Homerton Changemakers, at the University of Cambridge