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Point of View
District C co-founder and CEO Dan Gonzalez shares the thinking behind Teamship, a reimagined internship experience that prepares students for modern day work.
Video
Preparing Students for the Future: District C’s Teamship
Dan Gonzalez talks about what makes Teamship different—students working together on diverse teams to solve real problems for real businesses—and why this matters for the future of work in a world with AI.
Are we preparing students for the “3-point economy”?
Basketball coaches don’t train players the way they did 40 years ago.
In 1984, NBA teams averaged just two 3-point attempts per game. Today, they average over thirty.
Great coaches don’t waste time training great 2-point players. They plan for today’s 3-point game.
But what about the broader economy? Has the way we prepare students kept pace with 40 years of changes in the labor market?
A Crisis in Competencies
Only 11% of business leaders strongly agree that recent college grads are prepared for today’s work, according to a Gallup survey.
Is this simply the result of dysfunctional school systems? Not exactly.
Education economists Frank Levy (MIT) and Richard Murnane (Harvard) argue the issue is more nuanced:
“American schools are not worse than they were in a previous generation. Indeed, the evidence is to the contrary. [Test results show that] most American students now master foundational skills as defined 40 years ago… Today’s education problem stems from the increased complexity of foundational skills needed in today’s economy.” (Emphasis ours.)
In short: the game has changed. Schools are better than they were 40 years ago, but we’re still preparing students to be 2-point players in a 3-point economy.
Only 11%
of business leaders strongly agree that recent college grads are prepared for todays work, according to a Gallup survey
AI Enters the Game
And the game keeps evolving.
Ginni Rometty, former CEO of IBM, predicts: “I expect AI to change 100 percent of jobs in the next 5 to 10 years.”
A Brookings report estimates that by 2030, 61% of jobs will face medium to high exposure to automation.
COVID accelerated the shift. Now, AI and automation are transforming the labor market faster than ever.
As educators, we must rethink what it means to prepare young people for the economy of the future.
Carl Ryden, tech entrepreneur and education philanthropist, puts it simply:
“We need to spend less time preparing our students to be bad computers and more time preparing them to be great humans.”
“We need to spend less time preparing our students to be bad computers and more time preparing them to be great humans.”
Carl Ryden
Tech Entrepreneur and Education Philanthropist
A 2-Point Game Isn’t Enough Anymore
While it remains critical that our students develop strong reading and numeracy skills, it’s no longer sufficient.
In today’s economy, they need 3-point range.
Employers and labor market research agree: the most valuable employees know how to do what computers can’t yet do:
Work in diverse teams to solve complex problems.
This is the uniquely human job description of the modern economy, and it’s time to prepare our young people to do it.