Over the weekend, I came across a fantastic op-ed article in The Washington Post by Heather Wilson. Wilson, in addition to being a former Congresswoman from New Mexico and Air Force Academy graduate, is a long-time veteran of the Rhodes Scholarship selection committee. From this vantage point she has access to some of the best and brightest college students in America. In essence, she sees our future before the rest of us do.

I wish the news from Wilson was good, but as you might expect, she's not entirely upbeat about the state of education in America. However, her criticism of the educational establishment does not fall principally on teachers, or even students and parents. She isn't inclined to join that growing parade. Rather, Wilson seeks to address a more fundamental challenge: how to reverse a scary trend of increased specialization amongst our college graduates. As Wilson puts it:

"'I [have] become increasingly concerned in recent years - not about the talent of the applicants but about the education American universities are providing. Even from America's great liberal arts colleges, transcripts reflect an undergraduate specialization that would have been unthinkably narrow just a generation ago.

As a result, high-achieving students seem less able to grapple with issues that require them to think across disciplines or reflect on difficult questions about what matters and why.'"

To put things more bluntly, we are a siloed nation. As I said when this blog started, we all praise the multi-faceted mind of Leonardo DaVinci, but we live in a world defined by Henry Ford. What Wilson now sees is the result. We have produced a generation of highly trained specialists who can't deal with the very big problems we increasingly face.

To her credit, Wilson recognized this problem before many others. Yet the damage is already far-flung. As she notes, this is not an isolated situation:

"'I wish I could say that this is a single, anomalous group of students, but the trend is unmistakable. Our great universities seem to have redefined what it means to be an exceptional student. They are producing top students who have given very little thought to matters beyond their impressive grasp of an intense area of study. This narrowing has resulted in a curiously unprepared and superficial pre-professionalism.'"

In addition to great universities, Wilson should add governments and companies to the list of institutions responsible for redefining excellence. In fact, governments and businesses are probably most to blame for driving the trend toward specialization. These institutions often demand narrowly skilled people. They are ones who ask college graduates to spend the rest of their lives in marketing, finance or human resources.

The cost, of course, is a lack of folks capable of dealing with highly ambiguous challenges. Things like healthcare reform, nuclear deterrence, the future of warfare, or how best to shape governments – all topics alluded to in Wilson's writing.

At Jump, our recruiting team is tasked with finding hybrid thinkers who break the siloed model. They must identify candidates who are one-part humanist, one-part technologist and one-part capitalist. People who can think like an anthropologist in the morning, craft great ideas like a designer in the afternoon, and then turn those concepts into a viable business before the last Caltrain departs downtown San Mateo for San Francisco. After reading Wilson's article, I can see why our recruiting team often works late in search of this rare breed.

However, there is reason to be optimistic! Human beings, especially the young ones, are incredibly resilient. And there is evidence that some (perhaps most) college graduates are interested in breaking the specialization cycle. Take Vi Hart for example, a rising star on YouTube who is interested in making mathematics engaging for all. Profiled in The New York Times last week, Hart has intentionally avoided falling in line with a siloed world. As she puts it:

"'I couldn’t focus on one thing or ever see myself fitting into any little slot where I would have some sort of normal job,' Ms. Hart said. 'If I want to spend a week carving fruit up into polyhedra, I want to spend a week carving fruit up into polyhedra, and where am I going to get a job doing that?'"

That's a refreshing and hopeful view, and as decision makers we should now aim to transform Hart's definition of 'normal' into abnormal. When well-rounded college graduates enter a world with well-rounded opportunities, we might find that some of the tough challenges we currently face start to look less messy.