Dear Universities, please change. The future depends on it.

A few years ago, I was hired as a change agent to one of Asia's top ranked Universities, to be the bridge between the world of academics and the real world, and to prepare our students for to enter a brave new world of change.

As an outsider, coming from the corporate world, it was truly eye-opening to see how Universities were a whole different animal from any other organisation. When we think of any other enterprise, the focus tends to be money - whether you're a profit (earning money) or not-for-profit (chasing money).

For Universities however, the focus is prestige. That's what Universities chase - rankings, research, prize-winning academics and so on. Even the entire trajectory of an academic's career depends on the currency of prestige, as measured by publications, tenure, titles etc.

That means that despite what every University claims, most Universities are not really built around the actual business of teaching students.

You only have to look at the fact that most elite Universities still persist in using lectures to educate students, when research has for decades illustrated that lectures are one of the poorest and most inefficient methods of learning with shocking rates of learning retention (you might as well be sleeping according to the brainscans), to see my point.

As Ben Nelson, Founder of Minerva Project, puts it, Universities have known that lectures don't work for decades, and yet they still use them out of convenience. It's like discovering antibiotics, and choosing to stick to leeches instead. Which is why the Minerva model focuses purely on fully active learning, but we'll explore that more in a later article.

What does a "real education" entail? We think it is giving youth a structured, rigorous and practical experience that teaches them how to think. Preparing them for the world of work that awaits them, and equipping them with practical, transferable skills, habits and mindsets that students can apply to multiple contexts later in life, whether it is at work, relationships and so on.

And many (including hundreds of corporate employers I have met in my line of work) would argue that most traditional University academics are the worst placed to guide our youth into this brand new era of the VUCA world, a future that is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.

For one, they are often experts in their narrow silo of domain expertise, but do not focus on teaching their students "far transfer" - which is the capacity to apply concepts and skills in a multitude of different situations. And that "far transfer" is absolutely vital for the development of critical wisdom. The equivalent in the corporate world is like having a CFO who understands accounting but knows nothing about finance (near transfer), or a CFO that doesn't use cost-benefit analysis in her or his own relationships (far transfer).

Also, as broad-based social emotional competencies (also known as "soft skills") become increasingly valued in a future where robots and AI can perform technical skills with ease, traditional University education has to evolve to place equal importance on developing deep human capabilities. Like compassionate, empathic communication with boundaries. Like self-awareness. Like cross-cultural collaboration skills.

So hence we need to rethink how we hire in Universities. Can we look for facilitation skills, relational competencies, an entrepreneurial mindset and the ability to collaborate with industry. By the way, I was just on a panel at the Taylors Teaching and Learning Conference in Kuala Lumpur last week and these were the specific qualities that the senior University management and industry on the panel specifically highlighted.

Time after time, employers lament to me that Universities don't focus on what they need, and students come to me with anxieties that they just aren't prepared mentally and emotionally for the 4th Industrial Revolution future of work that awaits them. One prominent employer told me "I don't even look at the transcripts. I don't understand what the courses mean, and only HR cares about the grades as a crude means of sifting candidates. Once you're in the real world, all that matters is your mindset, and how good you are at learning."

Since then, I've taken on a role as a Strategic Advisor to Minerva Project, which is a groundbreaking University startup that aims to address many of the issues that traditional institutions of higher learning are saddled with.

Minerva students are expected to travel to 7 cities during their 4 year programme, starting off in San Francisco, Seoul, Hyderabad, Buenos Aires, Taipei and London. The first year of a Minerva education centres on learning 80+ foundational habits of mind and concepts that are then recontextualised and assessed across multiple fields and disciplines over the rest of the student's education. All learning is done through fully active methods, using the most advanced learning science.

Currently in its 4th year of operation, Minerva already has more applicants than MIT and is the most selective University in the Western world, admitting just 1.2% of its 25,000 applicants based on its own algorithms for identifying talent (not privilege).

Last week, I hosted a fireside chat with Ben and asked him if he had one wish, what would it be? His answer - that he will one day have competition in the University space. The biggest challenge ahead for Universities is walking the talk of being an educator.

Watch the video of our talk here

More info about the Minerva Project at https://www.minerva.kgi.edu/

*The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any orgnisation referred to in the article.