Recent research on students with disabilities was conducted by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization, in partnership with the Huffington Post. The research focused on inequality and innovation in education, and recently issued their report on the plight of students with disabilities in post-secondary settings.

  “About a third of the students with disabilities who enroll in a four-year college or university graduate within eight years.  For those who enroll in two-year schools, the outcomes aren’t much better: 41 percent, according to federal data.”

The report goes on to say that these dismal outcomes are not because students with disabilities can’t handle the coursework, for most can grasp the academic content.  What these students lack are the soft skills that will help them succeed in higher education and life.

What Are Soft Skills and Why Are They Important

Soft skills refers to a group of personal qualities that make a good student or employee, personal qualities such as a positive attitude, communication, planning and organizing, critical thinking, interpersonal skills and more.  These soft skills enable one to critically think, plan and organize, communicate and get along with fellow students, faculty, employees and employers. Soft skills are far more important than pure academic and technical skills training for success in today’s society.

Soft Skills Have Been Ignored by Our Educational Institutions for 100 Years   

It is important to note that research conducted by Harvard University, the Carnegie Foundation and Stanford Research Center has all concluded that 85% of job success comes from having well-developed soft and people skills, and only 15% of job success comes from technical skills and knowledge (hard skills). These statistics were extrapolated from A Study of Engineering Education, authored by Charles Riborg Mann and published in 1918 by the Carnegie Foundation. This is not a typo—it was 1918—and for nearly 100 years our educational institutions have ignored the key elements for personal, educational and workplace success and have insisted on teaching academic and technical skills over soft skills.  (Source: National Soft Skills Association)

Regular Education Students vs. Special Education Students

It is important to note that Mann’s research was focused on college and university engineering students.  These students might be considered quite capable of handling the academic rigors of an engineering program, but they were never taught the soft skills necessary for success in their chosen engineering field.  In the case of special education students, the need for soft skills training is multiplied many times over.  Typically, these students struggle in the area of social and emotional development, which is the foundation for all soft skills development.  Clearly our special education programs need to stop focusing all of their efforts on academics for the sake of academics. We need to include soft skills training to provide the keys to future success for all students, with or without disabilities.

The Call for Soft Skills Training in Transition Programs for Special Education Students

Under the current special education law, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), there is a requirement for all special education programs to address the transition process from high school to post-secondary education or training.  A transition plan is to be in place by the age of 16; in fact, in many states it is now by the age of 14.  The federal law requires schools to create individual education programs that include goals, along with a plan to support the learning needs of special education students in order to achieve their post-secondary goals.  Research shows that, in most cases, there are no goals set and no plan at all to support students in non-academic areas, including the development of soft skills.

It is time that our educational institutions wake up to the fact that post-secondary success for all students, not just students with disabilities, must include soft skills assessment and training as well as academic assessment and training.

As one parent in the Hechinger Report states, ”It’s a crisis, our kids are graduating to the couch.”

It has been 100 years since the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released a study on engineering education authored by Charles Riborg Mann. In his study, 1,500 engineers replied to a questionnaire about what they believed to be the most important factors in determining probable success or failure as an engineer. Overwhelmingly, personal qualities were considered seven times more important than knowledge of engineering science.

A second circular letter stating Mann’s results was sent to 30,000 members of four large engineering societies, and each member was asked to number the six qualities needed for top engineers. The top six qualities were:

• Character
• Judgment
• Efficiency
• Understanding of others
• Knowledge
• Technique

Notice that the top four are soft skills while only the last two were hard skills?

Education Has Not Changed

A quick study on curriculum used in high schools, community colleges, colleges and universities across this country reveals that nothing has changed in 100 years. Educational institutions simply ignore the research on soft skills along with the requests of their local employers. They continue to teach the technical knowledge and skill sets for an occupation but leave out the soft skills assessment and training that are critical to success in any occupation.

After working in this industry for over forty years, I have come up with the conclusion that soft skills are not taught because there is an assumption that students already have these skills, even when employer advisory panels tell them that their graduates do not.

Bad Assumptions Lead to Bad Results

In most situations, educational institutions assume that their students posses these skills, learning them either from their families or other life experiences. This may have had some validity in the past, but if parents or other adults do not possess soft skills, how can they teach them to others?
This incorrect assumption leads to costly errors in the hiring process. I don’t have to go into the cost of a mis-hire. It is sufficient to say that, when a student leaves a college, enters the working world, and does not even know enough to show up on time every day, the cost to the employers is in the tens of thousands of dollars, to say nothing of the cost to the self-confidence of the employee.

Check the Standards

I once asked a good friend of mine who worked for a state Department of Public Instruction if he could give me the standards for freshmen algebra. After several weeks of searching, he came back to me and was embarrassed to say that there were no standards other than seat time. Since then, there has been a push to create state and national education standards for academics. A quick check on those reveals that there are still no standards for soft skills.

80/20 rule

It was established back in 1918 by Mann’s study on engineering education that approximately 80 percent of success is due to soft skills while 20 percent is due to hard skills.
I ask a simple question—why has this fact been ignored by the educational establishment for 100 years?