Introduction

Working with a team of three other students, I had the opportunity to assist a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS) in doing preliminary research in preparation for a course on leadership that she was creating. In performing this research I learned some interesting things about what students want to learn about leadership and what universities believe students should learn. Below, I will explain our process for collecting data and observations I was able to make .

Process

We began by looking into different university courses on leadership with the intention of comparing the topics that they taught in their syllabuses. We recorded the topics covered and grouped them according to commonalities as the x-axis is a spreadsheet. We then recorded the titles of each course and the name of the university that teaches the course and listed them as the y-axis. Once we had this list we then compared all of the different courses and noted whether a course covered each of the topics. At the end we were left with a spreadsheet that very clearly showed the most commonly taught topics.

Raw data collected from the syllabuses of leadership based university courses. Top row: topics. Left column: Course and university name. Central grid: whether a course covers a topic.

After we collected this data we were able to put together some rather simple graphs to provide a different visual perspective. These graphs showcased the number of topics covered by each course and the number of courses that provide a specific topic.

To contrast this data we decided that it would also be helpful to know how students viewed leadership and what they felt would be the most useful topics to learn. To do this we created a one question survey that instructed the participants to pick their top three topics that they would be interested in learning from the same list of topics collected from the syllabus research. This survey was then sent out to graduate students at MIIS studying translation and localization management and undergraduate students at Brigham Young University (BYU) who were studying localization. These groups were given three weeks to complete the survey. At the end of the period we were able to collect responses from 64 students which we then compiled into the following graph.

Left: leadership topics. Right: number of students who chose that topics as one of their top three and what percentage that is of the total 64 students.

Observations

Finally, after we collected all of this data we were able to compare the different perspectives of the students and universities, and the results were rather interesting. It turns out that there is quite the disparity between what students want to learn and what universities want to teach them. Universities tended to favor topics that were more theoretical and thought provoking in nature, such as leadership theory, leadership ethics, and defining leadership. These types of topics are typical of classic liberal arts programs which favor thought and academic prowess over practical skills and applications.

Conversely, the students at MIIS and BYU were much more interested in topics with practical applications, such as dealing with controversy and failure, risk taking, and different leadership styles. These results were not entirely unexpected seeing as both groups of students were studying localization, which is a very business oriented topic. Because localization is such a business oriented subject many of the students who study it do so with the intent of graduating and working in the language services industry which skews their priorities and interests towards skills and information that have the potential to make them more valuable to future employers.

Conclusions

Based on this preliminary research and the observations that I was able to make, it can be hypothesized that there is a disconnect between what the students want to know about leadership and what universities want to teach them. To look at things from an economic perspective, it seems that there is an imbalance in the supply and demand. Universities are supplying theory and thought, but students are demanding practical skills.

Know More

If you are interested in knowing more about what we have learned from this research project, check out the blog posts by the other members of the team.

Finally, thank you to my three colleagues, Peter Chea, Stephan Zhao, and Lynn Li. Without their diligent work we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish as much as we have.