Education Moves Fast to Keep Up with the Industry

By Matt Swain, InfoTrends

In the popular YouTube video Did You Know?, the creator notes that “the amount of new technical information is doubling every two years. For students starting a four-year technical degree, this means that half of what they learned in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.” Even now as I look at the new course curriculums from my alma mater (Rochester Institute of Technology), they are changing to better suit emerging technologies.

My undergraduate education was in Imaging and Photographic Technology. I distinctly remember returning to school to start my third year, only to find that my traditional film processing lab had been converted into a computer lab—fully equipped with the latest version of Photoshop. Historically, I manipulated the contrast ratios of a roll of film by varying chemical mix and development times. Now, I achieve a more precise result with a few clicks (Image à Adjustments à Levels). While there are still a few traditional film development labs and darkrooms at RIT, the school has accepted that the future of photography is in digital (not chemical) processing/development and has invested accordingly.

A similar transition was occurring on the print side of the school. The Newspaper Operations Management program saw its last graduates in 2001, resulting in the closure of the newspaper lab and the birth of the Digital Publishing Center (which took its place). Two first-year Newspaper Operations Management students from 1999 were asked to change to Printing Management due to the termination of their program. They obliged, but were later asked to switch to Graphic Media as Printing Management was also phased out. (Both students ended up leaving altogether—likely because the education that they expected to receive was drastically different from the degree program that they ended up in). The university’s mission is to best prepare students for the workforce, and that means changing with the times. Even during my undergraduate studies, the Print school was known as the School of Printing Management & Sciences. By the time I finished my graduate degree, my diploma noted that I had just received a degree from the School of Print Media.

InfoTrends has hired a summer intern from RIT’s School of Print Media, giving me a chance to find out what has changed since I left. Elli Vandegrift recently completed her sophomore year, during which she took a course entitled “Information Architecture.” In this course, the students were charged to create an open source cookbook that was to be outputted on all platforms: print, Web, and mobile. They organized the recipes in hierarchies, built a Web site for Web and mobile viewing, and created a version for print. The cookbook was to be usable for all ages and accessible through any output. Think about it—these second-year students are going through exercises that some of today’s print service providers would have difficulty completing using their existing workforce. Yes, printers can print, but are they equipped for the multi-channel approach that is increasingly becoming the norm? These up-and-coming students will help fill in the education gaps for the rest of us… because even my fairly recent education is already dated.

By leveraging digital technology, multi-channel communications, and other recent trends, traditional majors have transformed for the better. “Printing” is a perfect example of a degree program that has needed (and received) an overhaul. So what does it all mean? To quote Karl Fisch, creator of the Did You Know? video, “shift happens.” The education of today’s young professionals in the printing industry is an invaluable resource for any company lucky enough to have them. Pick their brains!