Information economy and educational opportunities: a latent variable model of learning skills

As Internet economic forces are transforming traditional companies and jobs, colleges are attempting to foster in their students transferable skills that improve their chances in the digital workplace, where employers look for potential employees not only possessing technical expertise, but who are also capable of and personally responsible for continually refreshing their knowledge base to keep pace with rapid technical change. In this paper a latent variable model is constructed to analyze the direct and indirect relationships between learning skills, educational performance, collaboration, family environment and personal stress of sophomores in applied informatics, economic and business sciences. While the obtained maximum likelihood estimates show significant dependencies between collaboration and learning, they strongly reveal a non-skill oriented educational system. It seems to reward lack of learning skills with success. This work underlines an urgent need to reform the curricula and the fundamental teaching and grading methodologies.