Preparing Students for Work in a Computer-Filled Economy

By Frank Levy & Richard J. Murnane

More than half of all American workers use a computer at work, and the percentage is growing rapidly. How should American schools prepare students to thrive in workplaces filled with computers? The answer begins by understanding the work that computers can and cannot do well, so that students can be prepared for work computers will not be doing.

Start by taking a broad look at the workplace tasks people do in any economy. Every job requires the processing of information. Whether it’s words on a page, numbers in a report, the look on a customer’s face, the taste of a sauce, the sound of a stumbling automobile engine—people in their daily work process all this information as they decide what to do next. Computers excel at carrying out those information-processing tasks that can be defined in terms of a sequence of rules. Filing and bookkeeping and repetitive manufacturing work are prototypical examples, but others now include issuing airport boarding passes and evaluating mortgage applications. Rules-based tasks are not only the easiest to computerize; they are also the easiest to send offshore to lower-wage countries. In the case of an Indian call center, the "rules" take the form of a step-by-step script that provides responses to most customer questions. As a result of computerization and outsourcing, work for a growing percentage of Americans consists of tasks in which information cannot be processed simply by following rules.

There are three types of workplace tasks that cannot be carried out by following a sequence of rules. The first is identifying and solving new problems—if the problem is new, there are no rules for solving it. We call this kind of problem-solving "expert thinking." A second set of tasks consists of complex human interactions, including leading, teaching, marketing, and negotiating. These tasks cannot be accomplished effectively by following rules because they involve processing vast amounts of information, only some of which is verbal and much of which may be unanticipated when the interaction starts. We call this interactive ability "complex communication." A third type of workplace task that cannot be described in rules is a set of "simple" physical activities that figure prominently in service-sector jobs like janitorial work, waiting on tables, and security-guard patrols. From a computer’s perspective, these jobs are not simple at all, something we can appreciate when we think about what the eye and brain must do to process light hitting the retina into three-dimensional...