Education in silos

As I remarked in a previous blog entry, the education system is ripe for change in the future.  One of the things that it seems to me we should additionally strive for is to take education out of the silo based system it has become over recent years.  It is really hard to find well-educated people with a true mix of skills now, and I can speak from experience of being part of the graduate recruitment process for a large company.  

At one level, people from the arts and sciences are rarely if ever brought together, and this stifles the breadth of creativity that emerges from innovation and solutions to problems.  At another level, within the telecommunications technology domain, it is quite difficult to find a graduate with a mixed higher education of hardware (electronic engineering/radio) and software (computer science). 

The system tends to put people into silos, and this inhibits some of the combined approaches to dealing with problems.  If someone graduated before a particular year, they are likely to look for hardware solutions; if they graduated after a few years later, they are likely to look for a software solution.  There are very few years to choose from to get a truly hybrid mix of thinking.  

When we put the education system right in the future, let's address the silo problem too at the same opportunity?