I’m lucky enough to have two careers: I’m an associate technical director at Big Spaceship and I moonlight as a part-time lecturer in the Design + Technology program at Parsons the New School for Design.

At Big Spaceship, I’m heavily involved in the interviewing and hiring process for our development team. Bringing new people into our shop is not something we take lightly – they not only have to be insanely talented and enthusiastic to learn, but they must also be able to slide into our culture. The projects we work on are demanding, as far as technical execution and time pressures. We need collaborators. People who know how a website, an iPhone app, or a whatever-it-is-we-come-up-with-to-build will intrinsically work. We need specialists, amazing designers and whip-smart coders.

And yet, I can’t look past the fact that I am personally responsible for the education of the very people we’re looking to hire. If they aren’t making it in the industry, I don’t have to go further than the mirror to know why. I’m basically walking on the fault line between two proverbial tectonic plates: Industry and Academia. My career has afforded me a unique perspective on the growing discord between the two, and what can be done to fix it.

There’s a stereotype prevailing through our industry doubting just how well academia is preparing students for a career in design or technology. The thought is that universities are ill-equipped to teach students the tools of the trade. It’s easy to see why; there are so few programs dedicated to this stuff and so many of us “made it” without ever leveraging our diplomas in…whatever it was we majored in. Why should anyone put faith in college to help their careers?

Some are quick to point out that lawyers and accountants come out of school far better prepared than those in our field. The problem with that line of thought is that law and accounting are both embedded institutions. Those fields have existed since the ancient Greeks, while the digital field has only existed as a viable industry since the late 1990s. Even the most forward-thinking academic institutions have only had multimedia programs for about 10 years. It’s difficult for academia to even project what a proper education should look like in that short a span, let alone implement it.

But the novelty of digital isn’t the only problem. Most undergraduate programs work on four-year cycles. The impact of changes in programs lessens as students come closer to their graduation; a new class or a change in teaching philosophy is going to do much more for a freshman than a senior. But the landscape of digital evolves much, much faster than this. Four years ago, YouTube was brand new, Twitter didn’t exist, Friendster was the prevailing social network and the iPhone wasn’t even invented yet. Every convention in our industry has shifted in the span of one graduating class. Even if academic institutions didn’t have a bureaucracy approving and adopting new classes, it’d be virtually impossible to guarantee that students would be equipped with the latest know-how in order to immediately join the marketplace the way many agencies expect.

Perhaps the most frustrating notion is that students simply aren’t trained for the job. I argue that colleges aren’t supposed to train students, they’re supposed to educate them. While that might sound like the same thing, there are critical differences that shouldn’t go overlooked. A design-minded student trained only in the tools of a designer will have a hard time collaborating with a programmer…especially one who never looked at or cared for aesthetics.

That isn’t to say that academia couldn’t do a better job. The faculty needs to align itself with the same agenda. Deans and program chairs should be hands-on with the curriculum. Elective courses should supplement studios. More time could be spent on rubber-hits-the-road issues, such as estimating time and implementing designs. Programs new and old could lean more on resources like the Web Standards Education Task Force. Perhaps most importantly, many institutions could simply eliminate the graduate degree needed to teach in this field. Everything is just too new to toss aside great teachers based on the merits of their formal education.

However, law and accounting do share one thing in common with digital: they change. Tax codes change. Laws change. While lawyers and accountants aren’t necessarily skilled at memorizing everything in the book, they’re trained in abstractions and the processes and practices that have evolved throughout history. The best law schools churn out the best lawyers because they’ve refined the craft of training them in the abstract.

We can learn from this and apply it to our education system. For example, teaching a designer Photoshop or a developer ActionScript is mostly meaningless: if Adobe ever goes out of business, all of that time will be wasted. Teaching them design fundamentals and programming concepts — with Photoshop and ActionScript as case studies — would be much more effective. Students need to be challenged to teach themselves to learn how to learn. At Big Spaceship, we look for inventive people who are open to using new technologies, who live for a challenge and want to get better each day. Is it realistic to say we want some design or coding chops? Sure. But the people hungry to excel in the way we look for are capable of teaching themselves the software.

There is something the industry side can do to help bridge the gap: teach. Partner with academic institutions. There’s an amazing wealth of talent in schools that we expect to find combing through resumes. Working with universities to offer co-labs, workshops or classes rewards companies with a first look at new, exciting young talent before they jump to join the market. It’s simply a matter of being more involved with the programs instead of criticizing them.

Many in the industry are quick to point out that they don’t need a degree to succeed in their field, that they had C averages or that they had a degree in something completely unrelated — and they’re thriving. While it’s true that there is currently no Harvard for teaching creativity, it’s shortsighted to believe that will always be the case. An undergraduate or graduate degree may feel irrelevant, but that does not make it a futile endeavour. It can only get better if academic institutions and agencies collaborate to create the best possible environment in which students can learn, develop and bloom.