University Education in a Time of Perpetually Wicked Problems

Wicked problems differ from tame ones in important ways that define significant challenges in resolving them. Among these differences are their lack of a prescriptive definition, their absence of a clear stopping rule, their emphasis on better or worse outcomes rather than right or wrong solutions, their uniqueness, and their demand that resolutions not make the problem worse. University graduates will take on central roles and leadership responsibilities for addressing the world’s wicked problems such as those identified as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Those roles and responsibilities require advanced critical, systems, design, and ethical thinking skills and not just the disciplinary tactics and tame problem-solving abilities that largely comprise a university educational experience. This paper challenges the ways in which universities fail to equip their graduates with sufficient understanding of wicked problems and the approaches that offer the best chance to address them. The increasingly-granular structure of the academic year, the curricular emphasis on disciplinary rather than inter- or multi-disciplinary learning experiences, the lack of collaborative opportunities with those of other theoretical and practical perspectives, and the lack of intentional learning for critical, design, systems, and ethical thinking are discussed.