A quick post here, because I just watched Obama’s speech. I’m glad he’s trying to do away with No Child Left Behind, but I’m not 100% on board with what he’s saying.
In the first place, he’s still buying into the “more education = more jobs” equation, specifically in terms of the jobs of the future, which he notes will require more than a high school degree. Probably, but the “more education is better” premise is clearly not true anymore. The oversupply of degrees is already apparent and as a former college educator, I can tell you that the last thing we need is more people going to college and expecting it to be a job-for-service transaction. If anything, we’ve reached a grim Catch-22, where employers feel entitled to expect degrees from all their applicants — and so, since ‘everyone’ has a degree, investing in one is no guarantee of a job.
Also, if people want a direct correlation between education and getting work, we’re talking vocational training not education per se. We’re also talking valuable skill sets, not degrees — so, will we base the new curriculum entirely on engineering, medical coding, and various flavors of computer science? I’d like to see a little more consideration of what we’re doing in K-12 versus what we’re expecting of higher ed, or vo ed, or community college.
Probably the most questionable statement Obama makes is that “Businesses will hire wherever the highly-skilled, highly-trained workers are located.”
No, they’ll hire where the cheap laborers are located, and more education here won’t make any difference to that. So I’m calling it: the most useful degrees won’t be in CS (that stuff is already being outsourced as we speak), they’ll be Hindi or Chinese. Or, actually, HVAC, car repair, and plumbing — things that can’t be outsourced.
I admire his intentions, anyway, but I think the Prez’s logic is flawed on a this one. Then again, he’s a smart guy, so maybe this is part of some strategy that I’m not seeing. I sure hope so.
Transcript here if you don’t want to watch the video.
You are correct in the respect that a higher education in general will not ‘get someone a job.’ As we continue to move toward a service-based industry, the jobs of the future are the jobs that cannot be outsourced. Hands-on. What should grow? It should be K-12 teaching (but that’s not likely to happen, give how we as a culture don’t care about education anymore); healthcare – especially as the boomers start having their “I ate too much McDonald’s in my life” heart attacks.
I would also note that some services are returning to the Unites States: web design, customer service, in particular. This is due not only to the weak dollar, but because some of the cultural differences led to some severely PO’ed customer bases. Cheap isn’t necessarily always better.
The general problem is that we as a country have abandoned vocational education and pushed everyone into 4 year colleges. (Hence the explosion of – you shouldn’t be in college, so we will offer you all these remedial classes.) Plumbers, electricians, coal miners, mechanics and the like make a damn good living. We need to start promoting those careers again for those who have the aptitude for them, rather than trying to get a square peg to fit into the round whole of a four year degree.
And finally, all those for-profit universities (er…I mean degree mills) should be executed. All they do is create personal debt and rip off the taxpayer.
I do see some hope that tech industries will keep paying people here, and I agree it’s the communication issue: you get what you pay for — obviously. There’s cheap-ass, lousy customer service here in the US too.
And I agree that vocational ed is not a bad thing. The only part that bums me out is that, given the historical precedents, it does seem likely that traditional/actual education curriculum (i.e. reading for its own sake) will continue to remain the purview of the rich, rather than be accessible to the smart. But that’s been true for a long time…
Cheap, but also skilled and trained, in many cases. And preferably in countries where the corporation taxes are most amenable to their profit-making.
Count me in as another person who is bored by the “education = jobs” stuff, though. Not that I don’t value education and all, but selling it as four+ years to get through so that you can have a job is outdated, inaccurate, and pretty annoying. Go to college because you want to and can afford it.
Oh, sure, I didn’t in any way mean to imply that the laborers being hired aren’t skilled, just cheaper. I think what bothers about this is that he really seems to be selling a promise that cannot possibly come true – though, of course, I too see the value of education.
You have hit the nail on the head! After all, it is a relatively recent phenomenon to equate a higher education with a job or a career. That’s been the equation only for the last 50 or so years, since American soldiers came back from WWII and the implementation of the G.I. Bill. And you are both right: there is nothing innately wrong with an education as an education. There is a problem with the current equation.
We all know it – so I won’t get into the argument fully – that an education used to be the means to the upper echelons of power. It was a “thinking man’s” pursuit – sexism intended.
I know that I (we) am the weird one. As an undergrad my peers were going into business and professions as chemists, etc. Me? I was a philosophy major. About as useful as classics, eh Amanda? I was learning for learning’s sake.
That turned out to be total bull once I hit he job market. My roommate started making $200K selling bonds out of college. I was making $18k working in publishing. We lived together in NYc. Guess who had to buy his groceries on credit cards?
I don’t regret the decision because I still love learning for learning’s sake. After all, I still read Kierkegaard and Foucault on my own time. However, to tell current students that 4-years plus $50K in debt is going to equal a “good-paying job” is a lie.
We should start a club! I too studies philosophy in undergrad and went to grad school for Religious Studies and loved what I learned, but now I’m not making even what I made when I was the office-guru before I went back to college. I loved what I learned and don’t think I’d change it, but I am all about challenging that ridiculous assumption that a college means a high-paying job.
Truly, in our climate of great technology, it would seem that learning for learning’s sake may have to happen outside of the academy. Break open the Josef Pieper, put it on iPad and let’s figures this out, aye?
Indeed, I think learning for its own sake is being pushed outside the traditional system — that doesn’t have to be bad thing, but it is a shame that the mandatory system is wasting so much of the kids’ time, only to throw them into a seemingly-irrelevant higher ed system.
I don’t think anyone gets it that doesn’t have a preexisting relationship with higher ed (and even then, very few of those folks).
The statistic that the higher ed advocates have been pushing for years – that college graduates make significantly more money than non-graduates – is fundamentally flawed. First, it compares all college graduates to every single person that doesn’t have a college degree, which is useless, since graduating requires a modicum of literacy, initiative, and compliance. College graduates versus certified tradesmen (electricians, mechanics, etc.) would be far more useful. Second – and this is the biggie – it doesn’t regress the data by intelligence and socioeconomic background. Historically, people who have pursued and attained higher education are (1) smart, (2) better connected than average, and (3) possess the resources for knowing how to get ahead in the first place (for example, family and peers that can tell them how to dress for work – I recently talked to an administrator that said she can’t get the new crop of education students to understand not to wear a mini-skirt to a job interview). Who’s to say that the exact same people wouldn’t do just as well without bothering with college? The two highest-income Gen-X’ers I know (a network architect and a contractor) both don’t have degrees.
Another thing that none of the Powers That Be seem to understand is that the main reason that jobs increasingly require college degrees is that increasingly, more people have them. More jobs require college degrees because we value them *less*, not more; and because universities have been motivated to recruit and graduate more students due to changes in funding formulas over the last few decades, college degrees have become easier to get. Jobs that suddenly require college degrees now when they didn’t twenty years ago – do these people think credential inflation happened in a vacuum? Do they not understand that supply and demand applies to labor markets? And why don’t people get that this is BAD? There’s the obvious – that young people now have to saddle themselves with tens of thousands in debt and four years of opportunity cost to get in the same position (likely with the same level of educational competency) they would have been with a high school diploma and a clean slate in 1980. Then there’s the less obvious – someone who’s been working in the same field since 1980 and can’t leave their company because other employers require a college degree as a base level for employment. This is, you know, bad for capitalism. And if current trends continue, the same displacement will happen to Gen X and Gen Y college grads, but with master’s degrees. Actually, that’s already happening to a lot of baby boomer professionals, CPA’s and engineers who can’t change jobs within their pay scale because almost all of them require master’s degrees now, which hardly anyone got back in the 70′s. How much of an insult is that – state-licensed professionals who have learned >10x in their 30-40 years of working in the field than is even theoretically possible in a master’s degree program, being forced to sacrifice one to two years of productivity for the privilege of competing in the labor market?
Finally – I’m writing a tome here and I know I’m preaching to the converted – but Obama’s almost right about one thing. The companies that produce the best jobs *will* go where the college degrees are. But they’ll go for quality, not quantity. The answer is not to compete to produce the most college graduates, but rather the best. These goals are mutually exclusive; we can only produce the better grads by making the curricula and standards more rigorous – more *difficult* – and that will mean fewer people can pass.
We have to reverse from the student-as-customer model back to the public-as-customer (and student/research as product) model for that to happen. Unfortunately, that won’t happen until there’s a major cultural shift and a change in the funding models for higher ed.
Thanks, Carole, for articulating this. You’re spot on about the reasons we need to be careful with those oft-cited statistics, as well as on the other points! This reminds me of the Onion’s recent post on why history can help you see things more clearly — we need to consider the factors that have led to too many degrees, just as you say…and I really do think that there’s active denial going on about the conflicting demands that society is making of education. But I think (grimly) the chickens are coming home to roost soon, as this younger generation realizes how little the degree means on its own.
Oh, they do, which is why I think they tend to insist that their classes be easy and accommodations be luxurious. Perhaps Gen Y, swaying towards moral relativism and reality as a subjective entity (makes sense, as they came of age during the culture wars), don’t have the same absolute belief in their biases as the older folk, putting them in the unique position of inherently understanding that the value of an intangible good like a college diploma is based only on what people think it is worth, driven pretty much only by belief and relative scarcity. (So, y’know, their dorms better be pretty sweet.)
You would think that academics, who think critically for a living, would be able to examine and discard their own biases in the same manner, figure out what the true problems are and why they exist, and become the torchbearers of this fight. But sadly, no. Even if many – most? – of them realize that we are awarding too many degrees and that we’ve lowered standards too much in order to do so, and that degrees have become far more costly than what they’re worth, talk to most of them, and all ills have one source: administrative bloat. Why do we have more expensive administrators, why do they cater to ill-performing students, why do they spend money on hiring more administrators rather than more faculty? “Because they are administrators, and they like to hire other administrators, so they can act all administration-y together and not work and fly around in private jets.” *headdesk*
And so it goes with all the stakeholders in higher ed – from the stupid Republican legislators who point the finger at professors for commanding “too high of a salary”/not being “good enough teachers” (which, just like with high school teachers, is principally because they believe that professors tend to vote Democrat), to the stupid Democrat legislators who point the finger at for-profit colleges for only being the most egregious example of the whole higher ed market and all of its problems (which is really just because for-profits are just far more obviously “corporation-y”).
Everyone can point fingers but almost no one truly asks “why.” That’s why the humanities are so important, because humanities majors – ideally, anyway – think critically. That, plus cultural awareness and a loose grasp of the simplest of economic concepts, makes the picture pretty clear. The symptoms, from the inability to discharge student loans during bankruptcy to the (market demand-generated) administrative departments whose sole purpose is to call and chastise students who have missed class twice in a row, are legion; but the economic/cultural disease is not.
Thanks by the way.
I think vocational training IS education. I teach at a community & technical college in southeast North Dakota (yes, North Dakota); our enrollment numbers blew up this year … employers want our students badly, and more are needed in vocational programs. So, we have seen the education = jobs here. But no one wants to live in ND. It’s too bad too, because our state is the only one (last time I checked) that has a surplus of money, etc. We’ve been recession-proof, and it’s awesome.
Also, we teach liberal arts students… I have athletes from the south in class who are learning alongside students in the plumbing, computer, and architectural drafting degrees. They, the athletes, get their GPA bumped up here before heading to D1 schools; we’ve had 3 former students head to the NFL recently.
I didn’t mean to brag, really, but rather, I wanted to give a snapshot of where the education=jobs thing is working. Yes, students need to give 2-year colleges a try and their parents have to let go of the 4-year dream.
I agree that our K-12 system needs an overhaul, too; I taught high school before getting my Master’s, and I was “let go” because I wanted the students to THINK.
Oh, I agree it’s a form of education, but to equate “getting a job” with “education”, wholesale, narrows the scope of education just as much as insisting “real” education can only happen in prestigious, four-year universities. That’s simply not what learning means, especially if it’s going to be lifelong.
I also agree two-year and community colleges are the way to go, and I fully believe that these are just as able to offer broad curricula that encompass all sorts of learning, not just job-specific training. But I’ll fully admit that my concern here is the “non-job-getting” fields that are being slashed and burned. That’s partly the fault of those in charge of them, to be sure; they are out of touch and have rested on their laurels too long. But it’s also not okay to destroy entire disciplines while claiming that (e.g.) a Communications degree will guarantee you a job, when that’s simply not true anymore. And I’m going to remain skeptical of any promise that a degree will get you a job, though. I think reformed K-12 is actually more important than college in the global economy because as I said, I think you can hire educated labor a lot places these days, and K-12 students are not being served well by the test-obsessed curriculum.
And yes, I’m going to have to say that, having been forced to live somewhere once already, I wouldn’t ask anyone to live somewhere they didn’t want to be just for a job. But that’s another issue.