THE FOOL'S GOLD OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

Today Guv Jen gives her sixth State of the State address.  One of the misbegotten notions she will be peddling is that getting more kids into college will help to reverse Michigan's economic decline.  To that end, according to the Grand Rapids Press, she will pitch a new $300 million taxpayer fund to replace "industrial-model" high schools with those offering study "relevant to the real world".  That relevance is essentially college prep, as explained by Governor Granholm's education advisor Chuck Wilbur:  "[She] believes that to diversify Michigan's economy and create jobs, we have to transform our schools so that every Michigan student can attend a high school that prepares them for success in college and in the workplace."

To say the least, that puts the cart before the horse when it comes to building new businesses.  Exactly how pushing more and more kids into college to get degrees for jobs that don't exist in Michigan, because the businesses that would provide those jobs don't exist in Michigan, will make those businesses suddenly appear in Michigan is not clear.  Granted, companies occasionally move into areas to take advantage of workforces that have characteristics well-suited to their requirements, but it is hardly the rule for the formation of new businesses.  And to the extent that it does happen, it is because that area has a well-established reputation for a particular type of workforce, which is acquired over a period of decades not a few years.

So Granholm's new education program isn't going to turn around the Michigan economy.  What it would do is exacerbate the trend of spreading out what students used to learn in twelve years over sixteen or more years now.  Plus it would further gut vocational training at the high school level, shoving it off to tuition-greedy colleges more than happy to sell degrees for what had been learned through apprenticeships and OJT, and then putting our public high schools at the service of colleges as student prep factories for them.

There is no argument that college is the right path for a genuine liberal education or for training in a true profession (e.g., medicine or the law).  However, a college degree is fool's gold for those looking for jobs in sales, teaching, journalism, business management, and the myriad of other careers that have become ersatz professions because colleges have successfully persuaded students, parents, and employers that a prospective employee is not qualified without that degree.  The end result is that most kids who get a college degree today have nothing but an expensive credential that lands them a job that any high school graduate could have gotten a generation ago -- WITHOUT the heavy burden of paying back a student loan.  On top of all this, college-level training teaches kids even less than what they used to learn through high school vocational classes, apprenticeships, and job experience.

We are faced with serious, fundamental problems in education today.  Huge amounts of taxpayer dollars are wasted to provide educrats with sinecures who in return have wrecked the education of our children at all levels.  An excellent study by the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy on how this has happened in higher education by the overselling of college is available here.  (Thanks to the Maverick Philosopher for posting on this interesting paper.)

Comments

[J. W. Woods]

Rollnggrande seems fixated on web links, articles and educational resources. He has become the judge and the jury and decides what is proper evidence for us to consider. He refuses to give any credibility to that which is not in front of him. He needs to consider what others are going through here and now NOT only those results found in an article, document or graph. I've seen the problems with our K-12 education and post secondary system myself (my own educational background and now my three K-12 kids as well). And telling children they have to go into debt for 10-15 years for a POSSIBLE future career is a poor option for them. It's frankly a crying shame.

Bill, I really like your site. Seems you are getting new readers everyday. Keep up the good work. We need a site like this in Grand Rapids. It fills in the blanks where other publications and sources won't or can't go.

JWW

[RollngGrnade]

Faye,

Of course you don’t need corroborating evidence for your claims; but your claims are less compelling as a result. Indeed – I would evaluate your sources if you cited them; however, anyone objectively watching our discussion is free to conclude that my evaluation of them is unfair. The fact that you are afraid to even reference an outside source doesn’t speak well for these corroborating sources you’re alluding to.

Since you’ve positioned yourself as an expert on this subject, I should say that I can boast virtually the same “life experience” credentials as you; especially when it comes to having friends with varying levels of college education. I also happen to work in higher education (both as an administrator and a faculty member at two different schools) and have earned a Master’s degree – so I have some breadth/depth with my collegiate experience as well. In my defense, I also routinely hire and fire people in my current job – and I’ve also done the same in the private sector when I worked there.

All that said, however, I’m surprised that you were reticent to cite sources for some of your claims, because some of them are well-documented and legitimate. I think that on balance we agree quite a bit more than we disagree.

There are indeed many people not using their college educations; that population of people is referred to by economists as the “underemployed.” Unfortunately the federal government (BLS) doesn’t measure the underemployed, but it’s conservatively estimated that around six million people in the US are underemployed (that is to say “the employment of workers with high skill levels in low-wage jobs that do not require such abilities”). Currently, my understanding is that underemployment is on the increase as our economy struggles to change its structure. Historically, though, once the restructuring returns

Moreover – I also know many people with college degrees who are working in a different field than the one prescribed by their degree. I see that reality differently though; I see that as a benefit of a college education (provided by the general education requirements) – college degrees provide room for change and adaptation. In the current working world, someone like myself can expect to hold 6-8 different careers throughout my working lifetime (a number that is increasing). The mistake a lot of people make is thinking that their education has concluded with the attainment of a college degree; that’s no longer true – we will all need to make education a life-long endeavor because the world around us will continue to change.

I agree with you that a college degree doesn’t guarantee success.

I also would agree that our current educational system needs to change: I don’t support the “broken” aspects you refer to – and I fight against them myself. The system needs to change substantially to account for all of the changes in our world (fueled by technology and globalization); our current pedagogy doesn’t take advantage of the realities that our tech-driven world has created. So, for example, we need to focus more on critical thinking and innovative thinking and less on memorizing rote facts (because those facts are available within seconds to anyone virtually anywhere, any time with wireless access to the Internet). Unfortunately it’s likely that these people you’re referring to are victims of the old, outmoded models of higher education that incorrectly assumed that jobs for “knowledge workers” would exist unchanged in the US indefinitely.

With respect to your hands-on business experiences – the best business schools have changed their curricula in recent years to incorporate a whole lot of hands-on “lab” learning as opposed to focusing solely on reading books. Incorporating more real-world experience is one of the paradigms that needs to change (and that is changing) in higher ed.

I agree that there are some people who leave college without good communication skills (I work with some of them – just like you), and without the emotional preparation to enter the workforce; though without statistical data – I don’t know how one could quantify it as “many” (or even come up with the percentage that the “many” constitutes). What I would say is that these people are victims of the “industrial,” almost assembly-line like approach to education that we need to change. There’s a small segment of the population that will be successful no matter how bad the education they receive. For the rest of the population, however, they need more face time with instructors, more hands-on learning opportunities, and more

If you look at the structure of four-year universities – you see a system designed to cater to the top percentile and weed our or marginalize the rest; they begin with admissions standards that weed the students who need more assistance out. From there they cram as many students as possible into a lecture hall (to save money), limit their access to faculty who focus on publishing research (to save money), and primarily test them with multiple-choice Scantron tests (to save money) and have a “sink-or-swim” mentality that’s very hands-off in terms of monitoring students closely on how well they’re absorbing what they’re taught.

Fortunately there is a movement afoot to change all of this; but it took decades to put our current system together, and it’s not going to change overnight.

If you’re interested – I would recommend the following:

- Watching Sir Ken Robinson speaking at the TED conference about the problems of the current educational system: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

- Reading “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” by Daniel Pink (the book discusses the future job market and what we need to change about our educational system to be ready for it).

- Reading “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman (discusses the impact of globalism on our world).

[RollngGrnade]

JWW –

You’re presenting a straw man version of my position in the discussion with Faye. I’ve never said that her observations don’t have validity; they do. However – it is difficult to generalize them to the general population given the inherently limited nature of her observations.

I also never said that there weren’t problems with our educational system; there are, and there are plenty of them (some of which I just elucidated in the above post) from K-12 on up. In fact, it’s my position that these problems in our educational system are responsible for devaluating education (and particularly higher education).

The entire thrust of my position is to contradict the outlandish claims by some on this board that a college education is of little value and/or that the Governor’s proposed plan to increase the educational attainment of Michigan’s population is a bad one. I argue that college degrees do have value, and with some paradigm shifts in our education system – they can be exponentially more valuable.

[english school]

The globalism is change the trend of the present education.Many Universities are change the mode of syllabus and book.And including the many languages courses Like as English,French,Spanish etc...

English schools

[english language school]

you can also hit this link:

[spanisch lernen salamanca]

A Good Education certainly helps the nation economically but it should be more technical and productive.People can share their experiences thorough the knowledge of various well known languages....

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