This topic has been touched upon in several of the recent discussions, including the various threads on college reactions to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and the role of the SAT. The article is a good summary of the many questions that have been raised.
Article should be “gifted.”
The concept of “college for all”, where college means a four-year college with a lot of general education coupled with advanced study in some one academic field (possibly two), was never a good idea.
College makes sense for some professions where that sort of additional educational track is likely to be helpful. It can also make sense for people who actually like school and would benefit from exploring interests in a school context.
But obviously many people do not fit into those categories. And in fact, “college for all immediately after HS” is a particularly bad idea. A lot of people are really not passionate about more school right after high school. For them, exploring interests in the working world makes so much more sense.
They may then conclude they don’t need any more school, that experience and training on the job is more than adequate for them. Or they might decide some specific schooling would advance their career, or start a new one. But then they can come back to school with focus and real motivation.
There is a lot in that specific article I do not particularly agree with, but I do think a couple things from the end make sense. First, there should be much more public support for things like apprenticeships as a next step after HS, versus just more school. Second, employers should be encouraged to not require a college degree for entry positions where a college education really is not necessary preparation. I note if they do that collectively, then the “signal” sent by reluctantly getting a largely irrelevant college degree will be devalued, as it should be.
These things make sense to me because again it should be possible for those so inclined to work after HS, and only later decide if more schooling would be helpful. And so I think both the public and private sectors should cooperate on embracing that as a viable path.
However, the credential creep trend has been going in the opposite direction over time. How would it get reversed so that employers no longer require education beyond that needed for the job?
Since this is an employer norm, it will take time, and it will need to be led by prominent employers and perhaps industry associations.
The article says:
The pressure to place less emphasis on four-year degrees is growing, however. In what has been called the “degree reset,” the federal government and several states eliminated the degree requirements for many government jobs. Companies like IBM and the giant professional services firm Deloitte have too. Last year, a survey of 800 companies by Intelligent.com found that 45% intended to eliminate bachelor degree requirements for some positions in 2024. The Ad Council recently ran a campaign encouraging employers to get rid of the “paper ceiling.”
Sounds pretty promising to me, hopefully it continues in that direction.
One of the exercises my 7th grade math teacher went through was comparing outcomes between working at the GM plant in town vs going to college. The math concept was looking at variables to find break even points. In general, we were looking at not breaking even until sometime in our fifties. Back then, we had a very good vocationally centered public HS in our county (still received a HS degree, still had sports teams and other clubs). No stigma back then to attending school there. Grads were well set up with getting into trades like plumbing, carpentry, electrician, auto mechanics, bookkeeping, secretarial, etc… No need to pay a private trade school to learn those skills.
I look at my kids’ HS. There is this obsession with college prep for all students. I see a lot of kids that are unengaged. I am not sure they are well served in terms of not picking up any skills that would be meaningful for them. There is a vocational HS in the district, but there seems to be a stigma attached to it – where the dumb kids go.
One thing that struck me in the article was " Of 100 random freshmen enrolling in college today, 40 will not graduate. Of the remaining 60 that earn a degree in six years, 20 will end up chronically underemployed. In other words, for every five students who enroll in a four-year college, only two will graduate and find a job based on their degree." And, “the U.S. invests almost exclusively in students heading to college. Government financial support for universities outstrips apprenticeships by about 1,000 to one…”
Wonder why we have a student debt crisis? People are being conned into thinking that all “credentials” are equal and incurring stifling debt, which if they can’t or don’t pay, become a taxpayer burden. I have always thought that any school that takes proceeds from government backed loans should be on the hook to some extent if there is a default and put some of the credit risk back on them.
Yeah, this gets tricky, because these days if someone says something like that your grades in high school indicate college is not necessarily the best choice for you, some people will think that means they are saying you are too dumb or lazy for college. And I know guidance counselors and such can get a lot of grief from parents in cases like that.
But we all know that is often because the kid in question just does not love school. Doesn’t mean they are not bright, doesn’t mean they cannot be enthusiastic and energetic in the right context, it just means school in particular is not that context for them, not at this point in their life at least.
Changing norms like that is again no small task, but hopefully again if big employers can change their norms around entry hiring, and public support for apprenticeships and such can be increased, it can trickle down into more people realizing that if a bright and ambitious kid would prefer that sort of next step, there is nothing at all wrong with that.
Sounds like the declining faith in the value of a college education is well justified. Per the article, 25% of college grads lack basic numeracy skills, and 20% lack basic literacy skills. Those students spent a lot of time and money in college yet failed to acquire an elementary education.
I understand the concerns about credential creep and the “paper ceiling”.
I’ll offer an alternative point of view. Until and unless we are prepared to invest in K-12 education, calling for “great jobs for HS graduates” is a fools errand.
I applaud what Bloomberg is doing in Boston (and other locations) to actually invest in HS’s… because otherwise, can Mass General afford to hire pharm techs who don’t know what decimal points are? Or nursing assistants who don’t know that a kilo is not the same as a lb? Or ANY health care professional who is reading at a 6th grade level?
It’s all nice and wonderful to claim that employers are elitist. It’s another thing to recognize that basic competencies- reading comprehension, arithmetic, reading a bar graph, being able to write a coherent paragraph-- are just not something you can take on faith anymore.
A good read. Thanks BK.
There are many posters on several threads that express this very sentiment. The simple truth is that not all students are ready to enter college right out of HS (I certainly wasn’t), and some may never be. Many will be much better off entering apprenticeships or trade schools, but to say so is “elitist”. Instead, many enter college unprepared and either drop out or graduate with marginal skills that no employer would be interested in. Couple that with debt and you have a recipe for failure.
If you send unprepared, and unmotivated, kids to college they will struggle and choose the “easiest way” to graduating, further diluting the value of their diploma.
Totally agree, but perhaps if some of the attention and educational dollars go to k-12, trade schools, and apprentice programs, as opposed to generating more college graduats with no real skills then everyone will be better off.
I note as I understand the employer movement in question, they are definitely not interested in just accepting a HS degree as proof of skills. They instead are substituting various relevant skills assessments for requiring a college degree.
Which I think just supports your point–if a HS does not do a good job preparing a kid in terms of skills, then merely removing the college degree requirement and swapping in a skills assessment will do them no good at all.
Employers just want to exploit and get good young talent that will work 60 hours a week, pay them a low salary and bill them out at a high rate. That hasn’t changed in 100 years.
The notion of college education as path towards career missed the whole point of college: personal growth/exploration/and the pursuit of knowledge.
For many the whole college experience was about the “social” and “networking side”. When you start your career, your employer should be training you and not expect “college” to have done so.
Take the foot off the gas, and let the kids grow. Too much pressure is placed on kids to choose a career, get a degree etc…at a young age. The workplace is evolving as are the skills involved. We still make the mistake of thinking of this generation of kids as going into the 80s workforce.
I’ve worked for companies which have spent millions of dollars on employee training, upskilling, teaching technical skills, teaching soft skills. And tens of millions developing those courses with top notch Learning Design professionals, experts in “gamification” and advancement, and all the latest bells and whistles that the Ed Tech industry can provide (which is quite significant these days).
Conclusion? Companies can teach a really wide range of subjects and skills to employees at all levels in their careers and in the company. Companies are LOUSY at teaching 5th grade sentence structure, 4th grade long division, 5th grade social studies/geography. You’d think that the same people that can take a college history major and teach an accelerated MBA in 6 weeks could figure out a curriculum for teaching percentages? Yeah, you’d think.
It is very, very difficult to compensate for terrible K-12 once someone gets into the workforce.
Not sure what you mean here, college students should be able “grow” while still learning (at least) the basics required of them when the enter the real-world. Too many seem to be graduating after four years of “growth” with very little to show for it aside from a mountain of debt.
You would think, wouldn’t you. It seems that colleges are all to happy to take money and pump out some grads with little going for them along side other grads that are extremely accomplished.
Or they will suspect that such a recommendation is based more on race/ethnicity/class/gender/etc. than achievement and interest – because that was and probably still is common (even though it may not be the case in every situation).
Except that then the applicant will not have spent money and time trying to get a college degree that they were not really interested in at the time.
That’s a fair point, although I would suggest the upper-SES kids being pushed into four-year colleges directly after high school, despite their demonstrable lack of real interest in more school, are not being well-served by that sort of bias. But I fully agree there has never been a golden era where college has been suggested for all who might benefit, and not pushed on any who would benefit from an alternative.
I suppose that is true, but they are still unprepared for working in a modern economy, so it seems like cold comfort that it could be even worse.
No wonder employers need to utilize their own test, or other scores, or recruit at target schools. Given the high failure rate of American college grads, they need to do so.
The student loan default data suggests that it’s a small group of for-profit colleges responsible for a disproportionate number of the “little going for them” students. They have exhausted their Pell, they are in debt, and they have degrees which don’t prepare them for the careers they thought they were studying for.
I have been tagged as an elitist on these boards long enough NOT to specify which degrees. But I think it’s tragic for a college to mislead a kid (whose social capital does not include grownups with professional employment) that a degree in “forensic science” is NOT going to prepare him or her for a career as a Medical Examiner solving crimes via autopsy, despite what they’ve seen on TV. No. A BA/BS, MD or DO, residency then fellowship in pathology.
So I wouldn’t say “colleges are ALL happy”. SOME colleges are happy. And others are transparent about career paths and that gets folks all riled up as well.
It’s pretty funny to me that this article about the lack of trust in college education places the blame solely on colleges, without ever even mentioning the massive political movement in the United States that despises education and, at every turn, urges people to embrace a narrow view of schooling solely as a means to an individual economic end, rather than as a public good worthy of investment for everyone.
If a critical mass of people in our country have been trained to see education as useless unless it leads to a certain narrow outcome, then of course they will distrust any education that doesn’t guarantee that outcome, especially when they’ve simultaneously been trained to view expertise with distrust and to deride colleges (and, to a degree, college grads) as elitest and/or malicious.
Let me be clear: I don’t have a problem with individual kids choosing for themselves not to go to college, and I firmly support robust CTE programs that allow kids to graduate high school with skills if that’s what they choose (as well as broad-based courses that expose kids to all sorts of careers, either degree-dependent or not).
But that’s not what I observe happening in reality. In reality, I see political leaders who say terrible things about education in general, and who reserve special contempt for the idea of higher education. They see college as appropriate as for only a narrow subset of kids and conclude (reluctantly, of course, but inevitably) that poor, Black and brown and disabled kids don’t actually need to be provided the same level of education that those same politicians demand for their own kids. Those kids should be satisfied with a “credential” dictated by local corporations, even if it means they graduate with only enough skills to do one specific job for one specific employer.
Meanwhile, we have a leading gubernatorial candidate calling teachers “wicked” and calling for science and social studies to be banned from the K-5 curriculum, and a candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction who has proudly called public schools “socialist indoctrination centers.” (count your blessings; I wrote, and deleted, a lengthy paragraph of other evidence from my state of the open contempt for the concept of education rampant among our political leaders).
It really depends on what you study. College is a good place to gain marketable job skills. But it can also be a $100k waste of time if you pick an unmarketable major and fail to get something employable, like a teaching certificate. I told my daughter that she can major in anything she wants, but she has to support herself with it. So she chose an employable major. I pay for my kids college because I want to set them up for success, so I get a say in what they’re doing. I’m not going to condone them playing for 4 years and coming back home and working at Subway and playing Xbox. I would expect them to be the adults that they are.