Look at the bright side, if these trends continue, we'll close the gender gap in pay.

As I've mentioned previously, I think this call to turn college into a technical training thing is a big mistake.  It's the only time in people's lives when they can be forced to read literature, forced to write papers, and be forced to discuss serious matters with a group of strangers.  I remember when I got to school sensing that many people had never sat around and discussed any serious issue whatsoever.

 

Agreed.

 

Meanwhile, speaking of engineering, my baby brother is a 3rd year in Vanderbilt's engineering school, and he tells me that he hasn't taken a single liberal arts class or basically anything other than math/science in his three years (does he write papers?  do any sort of library research?  I dunno.).  Not surprisingly, he is easily duped by political rhetoric, pop culture, and everything else.

 

I think that's the goal of some majors and universities.

You guys are insulting to technical fields and the funny thing is most couldn't hold an engineer's slide rule!

 

Easily duped according to whose standards?

^ Hey Dan B. what's a slide rule? HaHa. JK.

 

The engineering programs being light on non-technical classes isn't exactly a new thing, my engineer father didn't take freshman English until he was a Senior, and he still needed my mother's help with it.

 

 

The earnings graph isn't unique to young college grads.  That trend can be applied to all groups, young and old, college degree or not. 

 

I still feel the there's plenty of jobs out there, just not enough qualified people to fill them.

he hasn't taken a single liberal arts class or basically anything other than math/science in his three years (does he write papers?  do any sort of library research?  I dunno.).

 

Minor point, but the sciences and math are liberal arts.  I think you mean "humanities or social sciences."

When I went thru Engineering @ UC, there was a requirement to take a certain number of humanities and social science courses to graduate (and there was an approved list of courses by the College of Engineering). Freshmen English was a requirement above and beyond the H&S requirement. I got my degree in 1995, so I don't know if it is the same now.

When I went thru Engineering @ UC, there was a requirement to take a certain number of humanities and social science courses to graduate (and there was an approved list of courses by the College of Engineering). Freshmen English was a requirement above and beyond the H&S requirement. I got my degree in 1995, so I don't know if it is the same now.

 

Bingo! Thank you. My college at UC was one of the first not to require a foreign language back in the 70s. We still had 2 years worth of social/humanities courses to go along with our technical. I  took English, History, psychology, and a few others. Many of us can even read Mark Twain.

 

My nephew just got his masters in Aerospace Engineering at UC and took the same type of classes, plus he took a foriegn language because he wanted too.

When I went thru Engineering @ UC, there was a requirement to take a certain number of humanities and social science courses to graduate (and there was an approved list of courses by the College of Engineering). Freshmen English was a requirement above and beyond the H&S requirement. I got my degree in 1995, so I don't know if it is the same now.

 

Case had a required humanities "sequence" even back when I went.  You had to take four classes of a certain type, I chose political science, plus a couple more classes to fill out the requirement.  IIRC, freshman English was a separate deal, though I am not sure some of the TAs (and even a professor or few) ever had to take it.  :o

 

What irked me after the fact is that if I had taken one more poli sci class, I would have officially had a minor, and I did not know this until I graduated.

The freshman English thing was sort of a joke, it is true because he put it off so long. It's just a family joke because he still makes my mom proofread things for work on occasion.

 

The flip side of this was I don't really remember too many non-engineering and non-science/science ed majors taking the Physics series for kicks. The truth is very few people in college really have that thirst for knowledge that they will take classes outside of the required classes or their comfort zone.

Right, I hate the implication that they are better well rounded individuals because they took "liberal arts" courses, even though most liberal arts majors can't find a job these days!

The truth is very few people in college really have that thirst for knowledge that they will take classes outside of the required classes or their comfort zone.

 

Very true, and this is being seen in all majors. The lack of serious discussion and writing stuff Mecklenborg was talking about is not limited to certain technical majors. It's being seen everywhere. Hyper-specialization leads to this. I'd say the average kid in an art class was just as likely, if not more likely to be easily duped or lacking critical thinking skills.

Count me among those who don't particularly think that taking a hodgepodge of humanities and social science courses makes one a well-rounded individual (and this from someone who double-majored in English and political science).  This is particularly true given the rigor (or lack thereof) of so many courses (including courses well beyond the entry level) in many humanities and social science disciplines.  Forget critical thinking (after all, too much of it might existentially jeopardize some of those disciplines in their current states) ... even basic technical proficiency with the written (and spoken) word is seldom particularly emphasized.

The lack of rigor has far more to do with the students than you could ever imagine. Low rigor classes keep the whiners quiet.

>Count me among those who don't particularly think that taking a hodgepodge of humanities and social science courses makes one a well-rounded individual (and this from someone who double-majored in English and political science).  This is particularly true given the rigor (or lack thereof) of so many courses (including courses well beyond the entry level) in many humanities and social science disciplines.  Forget critical thinking (after all, too much of it might existentially jeopardize some of those disciplines in their current states) ... even basic technical proficiency with the written (and spoken) word is seldom particularly emphasized.

 

I agree with all that, so we have come full circle to the dilemma of all these people who aren't college material ending up in college.  I do believe that they could be made to benefit from these classes, but the whining that Dmerkow mentioned makes community colleges and the state branch campuses a joke. 

 

I thought of this radical change a few months ago: don't grant federal student loans to students under age 20.  If you remember the old adage "if you don't go to college right after high school you'll never go...", such a situation that delays the availability of college to people who don't know what they want to do prevents people from wasting a lot of money going to camp (college). 

 

I think we'd be a lot better off if we simply sent 18 year-olds off to real camp for a year rather than have them hanging out on college campuses under the pretense that they're learning something.  Some people suggest compulsory military service, but I think you could dangle a carrot over lower class teenagers by paying for a Peace Corps-type year overseas for all high school graduates. 

 

People who have read about (studied?!!!) the communist regimes know that it was common for the various dictators to set up camps for teenagers.  For example, I had a professor who was raised in Shanghai but forced by Mao to spend his teenage years working on collective farms near the Mongolian border.  I'm not talking about that kind of stuff, although I'm sure critics of this sort of program would sound the alarm. 

 

 

 

 

There's always the 1 or 2 year mandatory military service that many countries have.

The mandatory military service idea is an interesting one, but many Western countries that have had it have been moving away from it.  Germany ended conscription as of July 1, 2011.  Sweden ended theirs in 2010.

 

Switzerland and Norway do still have it, though.

 

I admit I have some problems with it as a matter of principle, but few people are suggesting that Norway and Switzerland are hellish places to live because of the draft.

It really only makes sense if we want to have a gigantic, inexperienced military.  We've decided on the opposite.

A conscription army is expensive and pretty useless on the current battlefield. I do think a massive expansion of service programs could work - not just saving the world stuff either. You'd have to make the experience pay enough and work be reasonably pleasant (avoid ditch-digging). Maybe we could all serve two years in the TSA.

I'm going by memory of a NPR story, but I remember hearing that the de facto martial law in place in Germany for the 14~ years preceding the fall of the Nazi regime caused a deep distrust of the military amongst German citizens.  So the compulsory service after WWII was an attempt to demystify the military --  by everyone having some first-hand familiarity with it, it was believed that citizens could recognize the seeds of fascism that had tricked the earlier generation.  It also gave the citizenry some know-how should the Soviet Union launch some sort of strike into West Germany.   

 

I do think that public financing of college educations in the United States could make sense if completion of some sort of service requirement of a year (I'm just throwing that time period out there for purposes of discussion) were required for eligibility, aside from grades/test scores/etc.  Also, if college tuition (but perhaps not living expenses) was funded entirely by tax dollars, the arms race would be put on ice.  If the 1-year service requirement thinned the masses attending college, it could only improve the experience for those who go, since to some extent the people who don't want to be there wouldn't be there.

 

 

A conscription army is expensive and pretty useless on the current battlefield. I do think a massive expansion of service programs could work - not just saving the world stuff either. You'd have to make the experience pay enough and work be reasonably pleasant (avoid ditch-digging). Maybe we could all serve two years in the TSA.

 

Could this be the plan with the porno x-rays and junk-grabbing techniques? Readying the job to be "reasonably pleasant" for 18 & 19 year olds with raging hormones?

I'm going by memory of a NPR story, but I remember hearing that the de facto martial law in place in Germany for the 14~ years preceding the fall of the Nazi regime caused a deep distrust of the military amongst German citizens.  So the compulsory service after WWII was an attempt to demystify the military --  by everyone having some first-hand familiarity with it, it was believed that citizens could recognize the seeds of fascism that had tricked the earlier generation.  It also gave the citizenry some know-how should the Soviet Union launch some sort of strike into West Germany.   

 

I do think that public financing of college educations in the United States could make sense if completion of some sort of service requirement of a year (I'm just throwing that time period out there for purposes of discussion) were required for eligibility, aside from grades/test scores/etc.  Also, if college tuition (but perhaps not living expenses) was funded entirely by tax dollars, the arms race would be put on ice.  If the 1-year service requirement thinned the masses attending college, it could only improve the experience for those who go, since to some extent the people who don't want to be there wouldn't be there.

 

I was at a YAF convention in 1981 when Bill Buckley suggested that "elite" private universities did something similar.  (the other speaker at the same session was John McCain, fwiw).

 

Count on the more "general" colleges to oppose such a thing as "thinning out the herd" isn't what they want.

 

TSA?  Bad idea.  Given an influx of bodies, they'd likely start random checkpoints on the roadways or buses.

I do think that public financing of college educations in the United States could make sense if completion of some sort of service requirement of a year (I'm just throwing that time period out there for purposes of discussion) were required for eligibility, aside from grades/test scores/etc.  Also, if college tuition (but perhaps not living expenses) was funded entirely by tax dollars, the arms race would be put on ice.  If the 1-year service requirement thinned the masses attending college, it could only improve the experience for those who go, since to some extent the people who don't want to be there wouldn't be there.

 

As a matter of principle, I'm of two minds about this.

 

As a matter of practical math, though, there is no way that we can support another massive entitlement program.  Think of the total of all college tuition bills in the country, then add all the new entrants that would get in if it were provided at taxpayer expense, then add all the various ways that colleges would find to increase their take from the federal till (even if the federal government tried to impose cost controls, there would always be ways found to get around them).

If the 1-year service requirement thinned the masses attending college, it could only improve the experience for those who go, since to some extent the people who don't want to be there wouldn't be there.

 

Including the guys who show up for 6 weeks in fall quarter just to steal stuff out of the dorms.

 

Mandatory military service is not only a good recruiting tool for those who want to fully enlist, it will help get rid of these stupid war hawks that don't understand the military and expose some of those suburban/exurban butterballs to fitness.

>Think of the total of all college tuition bills in the country,

 

Georgia and maybe a few other states have free tuition at their state universities.  My thought is that college costs could be controlled to a much greater extent if the rankings + growth motive is eliminated from the public universities. 

 

 

>Including the guys who show up for 6 weeks in fall quarter just to steal stuff out of the dorms.

 

Yeah, freshman year in the dorms is total bedlum, everywhere.  Everyone's 18, but people are in vastly different states of mental health.  One of my uncles boasts of keeping his roommate alive with steak hogies and only steak hogies during a 68-day drug binge.  The guy actually passed all his classes despite not attending about 8 weeks of class. 

Georgia? That's in Real America and everything. I've probably mentioned it before, but if you average a 3.0 in a West Virginia high school, you get free tuition to Marshall or WVU.

I think Georgia had free tuition.I think it disappeared in the last couple years. Economic collapse and all...

BYU:

What do you know about black history?

That was terrible on so many levels.

They could have done this at any state university, not just BYU. 

Is BYU a state university?

No, I dont't think it is.  I meant to imply the mediocrity of many state university students.

BYU is Mormon.

This is a good read.

 

The Big Jobs Myth: American Workers Aren't Ready for American Jobs

JUL 25 2012, 2:10 PM ET

 

What ails the American worker? Republicans and Democrats, chief executives and certain academics all say they see a mismatch between workers' skills and employers' needs. The data see something different.

 

A specter haunts the job market. You've witnessed it on the campaign trail. You've seen it on TV. It is the idea that the skills of U.S. workers don't match the needs of the nation's employers.

 

This "skills mismatch" is routinely held up to explain why the unemployment rate is still at 8.2% three years after the Great Recession officially ended, and why nearly half of those out of work have been so for more than six months. The Romney campaign affirms that the skills mismatch "lies at the heart of our jobs crisis." In his State of the Union speech, President Obama quoted conversations with businessmen who can't find qualified workers, and then proposed "a national commitment to train two million Americans with skills that will lead directly to a job."

 

It is heart-warming to see Democrats and Republicans agree, but unfortunate that the thing they agree about may not be true. In recent months, researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the University of California-Berkeley, and the Wharton School have expressed skepticism about the existence of a national skills mismatch. A larger body of work, stretching back decades, paints a murky picture about how broad-based a problem worker skill level is. Despite this, policymakers have fretted about the issue for 30 years, in periods of high unemployment and low. If the research is far from certain, why does the skills-mismatch narrative stay with us? And by fixating on mismatched skills, are we ignoring a far bigger problem for the economy?

 

...The truth that is unfortunately lost amid so much harmony is that individual-level skill doesn't exist in a vacuum. Many employment structures -- from pay scales to hiring practices -- sit outside of the control of workers, yet nonetheless help determine whether they get hired. What individuals can generally control is the amount and type of education and training they receive. The trend there is certainly to acquire more, but an arms race for education brings with it a whole host of other problems, such as crushing student-debt loads, which are particularly worrisome if a big reason for getting a degree is simply to make it through a firm's hiring algorithms.

 

An over-emphasis on education as the pathway to more jobs may be problematic in another way. Attending school has always brought a variety of advantages -- Thomas Jefferson wanted universal public education to create better citizens, not better workers. In many cases, the sorts of "skills" employers want -- problem-solving, creativity -- demand better thinking and communication, the types of abilities one picks up in English, history, and arts classes. Yet by drawing a direct line from coursework to jobs, these are exactly the areas of curriculum that get tossed aside for more industry-specific concerns. In other words, the implications of understanding workforce quality through the lens of the "skills mismatch," and positioning education as the solution, could be far-ranging...

 

READ MORE AT

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/the-big-jobs-myth-american-workers-arent-ready-for-american-jobs/260169/#.UElwm53S_G0.facebook

I've been wondering about the "jobs mismatch" meme for a while myself, but also wondering if it was my own bias as an English & political science major from undergrad talking (since, as the article notes, those are the ones that might be deemphasized in favor of more industry-specific courses).

 

Unfortunately, part of the problem may be that those courses don't teach writing, problem-solving, and creativity the way they might have at one point.  They do still in many ways reward those traits, at least most of the time (though individual professors obviously vary greatly), and so they may still have a kind of signaling function, but I seldom recall getting actual advice on my writing.

Im trying to figure out how history is a way of learning problem-solving and creativity.  I just don't see it. 

That's because most history courses teach rote memorization and recitation, especially at the 101 level.

 

There are much more interesting questions to ask about history, ones much more capable of getting creative juices flowing and problem-solving gears engaged.  They're just harder to teach.  Counterfactuals are often creative fodder: What if Hitler had not broken the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union?  What if Rommel had not been condemned to a remote theater due to internal German military politics?  What if Israel had been founded in modern-day Uganda (the second-choice location for it based on British colonial territory they were considering divesting during their post-imperial contraction)?  What if Florida had declared for Gore in 2000, or Bush v. Gore had come out the other way?

 

Similarly, problem-solving lessons can involve inquiring into how history happened, or how certain events that could have happened didn't happen, rather than just what happened.  After all, history is in large part the story of people solving problems (and creating them).

Let me change subjects slightly and share an idea I had this morning -- Ohio offering student loan forgiveness to graduates of state universities while they reside in Ohio.  So if they graduate from OSU and move to Chicago they pay back their $15,000 or whatever.  If they stay in Columbus Ohio pays their typical annual payment. 

It would probably be cheaper just to build rail transit and provide more tax incentives for non-sprawl building patterns so that they don't leave. But uh, that's something an entrepreneurial-minded dictator would do rather than a gridlocked representative democracy whose politicians only aim to please those living in ribbon development. It would also require leaders that are capable of connecting the dots between brain drain and the built landscape. Doing something more direct like you propose is less effective and more expensive but much more realistic in today's Ohio political climate.

I write all these posts at work so I usually don't double-check them.  Look at this:

 

>If they stay in Columbus Ohio pays their typical annual payment. 

 

 

Add a comma an you're still f*cked. 

Let me change subjects slightly and share an idea I had this morning -- Ohio offering student loan forgiveness to graduates of state universities while they reside in Ohio.  So if they graduate from OSU and move to Chicago they pay back their $15,000 or whatever.  If they stay in Columbus Ohio pays their typical annual payment. 

 

This is something I've been thinking about for while too. Ohio taxpayers are currently doing a great job subsidizing the workforce of Texas, NC, Nevada, etc.  There are definite downsides though- the reduced flexibility would make the schools a lot less attractive to a lot of applicants.  Maybe a middle ground would be to raise tuition only a bit (not dramatically) and use the extra money for a forgivable state loan program that applies to alums so long as they work in Ohio.

I think though there would have to be some separation of loans for tuition versus room & board.  I'm not sure how the loans work anymore so I can't make any specific suggestions.  Although loans that pay for apartments and food do actually pay property tax, state sales tax, etc.  Maybe there could be a refund calculated on estimated taxes paid directly or indirectly with loans. 

My problem with that concept is the same one I have with federally subsidized and guaranteed student loans today: It would simply encourage universities to increase their sticker prices.  The distributional consequences of the price increase would not be uniform (those who paid the increased prices and moved out of state would pay even more, and those who stayed in-state would pay less), but the university would still ultimately just pocket the subsidy and keep tuition absurdly high.

^I don't think it would be tough to prevent universities from pocketing the up front sticker price increase.  You could even have them ship the money directly to the state (it's essentially a tax that's refundable to some payers, but could never be branded that way).  If properly designed it would be a net transfer from out-of-state alums to in-state alums and revenue neutral vis a vis the Universities.  And while I worry less about the distibutional consequences (I like high sticker prices and generous grants), you could even pay it out as refundable tax credit instead of loan forgiveness so that alums from higher income families could also enjoy the benefit.  These things have all sorts of unintended consequences, for sure, so it's not something I would ever suggest be casually embraced. But definitely seems possible that there's a system that would capture more of the benefits in-state.

Don't get me wrong, I have little in principle against capturing the benefits in-state, considering that the costs are also borne predominantly in-state.  (However, I also partly empathize with the more pan-national sentiment that this is part of our obligation as states to the country as a whole, which is also why I don't have strong principled opposition to state public funding of education notwithstanding my libertarian starting position on issues.)  That said, I still don't think that either of those hybrid post-graduation-reimbursement systems you propose would actually get us there.  Much as I hate to say it, there might be no substitute in this instance for direct regulation of the state universities, i.e., tuition & fee increase caps or even compulsory tuition reductions (to get us back to where we'd have been had the caps never been lifted in the early aughts).  Government regulating government's own instrumentalities (including state universities) isn't as offensive to free market principles as government price controls in the private sector, at least.

I guess a good starting point is knowing how many graduates actually leave the state within, say, five or ten years after graduation.  It could be a much smaller problem than we (jmeck and I) are even making it out to be.  I certainly agree there's nothing wrong with tuition caps etc. given that public universities are extensions of the state itself, and that there is plenty of private competition.  It's also likely Ohio or other states have already explored tuition/loan schemes that reward stayers and rejected them for one reason or another.

But back to the original topic, no, I don't think it's possible to teach people to become intellectually curious.  People are primarily the product of their family upbringing, not the schools they attended.

Then why have schools at all?

Then why have schools at all?

 

Why live, if we'll die anyway?

 

I believe it's possible to awaken someone's intellectual curiosity, even if they've been fed propaganda in a trailer for 10 years.  I have friends who do this for a living.  While family has a whole lot to do with it, we're all better off when other options are made available to people.  Not everyone agrees with their parents forever.

^They'd better, or I'm cutting off their allowance.

 

I want to touch on the skills gap discussed above. I think the focus of the discussion was based on skills acquired via a college education, but much of the gap I see is on the trade side of the labor pool. Employers don't need managers, they need the people that actually make what it is they produce. Currently (at least in NEO), there's a gap between the skills much of the labor pool has (long run metal forming, for instance), and what is needed (technology based, CAD driven production methods, welders (seriously, if you know someone that can weld aluminum they're in high demand), etc.). There's also, as KJP mentioned somewhere, a need for folks with skills related to the shale industry.

 

The gap is being addressed (a lot of Comm Colleges are addressing this, and many employers have taken on the approach of training on the job), but it will take time for everyone to catch up.