Should I have gambled?

I rarely found students to be at fault.  I have even told them so.  The system is messed up, and is set up much to the disadvantage of students like the ones at my university, most of whom do not come from privileged backgrounds.

But then, I never followed up those talks with students by telling them that they should take my classes and major in the programs that my department offered!

The following commentary was published in August 2014.
***************************************************

College: The million-dollar gamble

Will you be at ease with your 18-year-old gambling with a million dollars?

High school students are told that they need to go to college because of the difference of a million dollars in lifetime earnings that a college degree makes. While that figure itself is debatable, it means that we place enormous pressure on 18-year-old high school graduates to choose wisely.

Most of them do wisely allocate their time between classes and part-time work and the occasional toga party and graduate hoping to land that dream job that will start delivering the million dollar premium.

However, more and more college graduates are finding out that there are very few meaningful full-time employment opportunities. As the Economic Policy Institute noted, "the Class of 2014 will be the sixth consecutive graduating class to enter the labor market during a period of profound weakness."

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York echoed a very similar trend: By "historical standards, unemployment rates for recent college graduates have indeed been quite high since the onset of the Great Recession. Moreover, underemployment among recent graduates — a condition defined here as working in jobs that typically do not require a bachelor's degree — is also on the rise, part of a trend that began with the 2001 recession."

The unemployment and underemployment of college graduates is worsened by their debts. Inflation-adjusted average debt of the graduating classes has tripled in 20 years; the average Class of 2014 graduate owed about $33,000.

Such a context makes a high school graduate's college investment a risky bet towards that debatable million dollar differential.

It is not always the students' fault when they find themselves unemployed or underemployed after graduating. After all, one only needs to recall any number of movies from the past and be reminded that college students were all not scholars every waking moment either.

So, what happened?

The social contract has changed.

Even until a few years ago, it did not matter what students studied (their academic majors) as long as they were able to earn the diploma and demonstrate their abilities to prospective employers. Employers, in turn, knew well that they had to invest in the new hires and train them with respect to the content of the job as well as with soft skills like communication.

Now, employers are no longer eager to make that investment. Corporations have abandoned the commitment to invest in the young, firmly guided by an ideology that the only social responsibility of business is to increase profits. Thus, students are rarely able to land valuable paid or even unpaid internships in corporations, and it is now up to the graduates to prove that they are competent with the content knowledge and job skills.

Which is why the risks associated with the million-dollar college bet appear to be heavily on the students themselves. Would it be too much to ask corporations not to always wear the blinders of short-term profits and to look at the longer term, too?

“School teaches you only to be better at school"

It was an email from a student who graduated three years ago.

"But, I wasn't even her favorite instructor.  I thought she did not like me and the classes that she took with me."

Yep, those were my immediate thoughts.  I am by now used to not being anybody's favorite.  Popularity is simply not my thing.

And, yet, there it was. An email from her.

I wrote "I will gladly assist you" in my reply to her request that I participate as a guide in her professional pursuit.

And I added more.

After all, if a student has taken two classes with me, then for certain I remember them well--sometimes way too well for their liking!

I wrote in that email, "BTW, perhaps you have forgotten that I used your remark in class in one of my op-eds." And expanded on it.

A couple of days later, she replied. "I actually forgot about the op-ed (and my cheeky comments in class). Hopefully, I can teach my students more than just to be good at school!"

She will be a fantastic teacher.

Here is that op-ed, from May 2016.
*****************

“School teaches you only to be better at school,” said a student who is graduating in June, in response to my question to the class on whether they thought they were ready for the world of employment.

The other students immediately and unhesitatingly agreed with her.

Without even knowing it, the student was channeling Ken Robinson. In a highly entertaining TED talk back in 2006 (way before “TED talk” became a part of our everyday vocabulary), Robinson noted that “you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.” Psychology professors are keen on creating more psychology professors and biology professors want to make biologists, so to speak.

I will be at least a tad happy if that student’s statement were true. I am not convinced that school is teaching students to be better at school. An increasing body of research questions the value added over the four-plus years of undergraduate schooling.

But, even more do I worry that higher education has become a diluted and credential-chasing process that is falling way short when it comes to preparing students for employment.

It begins when graduating high school seniors and college freshmen are bombarded about their academic majors. This is where the machinery of school teaching students to be better at school does a tremendous disservice because college is really not about the major.

The composition of the academic credits toward a college degree itself easily gives this away — a majority of those credits will not be in the major. Or, to rephrase it, if college education is only about a major, then an undergraduate experience can be wrapped up within a year and a half after high school.

Even the preparation for productive employment is rarely about the major itself. The skills that employers repeatedly cite as important — skills like writing, thinking, communicating, researching and more — are gained through a broad array of topics outside one’s major, and that is what most of the undergraduate education is all about.

Yet the myth persists and, despite all the research, there are some academic majors that are more geared for employment than others. Of course, that is the case if students are in professional undergraduate programs like elementary school teaching, for instance. But, otherwise, the link between a college major and productive employment is nebulous at best — unless one wants to be a college professor.

If we are truly interested in how higher education is serving the young and, hence, the country’s future, then the debate we ought to be engaged in is not about whether majoring in science, technology, engineering and math (often grouped as STEM) is better than art history, or whether we need philosophers or plumbers.

Instead, society needs to pay attention to whether students are mastering the skills that are needed to be gainfully employed, along with a broad understanding in order to be caring citizens. Else it will continue to be the case that the only thing that school teaches the young is to be better at school.

The old man and the C

For years--all the way from my California days--I have been arguing in favor of vocational education in high school and against pushing young people into college.  I have written many op-eds about these issues.

I have also written quite a few op-eds, and blogged over and over, that "higher education" is not vocational education.  While college does involve preparing for the world of employment, it is a lot more than mere job-training.

I have failed, and failed miserably at that, to get anywhere with such ideas.

But, I continue along this path anyway because, well, stupid is as stupid does! ;)

Now that we are well into the term, students have started feeling the pain of college and classes like mine.  "It's all downhill from here till the end of the term," remarked a student in class yesterday, when I asked them about the lack of energy in the room.

It is not me.  Even the best of the teachers face the same issue.  In this interview, the libertarian-economist, Bryan Caplan, quotes  "Steven Pinker, the psychologist at Harvard, who regularly wins awards for his teaching" and says:

Yet he looks at his classroom a couple of weeks into the semester and sees that half the students aren’t there. How can it be that these are the best students in the world, with the best teacher, at arguably the best school in the world, and half the students don’t think it’s worth their while? And they’re getting a grade, so they actually have an extra reason to be there, and yet they’re not. The only thing you can say is that even the best teacher in the world is boring to these kids, compared to what else they could be doing. It’s sad and hard to face, but that’s the truth.

Even at Harvard, many of the brightest students find one of the brightest thinkers/teachers to be boring!  What are my prospects then, right?

Caplan has a new book out, in which he tears into higher education.  He says in the interview:

People who don’t like school rarely write essays about how terrible it was. Instead they just suffer in silence or complain to their friends, and then they go and get a practical job and we never hear their voices again. The whole conversation about education is really driven by people who did enjoy school and who work with students. Part of what I wanted to do is give a voice to the voiceless and say, "They may not talk about it, but they are suffering." It’s not a real mystery if you actually go to a classroom and look at the faces. Students are generally not happy. They’re bored.

Yep, which is also why I have blogged in plenty about how the current system of higher education is nothing but a ponzi scheme run by educators.

I firmly believe that we are rapidly approaching the point of a paradigm shift in the way we do college.  There are forces converging from many directions.  When that shift happens, I will lose my job.  And students will not be subject to my boring classes either. 

May we please stop pushing college degrees for all?

Consider the following, which are the concluding sentences from James Surowiecki's "Financial Page" column in the New Yorker:

We should also rethink our assumption that college is always the right answer, regardless of cost. Politicians love to invoke education as the solution to our economic ills. But they’re often papering over the fact that our economy just isn’t creating enough good jobs for ordinary Americans. The notion that college will transform your job prospects is, in many cases, an illusion, and for a while for-profit schools turned it into a very lucrative one.

Now, read the following sentences from the concluding paragraph in Rebecca Schuman's column at Slate:

The university classroom benefits from a diversity of backgrounds, including first-generation students who absolutely should get any support they need with college readiness. Every American who wants to attend college should be able to (and for a lot less money than they’re currently laying out). But those who don’t want to shouldn’t feel like they have to

Here is the problem: Surowiecki and Schuman are not higher education "insiders."  Yes, Schuman, is an adjunct faculty after earning her doctorate.  After being on the doctoral path at Yale, Surowiecki became a journalist/writer.  For all purposes, both are "outsiders" looking in at higher education when they conclude that the push for college degree for all is not worth the talk, leave alone the money that we invest.

It is an open secret anymore that we are unnecessarily pushing college degrees down the throats of young, and older, adults.  All we have managed to achieve through this is an enormous level of credential inflation.  Which is what Schuman notes as well:

the solution is to stop requiring a bachelor’s degree to be an office assistant, or a paralegal, or any number of professions that up until recently could be staffed—successfully—by the holder of an associate’s degree or high-school diploma.

The first ever op-ed of mine that was published along these lines was about two decades ago.  Yep, back in California, not too long after earning my doctorate, I argued in that opinion piece that we were committing a double crime of pushing college degrees and undermining vocational education.  Nobody cared then because I was an outsider--I was not in academia at that time.  (Well, ok, there was one wonderful benefit from that--a Mike contacted me after reading the column, which later led to dinners as well.)

As an academic, of course, I have written quite a few op-eds by now criticizing the overselling of college degrees and the under-investment in vocational education.  The only time that a fellow academic responded to it, well, it was pretty much a personal attack.  Otherwise, the higher education professionals remain silent as ever.  Why?  It should not surprise you by now--this college degree issue is merely one of the many examples for why I loved the George Bernard Shaw quote as the title for this blog itself: every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.



(BTW, keep in mind that the criticism is against the push for college degrees; having a degree is not the same as having been educated, wherein lies a huge part of the problem.)

The US college degree is sold, and exported ... if the price is right

A few years ago, when I served as the director of the university's Honors Program, I regularly met with the university president and the provost, mostly to update them about the quality improvement that I was observing in the program's incoming and graduating students.

At one of those meetings, the then president of the university talked about the institutional arrangements that he was putting in place to bring more Chinese students to the university.  He emphasized that many of them were excellent students and that I could think about getting them into Honors as well.

Of course, who wouldn't love working with smart and dedicated students!  But, I refused to aggressively court those students. I told the president that the students would be an awesome addition but as long as they demonstrated fluency in the English language comparable to what I expected from the "native"students, given the writing-intensive nature of the curriculum.  Does it surprise you that the president was not pleased with my response?

Over the years, the university's foreign student population has grown a lot.  From China and from Saudi Arabia.  Perhaps because of the content of the courses that I teach, or perhaps because of my emphasis on reading, writing, and discussing, I rarely ever have a foreign student in my class.  To my knowledge, no student from China or Saudi Arabia has been in the Honors Program even after my exit from there.

Public universities, even the no-names like the one where I teach, actively recruit international students, because it is all about the revenue stream.  They pay full price and more.

Chinese students have become a big market in the United States—and nobody understands this better than the universities themselves. Over 60 percent of Chinese students cover the full cost of an American university education themselves, effectively subsidizing the education of their lower-income American peers.

A few weeks ago, a colleague referred to how the international students are so segregated from the main student body, and from the town itself.  I told him that the university couldn't care because it is all about the money.  "As if they are walking ATMs" I added.

But the symbiotic relationship between cash-strapped American schools and Chinese students is not without its problems. Demand for an overseas education has spawned a cottage industry of businesses in China that help students prepare their applications. The industry is poorly regulated and fraud is rampant. According to Zinch China, an education consulting company, 90 percent of Chinese applicants submit fake recommendations, 70 percent have other people write their essays, 50 percent have forged high school transcripts, and 10 percent list academic awards and other achievements they did not receive. As a result, many students arrive in the U.S. and find that their English isn’t good enough to follow lectures or write papers.

Any honest faculty member will acknowledge that the typical Chinese student coming for an undergrad education in the US has immense problems with the English language.  But, good luck tracking down a few honest academics!

“American universities are addicted to Chinese students,” Parke Muth, a Virginia-based education consultant with extensive experience in China, told me last year. “They're good test takers. They tend not to get into too much trouble. They're not party animals. The schools are getting a lot of money, and they, frankly, are not doing a lot in terms of orientation.”

But, sooner or later, all these shenanigans get exposed.

A startling number of Chinese students are getting kicked out of American colleges. According to a white paper published by WholeRen, a Pittsburgh-based consultancy, an estimated 8,000 students from China were expelled from universities and colleges across the United States in 2013-4. The vast majority of these students—around 80 percent—were removed due to cheating or failing their classes.

I would bet my money that almost always the students cheated or failed because of their problems with the English language.  It is not the students' fault really--they have been trapped by circumstances, including shortage of college seats in China; pressure from their families; and the mercantile attitude of colleges in granting them admission.  These circumstances have also led to cheating at the college entrance exams like the SAT and TOEFL:

 Fifteen Chinese nationals have been accused of cheating the college entrance examination system with a scheme that involved fake passports and test-taking impostors, according to a federal indictment unsealed on Thursday.

It is not merely these fifteen and the "customers" they served:

Mr. Hickton, the prosecutor, said he believed the issue extended beyond the 15 people charged on Thursday.
“I would not want anyone to be left with the impression that that’s the sole country involved or the scope of it,” he said.

I am not surprised at all.  These are also the kinds of things that happen when education is treated as a business.  But, even the educators don't get it--they are convinced it is a business, as this University of North Carolina trustee declared as the rationale for closing quite a few academic programs:

“We’re capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand.”

Ah, yes, coming from the same university where thousands of students over the years took fake "paper courses" in order to make sure they were academically eligible enough to play football and basketball.  Capitalists who are ready to sell college diplomas for the right price!

Maybe it is time I stopped being some old-fashioned academic, and got on with the times, eh!

Through the looking glass. A broken looking glass.

One moment you are enjoying life and the blue sky with puffy white clouds. And the next moment, well, shit happens. Sometimes. Like this:

I suppose the cosmos determined that it was time that I paid up, some more.  Can't fight that cosmos.

"You have to pay a $100 deductible."  Not that bad a deal to replace the windshield, I figured.  I was even Polyanna-ish thinking that it could have been worse.

The auto repair folks gave me a ride.  It turned out to be more than a ride.

"How has your day been thus far?" the young fellow asked me.  He didn't look older than twenty-five.

"Looks like I am draining my wallet today. Other than that, things are well. Thanks."

Conversation is not a solo act.  I followed up with "How about you?"

"Am looking at a long day" he said. But, he continued to have a pleasant expression on his face.  Not like me, who was born with a face that apparently cannot even convey a smile!

"Oh yeah?"  That was the cue for him to continue.  And he did.

"After a full day here, I head to work four hours at UPS."

"Wait a sec, are both part-time jobs, or is one full-time and the other part-time?"

Turns out that the UPS job is a part-time one on top of the full-time job.

"That is a long day.  An exhausting day, I imagine."

"Yes, tiring sometimes."

"I teach at Western Oregon.  A few weeks ago a student was describing the tiring job he had at UPS, sorting boxes and loading trucks" I told him.

"Hey, if people are ready to hire you, then I bet you have a very good work ethic."

"I suppose so. I think I have a good work ethic.  That matters a lot" he said.

For a second he seemed to think about his life and experiences.  "It worked out well because I am not the scholarly type" he said.  "I love the trades."

I was yet again reminded that we do a huge disservice to the young by pushing an unhealthy ambiance right from elementary school years that those who don't go to college are losers, and that the trades are only for the ones who can't make it.  This young man is yet another evidence in my pile that there are plenty of people who love what they do, enjoy their lives, understand the world, are wonderfully articulate, and all of that without ever stepping their foot on a college campus.  Life is not about piece of paper that the college diploma is.

The ride ended.  "Thanks for the ride, and the chat."

He put his hand out.  "Thanks. I am ___."

"I am sriram."

"Srilam?"

"Sriram."

"Got it. Sriram."

I wished him well.

I got more than $100 worth out of the shit that the cosmos flung my way.
The score: Cosmos 0 versus sriram who is a gazillion dollars wiser after chatting away with a twenty-five year old young man.  The cosmos lost big time! Again!!!  I am all set for the next round with the cosmos.

The (relatively) worthless college degree

This catchy tweet appeared in my newsfeed:

Why you need a bachelor's degree to be a secretary today http://t.co/ttIKHPIelp
— Vox (@voxdotcom) September 9, 2014

My first thought was this: I wrote an op-ed on this seven f*ing years ago!

college education serves as a filter for employers who are faced with the daunting task of selecting from among the many, many applicants for jobs. This further reinforces the notion that college degree is important.

I calmed myself down and tweeted using polite language:

When I wrote an op-ed on credential inflation, in August 2007, neither students nor faculty agreed with me :( http://t.co/XgLIpJ49WI
— sriram khe (@congoboy) September 9, 2014

It is the story of my life--it is not what you say but who says it!

Oh well, enough about woe-is-me and let us get going with the issue of, to borrow Catherine Rampbell's column title, "the college degree has become the new high school degree"

Regardless of what you actually learn in college, graduating from a four-year institution may broadcast that you have discipline, drive and stick-to-it-iveness. In plenty of jobs — such as I.T. help-desk positions — there is little to no difference in skill requirements between job ads requiring a degree and those that do not, Burning Glass found. But employers still prefer college graduates.
With college attendance more routine today it was than in the past, degrees are becoming a common, if blunt, tool for screening job applicants. In 2013, 33.6 percent of 25- to 29-year-olds had a BA, vs. 24.7 percent in 1995. Bachelor’s degrees are probably seen less as a gold star for those who have them than as a red flag for those who don’t. If you couldn’t be bothered to get a degree in this day and age, you must be lazy, unreliable or dumb.

That is no different from the arguments that I made seven f*ing years ago!  Crap, I am getting way too pissed off that we have been taking the youth and society for an expensive ride all these years.

Employers have figured out a cost-minimizing approach to the recruitment and training of young hires: use college degree as a filter to weed out those who could be "lazy, unreliable or dumb," and, on top of that, leave it to the youth to pick up job-skills at the college, instead of training them--even if the grads are hired only to be glorified secretaries.

We then mix up the data of students graduating from elite universities with students graduating from Podunk U., and brainwash the youth and society about higher education. For instance, in the following chart, do you see any small time public regional university?

It is f*ing insane that we don't ever engage in honest discussions on this important public policy issue, and instead try our best to distract everybody by touting college sports, climbing walls, and fancy dorms.

And then we wonder why we are graduating the most indebted generationever. Ever!

“As the transition to adulthood has protracted, and the costs of education have risen, young adults have shifted their credit use away from home mortgage debt and towards student loan and consumer debt”

On my part, I will continue with the full-disclosure with the students. Though, this means that it will only continue to worsen the enrollment issues and I will be writing my own professional pink slip--I can't thank tenure enough!

Higher education does not care about its unemployed graduates. It is football season!

"How adrift were you at twenty-two?" is not only internally poetic and philosophical but is also a quick online questionnaire at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I would love to include that questionnaire as my first day activities when classes begin in a few days.  But, I won't--I cannot afford to drive away even more students than I currently do!

I could give those questions to any number of young people I come across.  Like the young woman who works at the grocery store that I frequent.

I first met her a few years ago, when she started working there.  Through small talk when she was scanning my purchases, I came to know that she was a student majoring in psychology at the local big university that is attached to a minor-league football team.  Every time I was at her counter, I chatted with her--she was always bubbly and excited about college and the world, which made this tired old curmudgeon happy.  When I asked her about career plans, she knew one thing: “I don’t want to become a lifer here.”

As she was getting close to graduation, more than a year ago now, she continued to have that excitement in her and carried out the typical American college student's plan to travel through Europe for a few days.

I still see her working at the same grocery store. Scanning groceries and bagging them.  I don't know how she feels about it because I intentionally avoid going to her counter.  I worry that I will ask her about life.  I don't want to do that.

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, whom I have cited plenty of times in this blog, have a new book that follows up on where their previous work ended.  In this essay in the Chronicle, they are not optimistic about the long-term future of the typical college graduates including the likes of that grocery store checkout woman:

In terms of economic outcomes, two years after graduation 23 percent of those in the labor market were either unemployed or underemployed (working fewer than 20 hours per week or in jobs where the majority of workers had not completed even a year of college), and less than half had full-time jobs that paid $30,000 or more per year. They also were struggling to become independent: 24 percent were living at home with their parents, and 74 percent reported receiving continued financial assistance from parents.

Their book is based on case studies, in which they track down some of the students they had interviewed for that previous book.

As colleges have sold themselves as economic-development vehicles, and their degrees as tickets to the middle class, the ethos of the marketplace has become their master, overshadowing their civic and intellectual purposes.
The tight embrace of higher education and the economy has an obvious downside: When times get tough, colleges take a beating. Predictably, tales emerge of recent graduates with expensive and worthless degrees failing to make their way into adulthood. They come from many of the same colleges, we are told, that are the envy of the world.
As college costs increase, so do expectations about payoff and questions about value. How should colleges be judged, if not by the financial success of their students? Is it higher education’s job to fix the economy?

To readers of this blog, and to anybody who has had the unfortunate experience of listening to me, these are not new issues at all.  The tragedy is that despite all the mounting evidence, we continue to go about with higher education with more of the same.  How unfortunate!

Arum and Roska argue--and I concur with them, of course--that colleges are to be blamed a lot for how things have turned out:

We find it implausible that in a globalized knowledge economy, the current state of affairs will continue indefinitely. Not just because the growth in college costs is unsustainable, but also because legislators, families, and students will have difficulties justifying why resources are increasingly allocated not to improving instruction but to building new dormitories, student centers, and athletic facilities. While this might be an effective institutional strategy for attracting 17-year-olds as consumers and keeping them satisfied with "bread and circuses" once enrolled, it has produced a competition to provide the best amenities and student services money can buy and the least challenging academic demands and expectations.
It is high time for educators to say enough is enough. If we continue to sit on our hands, the public’s faith in higher education will continue to erode, and poorly designed accountability frameworks will likely be imposed upon the system. And we will have ourselves to blame.

Yes.

"Colleges," Mr. Schneider says, "may be really sorry they went down this road."

Oh yeah?  How about 'em Ducks!

Fatal attraction

No, not those brightly painted toes that distract me when the summer heat reveals those female feet ... but blogging about student debt and higher education

[What] do you tell perspective parents and students about the options they should be looking for, whether they should consider, you know, not going?

What would any responsible person tell them?

[We] really emphasize that metrics such as completion rates at schools, average amounts of student debt and employability at a particular institution once someone graduates should be the priority in choosing a school, and not, again, which university has the more popular football team or the more lush student center.

We should use such metrics because ...?

[If] we can reorient to those metrics, many people might be able to avoid going into an amount of debt that is crushing.

That is from the PBS News Hour interview with Andrew Rossi, the director of the documentary, "Ivory Tower," which is about "the growing worries and criticism over college costs and student debt."

(BTW, looks like the transcriber got mixed up with the prospective versus perspective.  Or, wait, did the News Hour's interviewer get it mixed up?  If the latter, well ...)

To me, and to readers of this blog this is nothing but the proverbial preaching to the choir.  It really does not take a rocket scientist, or even a first grade student, to figure out that reason why college has become expensive is rather simple--higher education has strayed far, far away from the mission of education.  It is now an enormous mostly "non-profit" arm of the entertainment industry, while occasionally holding classes for students.

David Leonhardt explains, very well as he always does, that it is not the debt that students at the prestigious schools have that is of real worry.  Those students will always succeed.  But, the scary story, which is also what I have often argued--like here--is with the college dropouts, a group that is also highly correlated with low and low-middle income households.

Many colleges graduate fewer than half of the students they enroll — and resist policy makers’ attempts to hold them accountable for their results.

Meanwhile, yesterday, this blipped in my Feedly:

Students may be graduating $30,000 in debt, but at least they live in relative opulence for four, five, or six years.

Why that sarcasm, you ask?  Here is an example for you:

At Wichita State, a new $65 million residence hall and dining facility at the center of campus has a waiting list while openings are plentiful at the university's older, lower-priced halls. It'll cost between $10,000 and $12,000 a year (including meals) to live in the new facility, compared to $6,800 a year for older residence halls.

Yes, students and parents care more about country-club living, fancy gyms with climbing walls, and, of course, football and basketball teams, and conveniently forget that the metric ought to be about "completion rates at schools, average amounts of student debt and employability at a particular institution once someone graduates."  And then the same students and their parents complain about the debt?

Why not talk about something pleasant when I am trying my best to maintain my sanity in this hot oven!

source

I tell horrible groaners. I am not an entertainer!

"I am not sufficiently entertained by these materials" replied the student when I asked him for his views during the class discussions.  The entire class and I had a good laugh because it was directed at the dry subject content that the students had to endure even if they did not enjoy it.

While the students in that class are well on their way to graduating, that particular funny comment is also a tongue-in-cheek statement on contemporary higher education and the expectations that students have. Increasingly, students seem to be conveying an impression that if the classes aren't "entertaining," for want of a better word, then maybe they will shop around for a class that will be more interesting.

A couple of years ago, during the first day of introductions when a term began, I asked students why they had opted to register for that particular class.  One student said, "my friends told me you show Onion videos."  Indeed, I had used a few of the Onion's hilariously satirical videos in order to engage students in thinking about economic geography.  In fact, at one academic conference my talk was about how we faculty can use those videos as starting points in order to help students think about topics like economic development in sub-Saharan Africa or outsourcing.  But, I would never have expected students to sign up for a class only because of the laughs.

Rarely do I use those videos anymore, worried that students might be getting the wrong message.  I am not Sriram the entertainer, nor are my classes merely for fun.  Learning is a serious activity.

In such an educational context, we also have a system of students evaluating faculty.  What significant evaluation can a reasonable person expect out of a student who signed up for a class because of the Onion's videos?  How about the concept of students evaluating faculty on their teaching, even if we set that "Onion videos" student aside?

"Student evaluations of professors aren’t just biased and absurd—they don’t even work" writes Rebecca Schuman:

[Asking] students to evaluate their professors anonymously is basically like Trader Joe’s soliciting Yelp reviews from a shoplifter.
I’m sorry—a bigoted shoplifter. Because student evaluations aren’t just useless: They’re biased.

But, universities continue with the system of evaluations anyway.

Years ago, before the union leader issued a proclamation in which he directed other faculty from paying attention to me, I suggested to him that we rethink the purpose of evaluation.  In an email, in November 2004, I wrote to him:

As an institution, and as a society, our interest is in the outcomes, and not in directing faculty colleagues on how they should engage their students in the classroom.  

Of course, measuring the outcomes is not easy and we could get bogged down in highly contested issues.  But, isn't that all the more the reason for academics to take that up--aren't we interested in solving puzzles?

I am reminded of this quote from a couple of years ago:

"Students are the inventory," Mr. Crumbley says. "The real stakeholders in higher education are employers, society, the people who hire our graduates. But what we do is ask the inventory if a professor is good or bad. At General Motors," he says, "you don't ask the cars which factory workers are good at their jobs. You check the cars for defects, you ask the drivers, and that's how you know how the workers are doing."

As I noted, even then, the analogy is crude, but the fact is that society does pay attention to the outcomes.  Society does not care whether or not I was entertaining in the classroom, but does deeply care about whether or not the graduates know what they are expected to know.

Thus, at the end of it all, when Robin can't put together a meaningful analysis, and when Leslie has no idea about India and China and the other emerging economies, I am not at all surprised that the world outside the academy largely discounts the college diploma.  And that is not an entertaining result, is it?

Is higher education hurting working class students, instead of helping them?

A few days ago, a student, "K," who was in one of my classes last fall, knocked on the office door to say hi, and we ended up having a wonderful conversation for more than half-an-hour.  I told her it felt like I was talking with my daughter and not with a student.

"That's a good thing, right?" she asked with a smile.

It is a good thing, indeed.  Taking such an interest can also mean that I end up worrying about things I don't really have any business worrying about.  Because, I can't change a damn thing, which is what the personnel officer tried telling me even at the campus interview as I was wrapping up my undergraduate degree.

I worried about her sister's college admission.  A high school senior I haven't even met! Later that night, I wrote in an email to "K":

you may want to pass this along to your sister.  This news item will also provide you folks with a perspective on what makes a college "selective" and why it matters.

It is a dirty, rotten, secret in higher education that is rarely ever openly discussed: it is not merely the diploma.  A diploma from a college like where I work doesn't have the same weight as a diploma, in the same academic major, from a different college.  The selectivity of the college and its prestige matter a lot.  I would think that it is the same case anywhere in the world.  On top of that, the possibility for post-college career connections at those selective institutions dwarf what a student at the university here can even hope for.

Add to all that the family background.

And then the dollars that students shell out.

The bottom-line then is a disastrous reality:

If you are a low-income prospective college student hoping a degree will help you move up in the world, you probably should not attend a moderately selective four-year research institution. The cards are stacked against you.
That’s the sobering bottom line of Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Harvard University Press), a new book based on five years of interview research by Elizabeth A. Armstrong, an associate professor of sociology and organizational studies at the University of Michigan, and Laura T. Hamilton, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Merced.

But, those students do not have any idea of how much higher education is becoming yet another brick in the wall!

The co-author of Academically Adrift, Richard Arum, whose research famously showed that a striking number of students learn little to nothing of intellectual significance in college, said in an interview that the book powerfully demonstrates that that lack of learning is not just attributable to student laziness. “This current work shows how students can – from their perspective – come to understand and interpret the life of being a student, the life of being in college, as having very little to do with academic engagement,” Arum said. “The institution itself has basically built this into the structure of higher education today.”

What I don't get is this.  It is one thing for a loony tune blogger like me to keep writing about all these issues with nobody listening to me.  But, what about all these researchers from a lot more prestigious places and think-tanks whose findings are also pretty much ignored?  

Institutions like the one where I work have a significant number, I would think more than a simple majority, of students who come from working-class backgrounds.  Many are the first from their families to attend college.  They, innocently, believe that if they somehow manage to get a college diploma it will be a guaranteed pathway into the prosperous upper-middle stratum.  All is not on the level:

More affluent students have parents who can help them figure out how to get through college — what courses to take, and when; how to manage time, get help or mercy from professors, etc. They can also use connections to get the kids jobs regardless of academic performance. 

Slightly more than a year ago, two sisters wrote about their educational experiences and decisions they made in an essay with a provocative title: "Should Working-Class People Get B.A.'s and Ph.D.'s?"

Briallen has a Ph.D. from Princeton University and is a lecturer in the English department at Yale University. Johanna is a high-school graduate working full time at a bakery for slightly above minimum wage.

It is not that Johanna was any less capable than Briallen; they were "equally bookish and academically inclined."  So, why college for one and not for the other?

For both of us, decisions about education have been limited and complicated by our class status.

Sisters, equally capable, from the same family background.  First the elder one:

Briallen worked in child care and food service for a while after high school, went to community college, and was accepted to a selective four-year college but was not offered enough financial aid to go. She finally graduated from a local college with the help of Pell Grants and a lot of debt. She can't imagine her life without higher education, but as a non-tenure-track academic in a tough job market, she has limited job security, and she owes more than $800 a month in student-loan payments. Her student debt makes it impossible for her to save money or start a family anytime soon, and she is entering her mid-30s.

The younger sibling processed her sister's experience, and had some of her own:

Johanna was wary of graduating with substantial debt and no family safety net, so she took a year off to work and save money and try applying to college again. Her financial-aid offers the next year were no better. She ended up taking classes at the local satellite campus of a state university while living at home and working long hours at a salon to pay her own way.
But after a couple of quarters she discovered that, because of the poor academic advising she had received, none of the introductory courses she had taken were actually required for her degree. Her AP credits from high school should have qualified her to start as a sophomore, but she was mistakenly placed in freshman-level courses.
After learning that she'd spent almost all of her hard-earned savings on classes she was not even required to take, Johanna lost her faith in the wisdom of investing in higher education. She left school and is now working full time for $13,000 a year. She's proudly debt-free and self-supporting, and in her limited free time she is pursuing reading, writing, and the free or cheap cultural and educational opportunities available to her.

Their conclusion?

Although we both continue to struggle with the stressful economic implications of our different education levels, we are proud of each other and of our very different choices. We just wish we'd been given the opportunity to make them more freely.

As I noted in this op-ed:

We push teenagers into higher education by scaring them about the earnings they could lose. Here, we commit two huge mistakes. First, we simply define higher education as nothing but a passport to a job, instead of a means of instilling in the young a joy for lifelong-learning as a path toward understanding their own potentials, of which earnings is merely one. On top of this, by constantly dangling the dollar sign in front of them, we are almost brainwashing teenagers to think that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is nothing but the pursuit of money.
Instead, the young ought to understand something entirely different — that life entails making decisions all the time, and that this will mean difficult tradeoffs, which sometimes can be expensive. Thus, we would not simply push teenagers toward college because they would otherwise be losers, but we would help them think and act every time they reached a fork in the road of life — the tradeoffs that Robert Frost so elegantly articulated as “the road not taken.”  

It is to also highlight the other road that I emailed "K"--as long as her sister has seriously considered the different roads that could take her in different directions from the intersection where she currently stands.  Because, blindly taking any one route can be disastrous, especially for those from working-class backgrounds.

Half a world away ...

What does it mean to be college educated anyway?

Even if I am a total dud in helping students in my classes understand and appreciate the materials, I bet there are very few who doubt my commitment to liberal education.  If they paid attention to me, then they also know that even as they go through a rigorous liberal education, they have to keep thinking about their career plans as well.

In this structure, problems are in plenty.  Universities offer such a diluted and distorted version of liberal education that we insiders are the ones giving liberal education that awful stink.  Here is an example: at my university, a student can major in the social sciences and minor in geography, and successfully graduate with not even a tenth of the requirements coming from the sciences.  This is merely one of the gazillion possibilities of students legitimately avoiding being liberally educated even as they earn their diplomas at the colleges and universities all over the country.  Not the well-rounded liberal education at all.

My point has always been that such an education is a waste of time and money.  We might as well merely offer professional training.  We should stop referring to what we do as liberal education.  Why call it liberal education and offer something else?

At the same time, we have been completely marginalizing professional education too.  Instead of providing career and technical education to those students who might prefer that, we put that down as some kind of an inferior option and we force all students to go through the hoops of whatever that is we do at four-year schools anymore.

No wonder then we are finding ourselves all twisted trying to figure out the "real payoff of a college degree." To a large extent, Ronnie L. Booth, president of Tri-County Technical College, near Greenville, S.C., articulates the points that I try to get across to people:

A vocational degree is not for everyone, he readily admits, but many of his students are arriving with four-year degrees in hand, looking for something practical. In coming months, he will direct Tri-County's academic counselors to more aggressively steer students away from fields and majors that might prove a bad fit. Don't like the sight of blood or the smell of bodily fluids? Nursing might not be for you. Interested in engineering? Let's have a serious talk about your grades in algebra.
"Better to find out on the front end," he says. "I believe in truth in advertising."
More parents and students, he says, need to "understand that someone has to pay the bills." In his region, he frequently meets waiters and waitresses who have four-year degrees, and he has a friend whose daughter went to college to study dance. She is working in retail.
"That is not what Daddy had anticipated," Mr. Booth says in a Southern drawl. "I believe in a broad educational program, things that make you a good citizen, but I am not sure that it is necessary to rack up $50,000 or $100,000 in debt to get that—and then not to be able to get employment. I have told my children that one of Daddy's goals is to get you off my payroll."

In healthcare, which has been one of the fastest growing sectors, ""It looks like B.A. is now entry-level, or it's becoming that way."  The jobs that didn't require a four-year degree are rapidly evaporating:

The erosion of midlevel jobs goes beyond nursing. Experts say several forces are at work. Automation has eliminated many transcription and clerical jobs. Cost pressures have led hospitals and other health-care providers to push many routine tasks onto medical assistants and other lower-paid workers.
Pharmacies, for example, increasingly employ a mix of licensed pharmacists—who now often need a doctorate—and technicians who fill prescriptions with only limited training.
The shift to electronic medical records, meanwhile, has eliminated many traditional jobs maintaining patient records but has created a wealth of new opportunities for those with coding skills.
At the same time, the increasing complexity of medicine, along with an increased focus on measuring and improving patient care, has raised the bar on educational requirements for some jobs. An Institute of Medicine committee in 2010, for example, recommended that 80% of registered nurses have bachelor's degrees by 2020, meaning nurses with associate's degrees may soon find themselves in the position LPNs face today.

The system is so rigged that the youth seem to have no choice but to get a college degree, even if it means that they will be underemployed:

In the short term, we're still obviously digging out of the jobs hole left by the recession. Unemployment for college graduates is higher than normal. Underemployment is more prevalent, though it's less severe than college critics portray, and perhaps no worse than during the Reagan days. It's the long view that's cloudier. Maybe, as the recession's impact fades, the economy will naturally go back to quickly churning out more jobs for high skill workers, and academics like Beaudry and his colleagues will be proven wrong. Or, perhaps they're right, and we'll need to wait for another great tech revolution before the market for educated workers goes back to growing the way it did 15 years ago.We can't say for sure. But we do know that young people are safer with a degree than without one.

One would think that all these mean that now is a real good time to seriously think about what it is to be educated.  Here is an example: how much math should we require that students do?  Or, even if we think that the math will do them good for critical thinking skills, which I believe it does, should we reconsider how we teach math?  We need to look into such questions because "less than a quarter of U.S. workers report using math any more complicated than basic fractions and percentages during the course of their jobs.":

And, here is the interesting aspect of it all.  Remember how we systematically treat technical training as some kind of a second-class option that the young should be discouraged from?  Ahem, they need math!

Upper level blue collar, e.g. craft and repair workers like skilled construction trades and mechanics

Lower level blue collar, e.g. factory workers and truck drivers

So, quo vadis?

The economy avoids graduating students as if they are Kafka's bugs!

Students seem to avoid coming to my office in the spring term much more than how they dodge me in fall and winter, because now is when I am even more interested in their answers to my second favorite question, “so, what is your plan for the summer?” My favorite question being “so, what do you plan to do after graduating?”

If experience has taught me anything, then I should have quit asking these questions a long time ago—most students would rather that I don’t trouble them about these issues. Yet, I do.

Almost always, it seems like what students want is to simply get the heck out of the university. Thus, every single instance that I engage in this back‐and‐forth with them, I am reminded of Franz Kafka’s short story, The Departure. It is a short one‐paragraph story that I often share with students:

I ordered my horse to be brought from the stables. The servant did not understand my orders. So I went to the stables myself, saddled my horse, and mounted. In the distance I heard the sound of a trumpet, and I asked the servant what it meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me and asked: "Where is the master going?" "I don't know," I said, "just out of here, just out of here. Out of here, nothing else, it's the only way I can reach my goal." "So you know your goal?" he asked. "Yes," I replied, "I've just told you. Out of here‐‐that's my goal."

If at all, I feel a greater urgency to share that Kafka story with students because of the brutal economic conditions that await them even as they express their goal to get “just out of here.” The Great Recession might have ended with an anemic recovery, but is not by any means a healthy economy that awaits the twenty‐somethings. Even internship opportunities, which were in the past guaranteed pathways to careers, seem to have dried up.

Over the past couple of years, in my visits to the stores and during the travels, I have met fresh out of college youth working at the checkout counters of grocery stores, washing cars at rental places, and waiting tables. None of these require a college degree, of course. But, they work at these places because it beats not working at all. One—a recent psychology grad—expressed her worry when she said, “I don’t want to become a lifer here.”

Most students, once past their bubbly freshman years, are well aware of this reality, which is also why they wish that I would not ask them about their plans. The non‐traditional students who are back in school because of the atrocious employment conditions outside always seem to walk around with worried expressions.  One can easily sympathize with students, therefore, for their immediate goal to simply get away from me!

Worry is what we should all do. According to a recent report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, about 48 percent of the employed college graduates are in jobs that do not require a four‐year degree. More than a third of those occupations did not even need anything more than a high school diploma. Such a high level of underemployment after a significant amount of time and money invested in a college degree should worry us all.

Just when I thought I had seen everything regarding underemployment of college graduates, I felt horrified to read about a McDonald's in Winchendon, Massachusetts, advertising for a full time cashier position that was restricted to college graduates. Even worse, it required one to two years of prior experience!

My comforting words to students are nearly Polyannaish—“at least you are not in Spain where the youth unemployment is more than fifty percent.” I tell them that even Ivy League graduates are having a tough time, hoping that misery loves privileged company.

The real tragedy is that despite all these trends over the years, we seem to be continuing with college degree as a cure for all, with more determination than ever. Within this collegiate education, it disappoints and depresses me that it is possible for students to have never read anything by Kafka when, ironically, the economy treats new graduates as if they have become the monstrous bugs that Kafka wrote about inThe Metamorphosis.

John Maynard Keynes famously said “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”  Have we not accumulated enough facts for us to change our minds regarding this expensive approach to getting every kid to college?

A tired, but a much younger me,
by my office door in 2002

Am I a fool to expect college students to know the answer to these five questions?

If I had a decent set of faculty colleagues who were sincerely interested in student learning, then I could have substantive discussions with them.  But, that is like saying that if my aunt had balls then she will be my uncle!

Thus, I am here blogging, confident that there are at least a few who care about these issues, even if we disagree on how the dots should be connected.

Every term, some time over the ten weeks, I typically ask students to respond to a few questions.  This time around, I did that on day one, with the following questions:

1. Name the capital of Afghanistan:
2. CH4 is the formula for the chemical known as:
3. The year that an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima:
4. The number of justices on the US Supreme Court is:
5. Oregon has seven electoral college votes, while California has 55. The population of Oregon is approximately four million. Estimate California’s population based on the electoral college data alone.

After they provide their responses, and after discussing with the class the correct answers, I explain the rationale for the questions--about the importance of general education and liberal education.

I wish I could frankly talk with them, without using euphemisms, like what follows here.

Afghanistan has been on our radar, literally, since 2001.  This means that students at universities have grown up with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars contexts.  More than eleven years into the war, is it unreasonable to expect students to know that the capital of Afghanistan is Kabul?

Human progress on this planet has been via thinking about cause-effect relationships.  One of the most fascinating ways we do that is in science.  Without advancements in scientific understanding, we wouldn't be where we are today.  It is unreasonable to expect students to know, as an example of Science 101, that CH4 is methane, which is pretty much what natural gas is?

Europeans often complain that Americans are obsessed with World War II.  With an ever growing number of movies, books, television shows, documentaries, we simply refuse to let go of the topic that most Europeans would rather forget about.  That war ultimately ended with the US dropping nuclear bombs in Japan, making us the only country, to date, to use those weapons.  Is it unreasonable to expect students to know that the war ended in 1945?

The Supreme Court is our third branch of the government making sure that legislative and executive actions are consistent with the Constitution.  Sometimes, even the elections for the legislative and executive offices are transformed into a fight for the opportunity to appoint the next Supreme Court justice.  With hot issues like gay marriage, abortion, torture, and even the Presidential election, becoming Supreme Court decisions, is it unreasonable to expect students to know that there are nine justices?

We live in a representational democracy, not a direct democracy.  We elect members to the House of Representatives such that in states with more than one representative, a comparably equal number of people are given a voice via a representative.  However, the electoral college votes includes senators also, and each state has two irrespective of the population.  Thus, the first step in that fifth question is to understand that Oregon's four million are represented in the House by 7-2=5, while California has 55-2=53 representatives.  Is it unreasonable to expect students to know this?

Every term the results are the same: disastrous. So awful that I don't enter the data into any spreadsheet nor do I even retain the response sheets.  However, term after term, I continue with such questions--not always the same--despite the terribly disappointing outcomes because I believe I have a responsibility to remind students that the health and richness of the democracy depends on them, too.  I have no other choice given my intense desire for a higher quality of democracy.

But, this is not really my job.  By the time students complete high school, they ought to have known the correct answers to those five questions.  Yet, they don't.  Even more scary is that, often, many students don't know the answer to these questions even as they are ready to graduate with their BS diplomas.

How come we aren't panicking when 1973 is noted as the year that the US dropped an atom bomb in Hiroshima; when California's population is estimated at 220 million; when Pakistan is named as the capital of Afghanistan; when the US Supreme Court supposedly has only three justices; and when most can't identify CH4 as methane?

I am willing to bet that most educators in high schools, colleges, and universities, are aware of such problems and more.  But, there is a collective indifference to all these troubling signs. They choose to ignore and do nothing about it: why rock the boat as long as the bills continue to get paid at home!

If only I knew how to simply collect my paycheck and keep quiet.  If only!

At the high school reunion, thirty years after graduation

The college-for-all argument becoming a Catch-22

Baby boomers who are nearing retirement talk about those old days when they worked a few hours every week when college was in session and all through the summers, at minimum wage jobs, and graduated with no loans and debts whatsoever.

Those days ended a long time ago.

Unfortunately, it is that boomer generation (I am not one of them!) that is now at the helm setting policies.  Which means, more often than not, they fail to understand how much things have changed at the ground level.  Even if they have children in college now.

Working full time in the summers, and twenty-plus hours during the regular terms, at minimum wages, seems like barely enough to get anybody even a cup of coffee anymore, leave alone paying for college.

With college being the required credential as high school was during the early boomer years, the percentage of students dutifully attending college straight out of high school has skyrocketed. Even if the government were to allocate to higher education amounts similar to those old days, the mere fact of higher numbers of students will mean a lower allocation per student, which will then require students to pay a lot more.  In reality, states have been decreasing their allocations over the years, while college costs have also gone up.

The net result: unless students are coming from affluent families, well, graduating with loans is what one would expect, and that is what we see happening.

The monies students pay now exceed the taxpayer support in quite a few states, including here in Oregon.  We just happen to be at the leading edge of that wave:

Oregon used to be considered a low-tuition state. But payments from students and their families now average $6,100 a year across public universities and community colleges, about 20 percent above the national average, the report found. Only 17 states ask students to pay more. 

"Only 17 states" will soon become more than 17.  We are approaching a psychological milestone:

Tuition has already amounted to more than half of the educational revenue in some individual systems, ranging from the University of California to the community colleges in Iowa and in South Carolina. But surpassing that threshold nationally is a gloomy milestone that reflects the deep state budget cuts that have hit public higher education since the beginning of the economic downturn and, at the same time, steady increases in enrollment.

At a national aggregate level, student payments for higher education will soon match taxpayer support.  A reality that the retiring baby boomers will find very difficult to comprehend when they compare it with their personal experiences.

Source: WSJ

If that is the case, then shouldn't the context make us question whether we should promote more college for everybody?  Yes, there are non-economic benefits to higher education.  But, if those non-economic benefits matter then we should pay for it.  However, we won't be paying for it because there is no freely available taxpayer money to allocate.  If politicians continue to advocate for college-for-all despite knowing all these, then they can be only irrational, right?

Options for BA degrees: filing clerk or bagging grocery?

It has been a long time since I completely outsourced the materials for a blog post.  That is what I will do this time, because together they write a story themselves!  A story that I have, unfortunately, blogged about over and over :(

From the NY Times:

The college degree is becoming the new high school diploma: the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even the lowest-level job.

And, why so?

Economists have referred to this phenomenon as “degree inflation,” and it has been steadily infiltrating America’s job market. Across industries and geographic areas, many other jobs that didn’t used to require a diploma — positions like dental hygienists, cargo agents, clerks and claims adjusters — are increasingly requiring one, according to Burning Glass, a company that analyzes job ads from more than 20,000 online sources, including major job boards and small- to midsize-employer sites.
This up-credentialing is pushing the less educated even further down the food chain, and it helps explain why the unemployment rate for workers with no more than a high school diploma is more than twice that for workers with a bachelor’s degree: 8.1 percent versus 3.7 percent.

So, what purpose does a degree serve then?

When you get 800 résumés for every job ad, you need to weed them out somehow

Ok, how about a real, first-person, narrative?

I have a graduate degree, and I work two part-time jobs. One is teaching writing at a university; the other working at a supermarket. People don't believe me when I tell them I make more money per hour bagging groceries than I do lecturing on literary techniques.

So?

In this tight job market, we cannot afford to ignore the reality that a college degree is becoming a luxury: one that no longer translates directly to success. It is time we shed our stigmas towards "menial" workers. The irony is that their salaries – and accompanying lifestyles – are anything but.

If all these are true, can we at least feel good that students are doing something of value when in college?

If you have ever thought or told your students that you are teaching them "critical thinking," for example, you are banking on the prospect that students will abstract some general cognitive skill from your course and apply it to future courses or even life situations.
But in practice, as How Learning Works makes clear, "far transfer" turns out to be a much more complicated process than many of us might expect, or that I might imply in my blithely hopeful syllabus talk.
"Most research has found," the authors explain, "that (a) transfer occurs neither often nor automatically, and (b) the more dissimilar the learning and transfer contexts, the less likely successful transfer will occur. In other words, much as we would like them to, students often do not successfully apply relevant skills or knowledge in novel contexts."
In short, the further we move students away from the very specific context in which they have learned some information or skill, the less transfer we should expect to see.

So, then why are we doing what we are doing?

If a BA is for bartending, a BS is for ...

Last week, I had a very difficult conversation with a student who wanted my thoughts on a certain academic major versus majoring in geography.  It was not difficult because the student wanted to ditch geography in favor of something else.  In fact, it was a move the student was thinking of making in the opposite direction, hoping for better employment prospects.

So, why was it difficult when all I had to do was to further encourage the student?  Because, I had to give my honest spiel that within the traditional liberal arts, any one major might not make students more or less employable compared to another--unless it is a professional, or a pre-professional, major.

I spent a few minutes describing the idea, that wonderful ideal, of liberal education.  We talked for almost an hour.  While I felt awful that nobody had ever told the student this reality of higher education, the student was thankful, and said, "nobody has ever taken the time to explain all these to me.  Not eve the counselors."

That was last week.

Earlier today, I read this news report on the tremendous underemployment of college graduates:

Students who graduated into the Great Recession have struggled to find work that fits their learning. But according to research released on Monday, millions of college graduates over all—not just recent ones—suffer a mismatch between education and employment, holding jobs that don't require a costly college degree.
The study, from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, says that nearly half of all American college graduates in 2010—some three years after the recession began—were underemployed, holding relatively low-paying and low-skilled jobs.

This is not news by any means.  After all, even I have been commenting about this forever, it seems like.  (like here, and here)  It has been one long trend, since the burst of the dotcom bubble, with a brief rise that came crashing even more.  Anyway, the latest report adds

Mr. Robe, a research fellow at the center, said that the "bartender with a bachelor's degree" is a classic example of the lack of jobs that require a college education. Many college graduates who take jobs as bartenders or taxicab drivers have better options, he said. But vacancies in those occupations tend to be filled by other college graduates, a trend that slowly crowds out high-school graduates and dropouts.

How terrible!

Meanwhile, there is a different kind of a report from the WSJ--about graduates with specialized skills:

Mirroring trends in the broader economy showing that engineering and computer skills are highly sought, eight of the ten highest-earning majors come from these departments. Companies need workers with specialized technical skills to keep up with rapid technological change and the explosion of data, but too few American college students are choosing the relevant majors to meet that demand.
“Over the years the number of graduates in those areas has decreased, so that creates greater demand,” said NACE’s Andrea Koncz, who oversees the survey.

The way I understand all these, it is quite simple a narrative: the economic structure has rapidly changed over the last decade.  In the new economy, high school graduation alone does not guarantee that "American dream" that was once possible.  That has led to an incorrect perception that getting a liberal arts degree would guarantee one a prosperous middle class life.  But, again, this is a completely different global economic structure where such a qualification doesn't make one readily employable.  Further, the liberal arts were never intended as an employment-ready credentialing system.

Ultimately, it is the college student who is paying a huge price.

Outstanding student loan debt now stands at $956 billion, an increase of $42 billion since last quarter.  However, of the $42 billion, $23 billion is new debt while the remaining $19 billion is attributed to previously defaulted student loans that have been updated on credit reports this quarter.¹ As a result, the percent of student loan balances 90+ days delinquent increased to 11 percent this quarter

How terrible!