F*k College!

I have emailed the newspaper editor the following ...

In a presidential campaign season that has mostly been a farcical political theatre at best, and one that seems to be on track for a terribly tragic ending on November 8th, serious discussions of policies have been sorely lacking. Every once in a while, policy statements are uttered, but they are never engagingly discussed and debated by the wannabes nor their surrogates.

One of those statements was this: “College is crucial, but a four-year degree should not be the only path to a good job.”

If only we had at least talked about that!

Over the past few years, the country’s political leaders and educators alike have been manically promoting—practically mandating—four years of college, for free, for everybody. But why this college conscription?

For productive employment, a four-year college is certainly not the only pathway. As my neighbors often like to remind me, their successful small business is not a product of any four-year degree. Among the owners and the employees, only one has a four-year degree. And, most employees earn more than what many recent college diploma holders can only dream of.

Perhaps the spectacular entertainment provided by NCAA football and basketball is what draws most to college. If the taxpayer-subsidized NCAA sports did not exist, most teens would flee from college, and from courses like the ones I teach, and towards the trades.

Even the very notion of a four-year college is an anachronism. More than ever before, the young will have to be lifelong learners if they want to succeed in the world of employment. They might have to regularly reinvent themselves in new careers, some of which are yet to be created. They will have to keep up with new ideas and technology—if they cannot do it on their own, then they will need formal training. This is applicable to those going to the trades as well.

The unhealthy fixation on four years of college triggers even more unhealthy policy approaches. We actively encourage high school students to begin to earn college credits even as they are worrying about their first pimples. We convey to students a horribly distorted idea that they need to be done with education at the earliest so that they can move on to the “real world.” We develop measures on how successful colleges are in moving students along in the pipeline—we critically examine the rates at which students graduate within four, five, or six years and longer.

I would rather have colleges and universities emphasizing to students the importance of lifelong learning. Taking six or seven years should be lauded, as long as students are simultaneously gaining valuable real world experiences. Perhaps we ought to even encourage the less interested students to take a break after a year or two in college, in order to experience the world—whether it is as baristas or as legal-aides or as farm workers—and then return to learn more, which will be an example of the continuous lifelong education that will characterize their lives.

We need to talk about this, instead of merely keeping up with the latest dramatic act in the political theatre.

Plumbers, philosophers, and ... pundits like me ;)

I plan to send a slightly edited version of this to the editor of that other paper where I send my commentaries.  Readers outside the US, especially this impatient guy, should note that this is about the American higher education system ;)

“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.

In a highly entertaining and sarcastic TED talk back in 2006—way before “TED talk” became a part of the common regular vocabulary—Sir Ken Robinson noted that “you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.” The student, too, was channeling Robinson’s point. Psychology professors are keen on creating more psychology professors and biology professors want to make biologists out of students, 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 it 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 myth persists, despite all the research, that there are some academic majors that are more geared for employment than others are. That is, of course, the case if students are in professional undergraduate programs—like elementary school teaching. But, otherwise, the link between a college major and productive employment is nebulous at best—unless one wants to be a college professor.

Even the composition of the academic credits towards a college degree gives this away—for instance, while a minimum of 180 credits are required to graduate from Western Oregon University, a majority of those credits will not be in the major. Or, to rephrase it differently, if college education is only about a major, then an undergraduate experience can be easily wrapped up within a year and a half.

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

If we are truly interested in how higher education is serving the young—and, hence, the country’s future—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 a geography major, or whether we need philosophers or plumbers . Instead, society—especially the faculty and administrators across Oregon’s colleges and universities—needs to carefully monitor whether students are mastering those skills that are prized by employers. Else, it will continue to be the case that the only thing that school teaches the young is to be better at school.

An honest day's work

By now, it should be clear to regular readers that I don't waffle and use euphemisms.  Right?  Mine is a Socratic approach.  In fact, the older I get, the less I am able to argue for anything that is way off the truth--I cannot even imagine how lawyers and accountants do that lying day in and day out!

So, in that Socratic spirit, let me share with you something that has baffled me throughout my career as an academic.

I find it bizarre when faculty talk about preparing students for the workforce, and when they give career advice to students.

It is bizarre because most of them--not all, but an overwhelming majority of them--have never been gainfully employed outside the walls of the ivory tower.  I do not mean working summer jobs as students.  I am referring to real jobs with real responsibilities.  Yet, they give career advice to the youth?  And students listen to them?

Most of the faculty were good students who went to college right after graduating from high school.  And almost always, even as they were wrapping up the undergraduate programs, they applied to graduate school, earned their doctorates, and then started working as faculty.  If not for the odd summer jobs, they might not have had any exposure to the real world at all.

My neighbor/friend jokes often that I am like any professor who has never done an honest day of work, by which he means the real world working experience.  But, of course, he knows he is exaggerating.  I worked as an engineer in India.  A real job.  Well, make it three real jobs with three different employers in India.  And then here in the US, I worked as a transportation planner, for almost six years.  The six longest years ever.  A grand total of seven years of work in the world that was far away from higher education.

The more I observe the faculty in higher education, the more I am convinced that most of them should simply admit to students that they have no idea about jobs and careers.  Even worse are the deans and provosts.  All of them should do a full disclosure like "to be honest, the only thing I know is how to prepare for a career in higher education."  As Ken Robinson remarked in this awesome talk that is also hysterically funny, the entire point of education, right from kindergarten, seems to be about preparing clones of teachers.

 If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say "What's it for, public education?" I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners -- I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. 

Which is all the more why I felt awesome on reading a student's email of thanks in which he writes:

The advice you gave was based on your understanding of who I am as a person and what I value, not on some intellectual or scholar you are trying to forge into your own image.

It is unfortunate that most of higher education today is neither about the intellectual aspects of understanding the world nor about workforce preparation.  It has become a self-serving business.  How awful!

Let them eat cakes ... made only by us!

Consider this:

[The] decision to manufacture in the U.S. isn’t solely about dollars and cents. Rather, it’s a function of the quality of the U.S. workforce—its noteworthy productivity and its easy familiarity with lean-factory principles—as well as the need for companies to react quickly to changes in domestic consumer demand. As Jeff Immelt, the C.E.O. of General Electric, put it in 2013: “Today, the product is the process, more or less. If you look at an aircraft engine, the content of labor is probably less than five per cent. We have two hours of labor in a refrigerator. So it really doesn’t matter if you make it in Mexico, the U.S., or China. Today it’s really about globalization, not about outsourcing; it’s how do I capture markets faster than the competition?”

Two hours of labor into the making of a refrigerator.  Just two hours of labor?  If you are like me, you have never thought about how much labor goes into the making of a fridge, right?  The fridge that has revolutionized our lives.

America manufactures a whole lot of stuff, yes.  It is not the strength of the manufacturing sector that is the problem, but the fact that the strong manufacturing sector does not generate the kinds of jobs that it used to in the past.  A point that Dan Drezner makes with data:

The problem isn’t that the United States doesn’t have a vibrant manufacturing sector. The problem is that sector does not generate the job numbers that used to be associated with manufacturing:

I wish politicians will make this distinction clear.

Both Trump and Sanders downplay the enormous economic benefits of globalization for American consumers of all incomes, and their proposed solutions are vague and could well be harmful if implemented. But their words resonate with many voters, because they articulate an important truth: free trade has created major winners and major losers in the U.S. economy, and the losers—mostly blue-collar workers—have received little or no help.

I have often blogged about my own stand on these: to a developing country, manufacturing and exporting provides the economic ladder going up.  To tell them that they should not "compete" against us seems like a variation of let 'em eat cakes.  Thus, if they manufacture stuff that then displaces workers here, then what is required is a new social contract that reflects a new reality, as much as the New Deal was in response to the economic situation of those times.  However, reworking the social contract requires thoughtful and responsible politics, which apparently is rarer than a unicorn!

Far from the madding crowd

Even as a kid, I hated crowds.  I was to some extent even terrified of large numbers of people.  I wanted space.  My parents knew this well and sometimes would even give me the out by saying, "Sriram doesn't like crowds."  And that was when I was a kid growing up in India!

Now, after living nearly three decades in the US, and half of that in Oregon, I am even more uneasy when I am in a crowd.  Visiting India is stressful for that reason too.

Of course, the crowds in India--even in the regular daily life, leave alone those Kumbh Melas--are a reflection of the phenomenal population growth in the old country.  In my own lifetime, India has added--I hope you are sitting down for this--about 750 million people.  Imagine that!  I mean, since the time I was born.  Phew; mind blowing!

Intellectually, this is not news to me.  But, there are some facts that mean more than the mere intellectual ideas they quantify.  Here is another way to think about it: When Indira Gandhi and her son, Sanjay Gandhi, introduced their atrocious family planning schemes in the mid-1970s, India's population was only half of what it is today.  How about that!

As I often tell students, such increases in population have come about despite the fact women have fewer children than ever before.  All because we don't easily die!  Somini Sengupta also touched on this during an interview on NPR:

My parents, who were born during the independence era - they're called midnight's children. In their time, life expectancy was 32, and today, it's 66. In their time, infant mortality rates were sky high, and now it's diminished remarkably.

Mortality rates are down. People are living longer. Is it any surprise then that 750 million more have been added since I was born?

There is one huge problem:

Today, India is youngest country in the world with 365 million people between the ages of 10 and 24. A million turn 18 every month.

When the young don't have things to keep them busy, then any society will be in deep trouble.

This is just part of India’s staggering challenge. Every year, the country must create an estimated 12 million to 17 million jobs.

Yep, it is only a part of India's many challenges.

The youth issue is not merely India's problem though.

Worldwide, young workers are in precarious straits. Two out of five are either not working or working in such ill-paid jobs that they can’t escape poverty, according to figures recently released by the International Labour Organization. In the developing world, where few can afford to be unemployed, most young workers have jobs that are sporadic, poorly paid and offer no legal protection; women are worse off.

It could get worse if young men with testosterone peaking in their systems cannot find women.

Little surprise then that the recent caste protests in India took place in Haryana, the state with the sharpest gender imbalance in the nation, with 879 women for every 1,000 men in the population.

I tell ya, I feel so relieved that I am far from the crowds and am safe in the shelter of my ashram.  Om! ;)

Yep, from the New Yorker ;)

College is to prepare for a world of unscripted problems

I have sent a slightly edited version of this to the newspaper editor .. maybe it will be published, maybe not ;)

The price of crude oil and of gasoline at the pump have been tumbling down to levels that most of us would not have thought possible. Eight years ago, a barrel of petroleum was selling in the global marketplace at $147 and experts predicted that soon it would reach a stratospheric $200 per barrel. Yet, since the new year dawned, it has been a story of how low can you go, with experts wondering whether it might even get closer to $20, and when it eventually goes up if $50 might become the ceiling price.

A belief that oil prices would only climb forever also propelled large enrollment increases in petroleum engineering. The near-guarantee of well-paying jobs lured young people to the discipline. But, over the past few months, the news reports have been less than encouraging. “Petroleum engineering degrees seen going from boom to bust” was CNBC’s report. The Wall Street Journal asked, “Who Will Hire a Petroleum Engineer Now?” The trade publication, Oil and Gas Investor, discussed enrollment declines in US petroleum engineering degree programs.

Of course, this is not new, but is a repetition. The oil price crash of the 1980s led to significant enrollment declines in those degree programs. By the end of the 1980s, only about 1,400 students were majoring in petroleum engineering programs across the country. As oil price rose, and as it stayed in the hundred-dollar range, enrollment soared to more than 11,000. But, with the recent oil price collapse, “petroleum engineering degrees will lose attractiveness in the years to come" said Penn State University’s Turgay Ertekin, according to Oil and Gas Investor.

There is an important lesson here, above and beyond oil price and enrollment in petroleum engineering. We live in a world where economic activities cannot be predicted with any sense of accuracy. As Yogi Berra said, it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. What might be the price of oil a few months from now, leave alone a few years from now, is unknown. It is not merely about the resource. We need to think about the technological changes that the future will bring, the geopolitical issues, the overall health of the global economy, and more, which make predictions highly suspect.

Students pursuing any field of study, including petroleum engineering, need to understand that the economic conditions of today and, therefore, the implications for jobs, is not the best indicator to prepare for the economic conditions and jobs for a few years down the road. Even four years make a huge difference—the freshman students who started on petroleum engineering four years ago face a reality now that is very different, a reality where perhaps half of them might not find jobs in the oil and natural gas industry.

Students and universities betting on “employable” majors based on current characteristics of the economy are betting against the only thing that we know for sure—the future will not be the same as today. The bets get riskier as we head into the future years. From steel workers to office secretaries and engineers, the experience of the past years has been that jobs can disappear in a hurry, leaving them worrying about their futures.

What can the young do then, and what should the universities do for the young? As the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) wonderfully put it, the challenge is “Educating for a World of Unscripted Problems.” Unscripted because we do not know what the future holds. But, we do have a sense of how we might be able to reasonably prepare for that future, by developing skills that will help people to constructively engage with the unscripted problems.

Yet, contemporary public policy discussions on higher education and workforce preparation rarely ever go into serious and sustained thinking about the “world of unscripted problems.” When, for instance, a semiconductor manufacturing company comes to town, we incorrectly believe we need more engineers and material scientists, only to realize a few years later—as was the case with Hynix—that the entire factory could close down. We seem to only consider the latest fad, without preparing for the longer-term uncertain future.

It is not that the petroleum engineering graduates will be jobless and unemployable. If their universities have educated them well for a “world of unscripted problems,” then those students will have skill sets that they will be able to apply but in industries completely different from what they had originally aimed for. If only we can use this example to understand that higher education is more than about a major and is, instead, about preparing for a “world of unscripted problems.”

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future

There are famous opening lines in fiction.  Like, "Call me Ismael." Or, "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  "Mother died today" is another opener and so is "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."  The first sentence sets up the reader for what is to come later on.

We lesser mortals suck at powerful and memorable opening lines, especially in reports and op-eds.  But, every once in a while, I do find one, which is what happened earlier this morning, when I read this:

Only the brave or foolhardy would claim knowledge about the shape of jobs for the next decade, let alone the rest of the 21st century.

Kaboom!  TKO right away.

The next time the university lets out yet another stinking fart that is disguised as as a degree program with stellar employment potential, I should remember to quote them that sentence.  But then I keep forgetting that I am incommunicado ;)

So if we’re not sure what the jobs of the future will look like, what kind of tertiary education can prepare students for the world of work?

Isn't that the gazillion dollar question!

Last week, during the introductory meetings, I shared with students my thoughts on higher education, which were not that different from what I have been telling students for years: they are not preparing for a job, but are investing their time and money in order to pick up valuable skills that will help them adapt to changes that will keep coming at rates even faster than the changes that we have experienced until now.  The more they can easily adapt, the more they will be able to survive in the brutal global economic landscape of tomorrow.

If only they, and everybody else too, would listen to me!  If only I, too, didn't suffer Cassandra's curse of nobody believing what I see coming ;)  So, I will instead quote someone who has some street creds:

Being more realistic about the role that college degrees play would help families and politicians make better choices. It could also help us appreciate the actual merits of a traditional broad-based education, often called a liberal-arts education, rather than trying to reduce everything to an economic cost-benefit analysis. “To be clear, the idea is not that there will be a big financial payoff to a liberal arts degree,” Cappelli writes. “It is that there is no guarantee of a payoff from very practical, work-based degrees either, yet that is all those degrees promise. For liberal arts, the claim is different and seems more accurate, that it will enrich your life and provide lessons that extend beyond any individual job. There are centuries of experience providing support for that notion.” 

Oh well ... nobody cares about all these anyway.  It is a strange world in which I find myself!

If I were feeling optimistic, I would be tempted to end this with one of the best final sentences ever: "After all, tomorrow is another day."  But then, as I peer into the future in which I see a whole lot of automation, artificial intelligence, and big data on every one of us--all of which I often blog about as well--another closing sentence appeals even more: "He loved Big Brother." ;)

How long should we continue to pretend that college pays?

[Whatever] the causes, the political consequences of a continuing decline in the real average wages of young college-educated workers will be momentous.

If you are nodding in agreement with that statement, then we have very little to disagree about.

I have now made it a routine of sorts to remark in the introductory class, in the appropriate contexts, that the rest of their lives will be exciting, but challenging when it comes to jobs and economic futures.

It is not merely their jobs and incomes that worries me.  That too.  What worries me more is this--we are not designed to sit around and do nothing, even if somebody takes care of our basic needs.  It is not for nothing that we have that old saying that an idle mind being a devil's workshop.  It does not mean that one becomes destructive--not doing anything constructive can be a challenge for most of us.

The animals in us might look for rewards via food and sex for what we do.  But then we are more than mere biological creatures.  We think. Some more than the others.  The rewards for thinking are way more than food and sex.  Some of those rewards are intangibles--like love and family.  However, these intangibles don't just happen, and meaningful work that pays is the route to many of those intangibles too.

Which means, well, we have a problem when the youth have no jobs waiting for them.  Jobs that pay well.  A big problem.  Not a new one, of course--even I have been blogging about this (like here,) and writing op-eds on this, for a few years now.

Even when people talk about these issues, they tend to overplay the income inequality issue.  Yes, it is awful how the top one percent, and the top 0.1 percent are getting richer by the second.  But, that takes the focus away from the larger issues behind these conditions:

college-educated workers in the United States are now subject to a combination of global market forces and public policies that are reducing their economic prospects.

We will have to re-work that old Bill Clinton campaign slogan to "It's the global economy, stupid!"

I am reminded of this succinct statement of the problem:

The paradox is this. A job seeker is looking for something for a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced.
The marginal product of people who need well-defined jobs is declining. The marginal product of people who can thrive in less structured environments is increasing.

I suppose I am having an additional layer of problem with this because of the conflict within me that I blog like this while working in the higher education business which promises students that if they work hard and get that diploma, well, the American Dream is all theirs.  A bizarre version of an Orwellian Doublethink!

I am sure the folks at the university have noted that for a long time I have not participated in any student recruitment events--it will be one more blot on my permanent personnel record!  Strangely enough, nobody has directly asked me for my reasons--at least if they did, I can present my arguments that we are massively overselling higher education and find out how they justify the hype that then imposes a tremendous cost on students.

Maybe this is nothing but the end of the term blues. Or because I am under house-arrest thanks to the snow and ice.  Maybe it will be a wonderful new year.

A synapse a day will keep dementia at bay?

I have to gingerly approach blogging about dementia--I am worried that Ramesh might actually make it a point to come all the way to Oregon to kick me in my behind!

I decided that it was time to create new neural networks in my brain--the synapses that I am hoping will help fight off dementia as long as I can.

I drove to the grocery store that was all the way south of town--a much bigger, newer, version of the store in which I typically shop.  Which means, no familiarity with the aisles. And no familiarity with the employees too--no Rod nor Cathy nor Demi nor ...

I didn't take the path that any normal person would take, or what Google would recommend.  New streets.  I had to pause and think about making the left and right turns.  And watch out for speed bumps.

As I was ready to turn right on to the one of the streets--my light was green--I noticed two young women trying to make up their minds on waiting for the their crosswalk light to turn green or to walk the other way, which would then put them in my path.

When I see women trying to decide, it is trouble--that is the conclusion that I have reached over the years.

Once, back in Bakersfield, I was at a coffee shop waiting in line.  A woman about my age was ahead of me and soon it was her turn.

She reached the counter.  Ordered something. As the cashier was ready to ring her up, she changed her order.  And, she changed it a third time, after which she turned around to look at me and said those immortal words that are forever etched in my memory: "it's a woman's prerogative to change her mind!"  And smiled.

What can one say when a woman says that and smiles, right?  I simply put my hands up in mock surrender.

So, when I saw these two women, I was worried they would jump into the crosswalk at the last minute and I might hit them.  I didn't care for the car behind me.  This being Eugene, nobody honked anyway.

Sure enough, the two women, who were chatting throughout, did exactly what I was afraid they would.  It was a good thing I waited that two seconds.

I am sure it was all good training for the brain.

I reached the store.  Everything was different--from the parking spots to even the hand-carry baskets at the store.  A different branch of the same grocery store chain and they have more upscale hand-carry baskets!

I slowly walked the aisles.  After picking up the few items that I needed, and Vitaminwater that I didn't need and which tastes horrible, I reached the express counter.

The cashier was a young blonde.  Perhaps a high school senior or a early year college student.

"Hey, how you doin'?" I said.  The part of the chit-chat that is pretty much the norm.

She mumbled something.

Turned out that it was not my old-age hearing problem or comprehension issue.

"I'm sorry" she said with a sweet smile.  "I am supposed to ask customers those typical questions and I am getting them all mixed up and they are not coming out right."

I was ready to burst out laughing.  I controlled that urge.  I didn't want to mess up that young woman's chit-chat skills any more than the horrible state that it was already in.

"You need a summer break" I said with what I hoped was a big grin.

She mumbled something again as I processed the card payment.

"I didn't get what you said ... something summer....?" I asked her.

"Working here is my summer break" she replied.

I wished her well and exited into the hot outdoors.

As I drove back home via a different route, I was glad that she was working over the summer.  Even if she didn't care for it that much.  To work in the summer is not only an American tradition for teenagers, it is also a phenomenally valuable and important experience that has significant effects over the long-term.  Unfortunately, the decade has been brutal for the young:

I am sure I have created enough new pathways to postpone the dementia by at least one more day ;)

Employment growth in universities is not good news

The Statesman Journal reports that hiring in the public universities is a bright spot amidst “all the dark news about employment in Oregon.” As an old Chinese parable asks, is this really good news or bad news?

To a large extent, all the new hiring in universities is a reflection of the bad economic times. As even the same report points out, the lack of employment opportunities while we struggle to claw our way out of the Great Recession has been a significant factor here. The September 2012 Oregon Economic Forecast notes that “college enrollment typically goes up during the time of high unemployment and scarcity of well‐paying jobs when even the older people flock back to college to better position themselves in a tough job market.”

Over the past few years, I have had many “non‐traditional” students in my classes who were there only because their careers had derailed as a result of the economic crisis. It is not any exaggeration, therefore, to suggest that if the economic climate were better, fewer students—traditional and nontraditional alike—would have enrolled in our public colleges and universities. Slower enrollment growth rates would have then resulted in public universities hiring fewer staff.

The other part of the bad news, which is found in that same report, is that the employment surge in higher education has been financed through increases in tuition and fees. “The universities raised tuition 30 percent in that time, bringing in more revenue to pay for more staff.”

There is one other bad news that usually does not blip in our radars until much later. If economic slumps trigger enrollment increases, then similarly economic and employment growth will also cause decreases in enrollment. We hope that sooner, than later, employment growth will pick up, and that the unemployment rate, which is currently at about 8.7 percent, will begin to decrease. Higher education will then return to “normal” enrollment patterns. In the current model, where public institutions are financing the employment growth through increases in tuition and fees, such a return to normal will necessitate massive layoffs in order to balance the books.

However, unlike other industries, higher education is not typically characterized by employment restructuring and we will, therefore, look at sharp increases in tuition and fees. This was our experience after the recession in 2001 when the combination of improved economic conditions and job growth, along with decreased allocation from Salem, triggered rapid tuition increases in community colleges and universities alike. We certainly do not want a déjà vu all over again!

It appears then that during the bad economic times, enrollment increases and so does tuition, and in good economic times enrollment doesn’t rise as fast but tuition and fees do increase. In a context where education is not purely for the sake of understanding and interpreting the world, but primarily for economic betterment, students, and the public, need to clearly understand whether such an investment will generate the returns they expect.

McJobs in America: What exactly does "manufacturing" mean?

First this video (ht):



A couple of weeks ago, Matt Yglesias worried that Obama's push industrial-policy push for manufacturing could be more than election gimmicks and could guide his second term:

It is sensible for public policy to pay attention to the creation of great firms, to strength in specific sectors, and to the quality of the jobs generated by different economic models. But it should be obvious that the path forward for America is to focus on our strengths in information technology and media, and not compete with the Chinese for manufacturing supremacy.

Because ... the big money is not in the manufacturing of the widgets themselves; The Economist's chart on the breakdown of costs and profits serves as a classic illustration:

So, do we really want to bring back manufacturing, or ... And, BTW, remember what Steve Jobs said?

“Those jobs aren’t coming back”

Hey, students, "If you got it, flaunt it"

Daniel Jelski, a professor of chemistry at New Paltz and who previously served as dean of New Paltz’s School of Science & Engineering, has the following career advice to today’s students at the end of his commentary:

• If you passionately like something and are good at it, then do that. STEM, for example, will always have a place for smart, hardworking people. Likewise, good writing can’t be computerized, but you need both talent and passion to be successful.
• Start work on the 10,000 hours. Your education may help, but very little you do in school contributes to the total. Be it car detailing, truck driving, computer programming, drawing, writing – acquire an expert skill in something. Write a novel.
• Empathize if you can. Computers can’t do that. Jobs that involve empathy (along with other skills) will always be in demand.
• If you got it, flaunt it. That’s something else computers can’t do. Beauty has value, especially for women but also for men. This is wonderfully described in Catherine Hakim’s book, Erotic Capital. Even if you don’t got it, take advantage of youth. Acquire a fashion sense, take care of yourself, look as good as you can.

Work hard. Have fun. Get rich.

There is a little bit of exaggeration, especially about the flaunting bit.  But, what use is a commentary without an exaggerated argument, right?

We blow the whistle on higher education because ...

Perhaps to the astonishment of the few students who pretend to listen to me, I routinely state in my classes that none of the courses I teach will get them any job. I tell them ... well, here is Bryan Caplan, who, apparently, says the same kind of things (ht):

what matters is how much education you have compared to competing workers.  When education levels rise, employers respond with higher standards; when education levels fall, employers respond with lower standards.  We're on a treadmill.  If voters took this idea seriously, my close friends and I could easily lose our jobs.  As a professor, it is in my interest for the public to continue to believe in the magic of education: To imagine that the ivory tower transforms student lead into worker gold. 

My conscience, however, urges me to blow the whistle on the system anyway.  Education is not magic.  Professors can't make students better at whatever job awaits them with learned lectures on arcane topics.  I'm glad I have a dream job for life.  I worked hard for it.  But society would be better off if taxpayers saved their money, students spent fewer years in school, and sheltered academics like me finally entered the Real World and found a real job.

If only my faculty and administrative colleagues would pay at least a little bit of attention to what Caplan says, even if they want to continue to summarily dismiss my thoughts on this issue :)

Mythbuster: The decline, demise, and death of manufacturing in America

So, it seems like every other product has a "Made in China" sticker, right?  Manufacturing in America is dead, right?

Are you sure?  Is that your final answer?

Jeff Jacoby notes that (ht):

There’s just one problem with all the gloom and doom about American manufacturing. It’s wrong.

Americans make more “stuff’’ than any other nation on earth, and by a wide margin. According to the United Nations’ comprehensive database of international economic data, America’s manufacturing output in 2009 (expressed in constant 2005 dollars) was $2.15 trillion. That surpassed China’s output of $1.48 trillion by nearly 46 percent. China’s industries may be booming, but the United States still accounted for 20 percent of the world’s manufacturing output in 2009 — only a hair below its 1990 share of 21 percent.

Our perception of the death of manufacturing in the US is based on: (a) the prevalence of low-price goods from China and other countries, and (b) a declining share of employment in manufacturing.  But, when one looks at it in dollar value, it is an entirely different story:

“America still makes a ton of stuff, and we make more of it now than ever before in history.’’ In fact, Americans manufactured more goods in 2009 than the Japanese, Germans, British, and Italians — combined.

American manufacturing output hits a new high almost every year. US industries are powerhouses of production: Measured in constant dollars, America’s manufacturing output today is more than double what it was in the early 1970s.

I talk about this in my introductory class when we talk about lower-order and higher-order goods, and how America increasingly specializes in higher-order goods.  But, whoever goes to classes and, more importantly, listens to cranks like me in the classroom, right?

Prick that higher education bubble. Soon.

Higher education, particularly here in Oregon, has been in an economic crisis for years now, and has resulted in it becoming an expensive investment, especially for those from lower-income backgrounds.  To a large extent, it is only the private sector that can help out—by shedding the requirement of college education and degrees for many jobs where such expensive credentialing is not required.

Often, we operate with a misconception that community colleges are significantly less expensive than a teaching university like Western Oregon University (WOU) where I am employed, and that research universities will be the most expensive among public institutions.

It ain’t so!

Consider, for instance, the tuition rates at WOU and its two immediate neighbors, Chemeketa Community College and Oregon State University.  For an Oregonian who is a full-time student taking fifteen credits per term, the annual tuition at Chemeketa will amount to $3,645, while it is $6,135 at WOU and $5,760 at Oregon State. 

Of course, decrease in state support is a big reason for tuition increases in the public system.  Rapid increase in non-academic expenditures is a significant factor as well. 

In addition, over the years, government subsidizing higher education has also contributed to tuition increases.  “Political Calculations” noted that between 1976 and 2008, there is “a really unique correlation between the average annual tuition at a four-year higher education institution in the United States and the total amount of money the U.S. federal government spends every year.” 

Government's role in subsidized loans to students has an effect which is not that different from how low interest rates led to higher home prices during the real estate bubble years. 

When monthly payment amount is a critical variable in the home purchase process, low interest rates make it possible for buyers to go after larger-value homes.  However, soon the homeowners also sense this, and home prices are correspondingly adjusted upwards. 

The later entrants to this crazy market do not realize that such a system will only help those who are already homeowners and, before they know it, those who joined this game towards the end find themselves "underwater."

In higher education, colleges and universities, like homeowners looking to sell in a bubble market, have been similarly adjusting their tuition upwards.  The net result is that increasingly students now are like the late entrants to the real estate bubble, and end up graduating with debts, loans, and underemployment that do not justify the costs.

In such a higher education bubble, we are wasting considerable individual and taxpayer investment through requiring college degrees for many jobs where such qualifications are way more than needed for productive performance. 

One better model could be for employers to appropriately scale down the higher education requirements.  And, by offering to pay for college courses as rewards for productivity on the job, they could actively encourage employees to value education as a life-long learning experience.  After all, there is infinitely more to education than pecuniary calculations, which is why I teach, and that too in Geography!

What for a college degree?

More on this long running topic:

Some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.

I am not sure how many of these entered these professions after earning their college degrees; I would assume that they are the majority.  In any case, do colleges and universities provide students with this data?  I guess not--it won't serve their enrollment business, right? 

The end is near ....

Meanwhile, student debts keep going up.

The class of 2009 graduated with an average of $24,000 in debts from student loans, up 6 percent from the previous year,

And the result in these awful economic conditions?  Examples like this story of a college grad working in the custodial services of the same university from where he graduated with a "degree in network and information-technology administration last December"

More on fixing schools and colleges

So, it is open season on fixing the mess in higher education, and K-12. This was the latest NY Times op-ed in this topic.

I disagree with the op-ed author (Harold Levy) for a whole bunch of reasons:

• I cannot believe that Levy would want to raise the age limit for compulsory education to 19. For better or worse, we already have 18 as the age when a kid becomes a legal adult. (of course, for alcohol they don't become adults until 21! that is another issue by itself.) The last thing I want to do is tell 18-year olds that they are not adults yet, and that we are going to tell them what they ought to do. To quite an extent, extending the compulsory education is almost the same as compulsory military service that a few countries have for their citizens. Compelling adults to do anything is not my idea of a free society.
• I have already made my point in an op-ed that longer school year is not a panacea. There are a number of other issues with K-12 that need fixing. For instance, studies have shown that children need sleep, more so teenagers. Yet, by starting the school day at 8:00, and in some places as early as 7:00, we rudely interrupt their sleep and pack them off to school. I am yet to meet a teacher who does not complain how most students practically sleep through the first and second periods. We continue with this schedule because it fits the parents' work schedule. When I was a kid, our school started at 9:00 am!
• Everybody talks about the long summer break, including Obama. I hate long summer breaks, which is one major reason why I teach summer school. It makes me less productive if I have that kind of a break. Which is also why I don't see myself taking a long sabbatical also. However, I do not want to force students into more schooling. I would rather lengthen the winter break by one more week, and have a longer spring time break, and thus shorten the summer break without adding more school days. Again, I think we won't do such things because it will interfere with the parents' work commitments.
  I tell you, we are screwing the kids because of what will be a good schedule for parents, and then we blame the kids for not doing well. Nice game we have going :-)
• Levy's argument on truancy is the weakest of all his weak arguments. This way exceeds my threshold for how much society should take over parenting. I will leave it at that.
• One of the groundwork laying items that Levy lists is "losing the advertising wars to for-profit colleges". And, what he in turn proposes is nothing but how public colleges and universities ought to behave like those for-profit colleges. Which means, Levy and I have a serious disagreement on the very purpose of higher education itself.
  When I criticize higher education, my concern is that we are promising students high economic rewards, but then screwing them up. I want full disclosure to students that there is no guarantee of productive employment upon graduation. I also want to emphasize to students that higher education is not about employment skills, but about something less tangible and more profound. Instead, we are currently playing a shell game of conveniently offering either of these explanations as bait and switch. When students worry about jobs, we tell them that higher ed is about more than jobs. But then we pummel them with how higher educated people on an average earn more. Of course, the world has conveniently raised the minimum education for even mindless routine jobs ....
• Levy's comments on making accreditation is a waste. Because, hey, the entire accreditation process was a joke at our own university. It is a fantastic process if done correctly and I completely believe in self-study-based-accreditation. However, in its current structure most colleges and universities simply play the accreditation game, which is a shame. And, it cheats the public with whom we colleges and universities have a social contract.
  

If only I ruled the world :-)

College degree has a use, after all!

What for a college education?

At first glance, the earnings uplift looks worthwhile. ... But cracks are appearing in the “graduate premium”. For one thing, it varies immensely by field of study ... men with arts degrees can expect to earn less than if they had skipped university entirely.
Robin Naylor, at Warwick University, has found that the average return to a degree has held up well over the past 20 years, but it has become more variable: the university now matters greatly, as does the degree class. “The penalty for not having a degree is high, but the penalty for getting the wrong one can be even higher,” he says. And Francis Green, of Kent University, has discovered that in 2006 a third of graduates were working in jobs that did not require a degree, up from a quarter in 2001; they earned a third less than those who were using their degrees.

That was from the Economist. I wrote about this in the Register Guard just over a year ago(August 27, 2007), and attracted some nasty attention for writing the following :

Does U.S. oversell college?
A new school year begins soon. I look forward excitedly to meeting new students and re-establishing connections with those who return. But once again, I start the year with the nagging question: Are we overselling higher education?

Growing up in India, it was quite common to run into people with advanced degrees working in unrelated jobs essentially because, well, there were very few positions to match their educational qualifications. Most of the bank clerks I have met in India have degrees in literature or the sciences. During our trip last December, the telephone salesman my father was talking to was happy that he was able to get that job soon after graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering.

Selling phones or working as a bank teller do not require four years of college. So, why the degree?

Two reasons stand out.

First, there's the faith that college is the path toward prosperity, and that therefore everyone needs to go to college. Thus, parents do all they can to ensure that their children attend college. Second, 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.

Against such a background, I can't help but wonder whether our drive to get more high school students to college is a variation of the Indian blind faith that college degree will lead to economic prosperity. Déjà vu all over again!

Ironically, while we "elders" are focused on getting more high school graduates to college, it appears that practically every student I meet in my university is familiar with the joke about college degrees and jobs - you know, with the punch line, "Would you like fries with that?"

Students are aware that a college degree might not get them a job after all. This reality that students see is a total contrast to, and disconnected from, our focus on college.

Perhaps employers here in the United States use the college degree as a sorting tool just as employers in India do. By demonstrating that they successfully negotiated hazards like me, students implicitly tell prospective employers that they have the requisite skills to do the job. But then all we have done is unnecessarily raise the entry-level educational requirement, when in reality a degree is not really required and a high school diploma would have sufficed.

Studies show that the average life-time earnings of college graduates are significantly higher than those of high school graduates. But the studies do not seem to account for the possibility of inflated requirements of educational qualifications.

Further, if the recent preoccupation with outsourcing is what is driving us to focus on college, that is all the more the reason why we ought to focus on jobs that cannot be outsourced, many of which do not require a degree. Plumbing, auto repair and caring for the elderly cannot be outsourced to India. Here again, we are all too familiar with the complaints about how expensive plumbers are, or how difficult it is to find people who can help with the rapidly growing elderly population. Yet we choose not to steer more youngsters into such lucrative careers because we are fixated on college degrees that don't always guarantee jobs.

In India, too, there are boundless opportunities for people interested in plumbing, caring for the elderly and other occupations that don't require college diplomas. Urban India is increasingly short of such help. Samad, the plumber on whose services my parents rely, has become so successful that he has made a career change and is now a real estate agent. Samad did not even complete the eighth grade, a total contrast to the newly graduated mechanical engineer selling telephones.

Of course, university education is not merely about economic productivity. It is also to develop a culture of learning and an appreciation of various aspects of life. Personally, I am immensely thankful for the opportunity that I have to pursue learning as my vocation. But at a huge cost to the youth, are we incorrectly advocating that college education is the only avenue for individuals to be economically productive?

Not Smart Enough for College

A letter in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
David Glenn's essay on the wage gap between college graduates and high-school graduates ("Supply-Side Education," The Chronicle Review, July 25) misses the central point: Not all people have the intelligence to complete a college education.

Some basic intelligence must be required to complete a respectable college education. Otherwise we will not only dumb down higher education, but the benefits of a college degree will be subsumed under a tide of educational mediocrity. One would need a graduate degree to truly be credentialed. If the big wage gap today were between graduate degrees and bachelor's degrees, would we suggest universal graduate school as the solution?

The truth is that there are students who don't belong in college. There are students who don't even belong in high school. Not only do they benefit marginally, if at all, but their presence reduces their peers' education as teachers are forced to slow down and give them more attention.

Many well-paying jobs require skill but not intellect. Some plumbers, carpenters, and electricians earn more than some professors. Pressuring everyone to go to college would gradually destroy the quality of higher education in America, and therefore of our society in general.

Scott Salvato
Valley Stream, N.Y.

After reading this, I thought it might be interesting to check the name with "Fundrace" that I blogged about earlier. Click here to find out about Salvato's political donation.