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.
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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?

I led to my own unemployment?

Maybe it was not an issue of running out of luck, but that I was not working hard enough to make my own job secure. 

Instead of writing commentaries to tell the public how awesome I am, I wrote opinion essays like this one from May 2016 in which I wrote that "college is really not about the major."  Perhaps there is virtue in the pursuit of selfishness.  Nah!

The following commentary was published in May 2016:
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“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.