So, after registering this blog some number of months ago, I'm finally opting to post something.
I've been thinking a good deal lately about the relationship between a college education and employment in the modern American economy. It seems that employers might want college-educated employees for one of two reasons. The specific skills acquired during college might be important, and a degree from a reputable institution provides some assurance to an employer that, say, a mechanical engineer knows a good bit about mechanical engineering. In other cases, a college degree might, instead, let an employer know that a student acquired (or at least demonstrated) a certain set of intellectual skills - the ability to communicate clearly, to craft a sound argument, and so forth.
The second variety of college education is very difficult to replicate without attending college, and, I'd argue, retains its value in almost any field of human endeavor. The utility of college degrees as a means of determining whether or not a particular student has actually achieved such a level of skill has decreased over past decades, as for-profit schools have moved into the market and disguised themselves as real universities, and as grade inflation and the need to retain students have led many other schools to reduce workloads and raise grades and graduation rates.
The first variety of college education, however, is the area where I think that our current system serves students least well. The vast majority of students in technical fields are bound for work in the corporate world or in other large enterprises. The organizations that will hire these young scientists, programmers, and engineers have very specific needs. Perhaps a firm needs database wranglers, or a research laboratory needs another scientist to help investigate certain biochemical processes. Currently, most of these positions are filled by men and women who study in programs little changed since the time of Isaac Newton, save for a slight narrowing of focus.
Instead of training engineers or programmers who are skilled in many, many different areas, but who will use only a tiny fraction of their skills, why not, instead, train most technical workers as modern-day apprentices. Corporations could hire young people right out of high school, and offer on-the-job training designed to teach exactly the skills needed for specific jobs. The initial investment in these training programs would be far less than the cost of a conventional college education, in both money and time, as corporations would not support vast and archaic university bureaucracies. Students would have a real incentive to perform well, because, instead of grades, they would be receiving employment. Corporations, in turn, would have employees with precisely the skills needed, and could train such apprentices over the course of, perhaps, 1-3 years, while still gaining from the work that these apprentice workers performed. In essence, these positions would be built on the current internship programs. Apprentices would be required to sign contracts obliging them to work for a set number of years, thus ensuring a reasonable return on corporate investment. Corporations, in turn, would have no obligation to their apprentices beyond the sunk costs involved in training them, and would still, therefor, have the freedom to modify the structure of their workforces as economic circumstances required.
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Interesting post. I think traditional college education is such a huge expense for so many people. In this economy, many people are then burdened by the huge college debt and then may not even have the proper technical skills for the jobs that are available. My uncle, Stephen Hamilton, is a professor at Cornell where he's written a lot and done a lot of work around the ideas of apprenticeship. I haven't read a lot of his stuff, but you might find his work interesting.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to see you're blogging. I'm thinking about starting a blog myself.
The problem with this, I think, is that it creates a narrow set of skills and a potential trap for the workers. On the first issue, narrow skillset, the worker will have limited ability to think creatively to solve problems or understand how his corner of the wold interfaces with others. This can lead to the second issue - if someone is so specifically trained, it could be easy to get trapped in one job or phased out when new technologies come in an it is cheaper to hire new, "blank" kids than retrain existing workers. Those displaced workers, so carefully and narrowly trained, may have difficulty finding new positions. I think a hybrid solution, with a few years acquiring baseline skills and some of the critical thinking/communication skills followed by intensive internships (or running classes and increasingly complex internships in tandem), may be a better solution.
ReplyDeleteAck. The above was Jean...
ReplyDeleteI'm not blind to the issue of narrowly-focused skills, and I can see the merit in a hybrid program that offers training in some basic core skills before adding a layer of specific technical knowledge. I'd suspect, however, that most workers in technical fields would come to rely on only a small sub-set of the skills that they developed during education, and that other skills, if acquired, would tend to atrophy. This issue would be worse, I'd guess, in technical fields, as the state of the art would advance at the same time that the unused skills were fading from memory. Python today doesn't look much like python of five years ago, after all. This would, probably, be less of an issue in less tech-focused areas.
ReplyDeleteI'd also tend to think that the apprentice system, at a minimum, would reduce the number of people with debt from acquiring now-obsolete skills. Hopefully.
I'm ruled by corporate distrust at the moment. I'm concerned about lock-in contracts with penalty clauses. Yes, there would likely be competition guaranteeing favorable terms to the best student-candidates, but most people could get locked into positions with little room for advancement, a narrow/non-transferable skill-set, and no way out of a dead-end apprenticeship that they signed into at age 18.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I believe in technical education and think a lot of people who go to college would be better off with an alternative. I'd like to see big shift in how secondary and post-secondary education functions, but this isn't it (at least without a lot of caveats).
The thing that worries me about technical education, really, is that the state of the art moves so dreadfully fast. A few others have suggested a sort of hybrid program, which would feature one or two years of classroom training in a broad array of general skills, and which would then lead to an apprenticeship/internship. It just seems to me that this system would produce mutual investment - corporations would be somewhat invested in employees, and would have incentive to retain those employees (which generally improves morale and personal happiness). Students would have a promise that educational attainment really would lead to a job. I'm thinking that a 4 to 6 year contract would be the norm for these - not a lifetime commitment, by any stretch of the imagination.
ReplyDeleteIf we get to magically dictate the terms of these contracts, great! That's not the way the world works, though.
ReplyDeleteI suspect - perhaps naively - that people wouldn't sign up for contracts that demanded too much in exchange for training. In this type of depressed economic period, that might be overly optimistic, I'll admit, but in a more normal labor market, I think that you'd see competition between employers for promising potential apprentices, and that this would limit the degree of exploitation built into most such contracts... I'd hope.
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