Young Americans need to be taught skills, not handed credentials

[Dubious]

Most education is now disconnected from the needs of students and the labour market
RANA FOROOHAR

Rana Foroohar AN HOUR AGO

I cannot think of a market that is more dysfunctional in America right now than education. Total student debt topped $1.5tn this year and a Brookings study found that nearly 40 per cent of those borrowers are likely to default on their loans by 2023.

Some of the borrowers will have attended predatory for-profit colleges, for which the Trump administration recently loosened regulations.

The imprimatur of a $75,000 Harvard degree is in such demand that the school is now being sued by a group of Asian-American students who say more of them should be allowed in on the basis of high test scores. But at the other end of the spectrum, several new studies show that a garden variety four-year degree isn’t paying off the way it used to. One recent survey found that 43 per cent of college grads are underemployed.

This certainly mirrors what I hear from chief executives, many of whom tell me they cannot find the skills they need either at the top or the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Ivy League colleges are great for those who can afford them but most education has become completely disconnected from the needs of both students and the labour market.

There are plenty of MBAs who can read a balance sheet but have neither operational nor soft skills. Four-year business administration graduates are settling for low wage gigs, while $20-an-hour manufacturing jobs go unfilled because employers can’t find anyone with vocational training.

Desperate companies are trying to plug the gap — telecoms group AT&T has set up an internal online course to train the 95 per cent of those in its own technology and services unit that have inadequate ability in Stem subjects — Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Walmart Academy has trained thousands of workers, including in basic skills they should have learnt in high schools.

There are myriad factors that have created this dysfunctional system, but one that hasn’t been talked about enough is the unfair bias towards schools rather than skills. According to a 2017 Harvard Business School report, more than 6m good paying jobs in the US are at risk of “degree inflation”, meaning that skilled labour is locked out of the market for lack of a degree, even if one is not needed for the job.
For some middle-level positions in 2015, two-thirds of employers were asking for a college degree, even though only 16 per cent of people working successfully in similar positions had them. That cuts social mobility. But it also inflates the price of what may be a needless credential and costs employers, who pay more for people with fewer skills and a higher propensity to jump between companies.

How to end this arms race? Some businesses and educators are working with non-profits that help them vet skills of workers with no credentials. One such programme is run with state governments in Colorado and Indiana, as well as companies such as LinkedIn and Microsoft. Skillful evaluates and ranks workers based on their hard and soft skills via online and in-person testing and training. It then pairs them with appropriate jobs.

Others, like Year Up, provide something similar at a national level for young people, identifying and training the highly-motivated for six months, and matching them with major companies such as Salesforce or JPMorgan who can trial them for another six months without a full hiring commitment. “We think of it as supply chain management for talent,” says Gerald Chertavian, the CEO and founder of the programme.

Perhaps the most successful and scalable bridging of the skills and credentials gap thus far has been the P-Tech high school, initially started by IBM as a way to create a middle-market talent pool and now said to run with 500 other industry partners in 110 schools in eight states.

It graduates students with both a high school and associates’ degree, and they are guaranteed jobs paying $50,000-a-year. Corporate partners are willing to make this assurance since they have a hand in shaping the curriculum to their taste. The completion rates of the graduates are 500 times the national average. The schools are non-selective, use unionised teachers, and serve a disproportionate number of lower-income students of colour.

Some worry about allowing business this sort of seat at the table in shaping education. I do not. Other countries — Germany, for instance — have shown it is possible to provide high-quality education and job-market skills at once.

We are at a crisis point in education today, but it is also a good moment to change the trajectory of things.

The Perkins Bill, which funds vocational education, was recently reauthorised by Congress. That means that there’s now a guaranteed pot of nearly $1.3bn over the next six years to be thrown at revamping secondary and tertiary education to meet the needs of employers and the labour market.

States have a fair amount of leeway about how they use the funds. It would be great to see more of them talking to employers about what they need and putting money into programmes that foster skills rather than simply award credentials.

https://www.ft.com/content/e5b1cba6...c1ad?kbc=c47f4dfc-6879-4e95-accf-ca8cbe6a1f69

 

[zectech]

So after telling students to go to college and get saddled with debt, various groups want to tell employers to bypass many of these students and hire those who did not go to college. Interesting.

The imprimatur of a $75,000 Harvard degree is in such demand that the school is now being sued by a group of Asian-American students who say more of them should be allowed in on the basis of high test scores.

A war on the educated and smart.

The war used to be on "white" workers:

Social engineering instead of work going to the best workers.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

So after telling students to go to college and get saddled with debt, various groups want to tell employers to bypass many of these students and hire those who did not go to college. Interesting.

The imprimatur of a $75,000 Harvard degree is in such demand that the school is now being sued by a group of Asian-American students who say more of them should be allowed in on the basis of high test scores.

A war on the educated and smart.

The war used to be on "white" workers:

Social engineering instead of work going to the best workers.

The problem is people think colleges like Harvard base their admissions solely on test scores. This is simply ignorance on how some colleges work.

Harvard has numerous degrees offered by different subschools (School of Management, School of Nursing, etc). They expect to fill their sub school classes with people who want THOSE degrees. So if 1 million people get perfect test scores and want to go to the Management school and only 30 people with mediocre scores applied to the Nursing school...guess who is going to get in.

Also schools like Harvard try to be diverse and help people who may have not have had the means to get the best education. So they are going to let in a certain amount from poor countries in Africa, Asia, and South America regardless of their scores. They have the African club so there can be some connections made current alumni.

There are lots of quotas of this and that which they do and certainly would not be able to do if everything is solely based on test scores.

 

[zectech]

How jews took over the Ivy league schools:

Kaplan capitalized on Jewish educational aspirations at a time when the SAT had firmly established itself as the official rite of passage for entry into the colleges that granted access to the top positions in the American meritocracy. The WASP ruling class under Henry Chauncey’s direction had created what it thought was an uncoachable test that measured pure mental ability. The Jew Kaplan was smart enough to see through WASP pretentions and come up with a system that guaranteed better test results (for jews). The system was so simple that it hardly qualifies as a system at all. In the days when the blueprint for building the atomic bomb was an open secret compared to the questions on the SAT test, Kaplan came up with a simple but ingenious way to subvert the system. After each class graduated from Kaplan’s school and took the test, he would invite them back to celebrate with hot dogs and root beer; admission to the party was gained by having each student tell Kaplan one question he remembered from taking the test. The net result of Kaplan’s parties was a list of the questions that his students would face when taking the SATs. If Kaplan tutored five classes of fifty students in one year, at the end of that year he had 250 questions. By the time Kaplan sold his test-prep business to the Washington Post company in the ‘70s, for $50 million he had over 30 years experience in gathering questions, which meant he could tell his students with increasing accuracy the answers to those questions as well. Jewish scores on the SATs rose accordingly, as did Jewish admission to the prestigious colleges that had established quotas to keep them out in the early 20th century.

http://www.culturewars.com/2008/BrooklynExistentialism.html

Now those in the Ivy league are keeping out Asian Americans for intangibles (Lower on Personality Traits).

Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.

Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students’ personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being admitted, the analysis found.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html

So minorities are welcome to Harvard because of quotas, but Asians are not accepted to their full potential because they are Asians, intelligent and business minded.

How about no one should be admitted to Harvard because they listen to anti-social rap music. How would the Ivy League schools like that.