Spoiled Milk
Banned
The question is in the title. This thread is about the US education system but citing examples from other countries is encouraged.
There are a few highly circulated ideas about the job market. One is that for a large amount of non-technical careers, it doesn't actually matter what you major in. This is because those employers are looking for skills, and there is a coarse relationship between having those kinds of skills and having a major at all, but not necessarily tied to the major you have.
Another is that people with certain majors have an extremely hard time finding work because the field they are trying to work in is oversaturated with people with the same qualifications. This happens across the board. People with B.S.'s in Psychology face a trememndous amount of underemployment just as much as people with PhD's in Biology. In fact, 31% of faculty members nationwide of incomes less than 150% of the federal poverty level.
These two examples, when taken together, point to something very inefficient inherit in an educational system that was never meant to educate the nation's workforce. First, Non-STEM undergraduate majors (and really, non-TEM) usually are not tailored for actual employable skills, primarily because they are not designed for that. People who major in Anthropology and Psychology have valuable writing, communication, and analytical skills, but that is a side effect of the education and not the primary intention even though realistically, students go to college to get jobs after they go to college. In the age of the internet, if they truly just wanted to learn things, they could just as well buy books for their own reading.
Second, people will routinely choose majors for which there is little to no market demand based on old historical data or incorrect assumptions. For instance, many students in this county major in the sciences only to find out later that they need to go to graduate school if they want to be employable in any kind of pure science. Then, post-docs end up in the infamous post-doc cycle (a reason for this might be that the sciences are getting funded at Cold War era levels even though demand has dropped), desperate for a faculty position. Even those that make it find themselves in the world of publish-or-perish, a phenomena which exists only because of the astoundingly high oversaturation of academic fields. Meanwhile, tech companies are struggling to fill high salary positions.
So my primary assumptions based on the above are that students in this country are 1) not getting workforce translatable skills in a consistent way and 2) not choosing the right majors based on the (admittedly fickle) direction of the market.
Now, you could just blame students. You could blame the amount of research they do, or the fact that they just don't care sometimes. That, however, is just not very productive. I think for most students in college there is an alluring illusion of choice in their lives. I think they think they have options when it's likely that for many of them, their choices are quite bad, and I think that for the most part it should be economically or bureaucratically impossible for so many people to enter the education and leave thinking "either I go back and do something else or I accept a life of low wage labor."
If you agree with me that this is a problem, how do we fix this?
The most effective tool in allocating scarce resources is just normal market economics. Prices are distributed information systems, jobs are scarce resources, and demand is fueled by skilled workers looking for employment.
But how can we translate that to an education system?
One idea I had was that large businesses could drive the direction of an education system, but the mechanism is unclear. After all, Google can't "purchase" some software architects in advance and wait four years for one. What institution would they pay? The company wouldn't be able to flexibly change to market demands and "cancel" an order (these are human beings we're talking about!). And companies would have too much of a role in deciding educational standards, despite not being education professionals - clearly undesirable.
I think fundamentally the stickiest part is that job offers are easy to put on the market and take off, but you can't retrain yourself at the snap of a finger. This train of thought bothers me because I am also pro-globalization. Economies should restructure their resource allocation according to the most efficient choices available. NAFTA preceded the American shift to an information economy. We might very well see another economic shift with the passage of TPP, but what about all the Americans who are laid off? They have the right to readjust quickly to the changing market and develop the skills to stay relevant. But that kind of quick turnaround from job to layoff to retraining to job is not seen in this country.
I am not a very smart person, so I don't know how to fix this. But I think it's a problem, and in a country where the skill gap between workers and job openings is increasing, solving this is probably the key to overcoming the challenges posed by an increasingly global, technical world.
Are there any ideas in academia that address this? Is there some big replacement for traditional colleges that's floating around that I don't know about but has a lot of support? Or am I just crazy and there is no problem?
There are a few highly circulated ideas about the job market. One is that for a large amount of non-technical careers, it doesn't actually matter what you major in. This is because those employers are looking for skills, and there is a coarse relationship between having those kinds of skills and having a major at all, but not necessarily tied to the major you have.
Another is that people with certain majors have an extremely hard time finding work because the field they are trying to work in is oversaturated with people with the same qualifications. This happens across the board. People with B.S.'s in Psychology face a trememndous amount of underemployment just as much as people with PhD's in Biology. In fact, 31% of faculty members nationwide of incomes less than 150% of the federal poverty level.
These two examples, when taken together, point to something very inefficient inherit in an educational system that was never meant to educate the nation's workforce. First, Non-STEM undergraduate majors (and really, non-TEM) usually are not tailored for actual employable skills, primarily because they are not designed for that. People who major in Anthropology and Psychology have valuable writing, communication, and analytical skills, but that is a side effect of the education and not the primary intention even though realistically, students go to college to get jobs after they go to college. In the age of the internet, if they truly just wanted to learn things, they could just as well buy books for their own reading.
Second, people will routinely choose majors for which there is little to no market demand based on old historical data or incorrect assumptions. For instance, many students in this county major in the sciences only to find out later that they need to go to graduate school if they want to be employable in any kind of pure science. Then, post-docs end up in the infamous post-doc cycle (a reason for this might be that the sciences are getting funded at Cold War era levels even though demand has dropped), desperate for a faculty position. Even those that make it find themselves in the world of publish-or-perish, a phenomena which exists only because of the astoundingly high oversaturation of academic fields. Meanwhile, tech companies are struggling to fill high salary positions.
So my primary assumptions based on the above are that students in this country are 1) not getting workforce translatable skills in a consistent way and 2) not choosing the right majors based on the (admittedly fickle) direction of the market.
Now, you could just blame students. You could blame the amount of research they do, or the fact that they just don't care sometimes. That, however, is just not very productive. I think for most students in college there is an alluring illusion of choice in their lives. I think they think they have options when it's likely that for many of them, their choices are quite bad, and I think that for the most part it should be economically or bureaucratically impossible for so many people to enter the education and leave thinking "either I go back and do something else or I accept a life of low wage labor."
If you agree with me that this is a problem, how do we fix this?
The most effective tool in allocating scarce resources is just normal market economics. Prices are distributed information systems, jobs are scarce resources, and demand is fueled by skilled workers looking for employment.
But how can we translate that to an education system?
One idea I had was that large businesses could drive the direction of an education system, but the mechanism is unclear. After all, Google can't "purchase" some software architects in advance and wait four years for one. What institution would they pay? The company wouldn't be able to flexibly change to market demands and "cancel" an order (these are human beings we're talking about!). And companies would have too much of a role in deciding educational standards, despite not being education professionals - clearly undesirable.
I think fundamentally the stickiest part is that job offers are easy to put on the market and take off, but you can't retrain yourself at the snap of a finger. This train of thought bothers me because I am also pro-globalization. Economies should restructure their resource allocation according to the most efficient choices available. NAFTA preceded the American shift to an information economy. We might very well see another economic shift with the passage of TPP, but what about all the Americans who are laid off? They have the right to readjust quickly to the changing market and develop the skills to stay relevant. But that kind of quick turnaround from job to layoff to retraining to job is not seen in this country.
I am not a very smart person, so I don't know how to fix this. But I think it's a problem, and in a country where the skill gap between workers and job openings is increasing, solving this is probably the key to overcoming the challenges posed by an increasingly global, technical world.
Are there any ideas in academia that address this? Is there some big replacement for traditional colleges that's floating around that I don't know about but has a lot of support? Or am I just crazy and there is no problem?