We hire for pedigrees and for certifications and now for work ethic. If you've spent summers flipping burgers or washing dishes or waiting tables because that was the work you could find and you needed money, you are will be good at most jobs.
And most of the things we hire new college grads to do, can be taught to someone with a strong work ethic in under six months.
I had a couple interesting apprenticeship offers 20 years ago - one as a finish carpenter and one as a pastry chef. Both of the people willing to hire me said they would hire me because I 1) showed up where I was supposed to be when I was supposed to be there (actually a little early), 2) I could do fractions, and 3) I showed up straight and could pass a drug screen. I thought these requirements were pretty basic and my potential teachers disabused me of that notion.
Basic math - fractions are taught in elementary school is going to be needed for many trades. Not showing up or showing up high and/or drug are also a problem. It may even be a bigger challenge now that drugs are legal in so many states.
Then there is what Mr. McWhorter refers to as "Black" English. I interviewed a kid who was clearly very bright and must have worked his ass off to accumulate the knowledge he displayed during our talk. He was bright and ambitious and would have walked through walls for us had we given him the chance but no one was willing to overlook his speech or figure out a way to help him overcome it. Our GM was concerned that if we brought him on and tried to send him to some kind of speech training we would open ourselves to charges of discrimination and lawsuits.
Six months later I found myself in a room with several black recruiters we were contracting with to help us recruit more minorities. I was a little confused because I am white.
This company is a now has a huge of DEI initiative and I bet they still would not hire this kid.
The issue is much broader. When we found that people with college degrees made more money, we drew the wrong conclusion: if everyone has a college degree, then everyone will make more money. It's more subtle.
In a workplace of 2,000 people, only perhaps ten of them will hold positions that require a college degree. The other 1,990 people will do perfectly well with a decent high school diploma and some technical or tradesman training. The ten holding positions needing a college degree will make a bit more than the others as they bear greater responsibility. In an enormous manufacturing plant employing 5,000 people the plant manager, the director of finance, the head of robotics requirements, and perhaps two to ten others will benefit from a formal four- or six-year program. The most highly skilled precision robotics repair technicians do not need anything more than a good apprenticeship program.
My wife's brother is relatively wealthy - certainly financially better off than I, who worked for forty years in an environment where most of my coworkers had MBA degrees or the Industrial Engineering equivalent. He was an elevator repairman for forty years, a profession that in the U.S. is only available through apprenticeship run by unions. Nearly all new entrants to the program are legacy, which results in an unchanging demographic. The positions are lucrative because they cross all the trades plus computer technology and controls.
Another problem that needs to be addressed is how basic jobs require a college degree. For example, my cousins son was working temp for UCSF doing data entry. He was offered this exact position, that he had been doing for awhile, as a permanent gig. It would have been a game changer for him..he has had some serious struggles w mental health & drug abuse. All he wanted was benefits. Well UC found out he didn't have a college degree and said sorry we can't hire you. That is completely absurd. When did a college degree become mandatory for jobs like data entry? This is a huge part of the problem.
I want to advise a colleague from undergrad biology, (He is a PhD Biologist professor/scientist) to send his kids to technical school for home-cable installation or hospital X-ray technician so that they can become financially independent and then they can enter a 4-yr university to study their passion independent of expected job potential. My academic study after financial independence has been more enjoyable than that prior.
Some red states have removed 4-yr degree requirement of gov job applicants. That is a good idea.
The issue of the American economy not producing enough jobs for people with high school educations or less for whom that is all they want or can have is not exclusively a race issue.
50 years ago my mom had almost exclusively vastly underprepared students like that and chose to go back to school to get an MBA due to the frustration. (Harris-Stowe is technically an HBCU but represents the merger of a Black and a white teachers college. In recent years it has begun to emphasize STEM education but still takes seriously being the only place some of the students could attend college.) However the Chronicle has pointed me to this report
https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/cew-after_affirmative_action-fr.pdf which is almost angry about the lack of investment in the education of simply above-average students, not brilliant people who will succeed if they simply do not get into legal trouble. I have also seen anecdata about how prison education programs have changed lives because nothing in the inmates' previous education asked the thinking skills of ordinary college students of them. (I assume if they could not read above a certain level they would not be in the class at all.)
As I understand it, students who applied but did not win the lottery for Harlem Success, were followed and vastly underperformed those who won the lottery. This seems to me to take parental involvement as an explanatory variable off the table and place the blame squarely on the government monopoly schools. One of the problems, in my view, has been that Teachers Colleges have taught a lot of bunk like Whole Language and New Math and the New New Math which were adopted by school systems and have proven (at a minimum by continuing low test scores) to be a failure. In any event, the teachers unions blame money, parents, students, anything but themselves. Competition works to make us all better and it is happening in red states through school choice but the teachers unions own the democrats and many parents continue to vote for them in spite of them being captured by a group whose job is to protect teachers not kids. If this analysis is correct, red state students will start to do better than blue state children. Time will tell.
Besides a misguided notion that pushing kids into college gets them to middle class, I suspect there is an indoctrination motive behind the all kids go to college agenda.
For as long as I've been an alumnus (a long time), my university alumni magazines have been filled with "first in my family to go to college stories". The subjects seem to be disproportionately female Hispanic, and the majors are not STEM. I wonder how the proud parents feel when their daughter comes home with vastly different values than she was raised with. Will they realize they've been duped?
Robert touched the third rail when he was so bold as to bring up cognitive deficits. It's absolutely true but no one wants to say it. You can lower grading standards, you can offer a long list of useless 4 year degrees. But with a technical programs, you need results. When you take your car to the mechanic you don't care if the guys great great grandparents were slaves, was raised in a bad area or the color of his skin. You want the car to start and run. At your house, you want the heater and ac to work, you want the retaining wall the mason put up to work. None of this bodes well for the guy that has lived his life by pulling the race card and has been pushed along by social promotion.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. After 60 years of trying, this is as good as it gets. Deal with it. Robert touched on the cognitive issue. Now throw in being lazy and violent and you have a permanent underclass.
Doesn’t the problem begin way before the college years? While there will always be kids who are below average intellectually, the schools seem to fail a far larger proportion so these kids get to community college or vocational training programs without basic academic skills. I would point to Harlem Success and KIPP vs the public schools to support my point.
College by any name is purported to be Road to happiness when I taught after completing my masters, I taught at a school for troubled, disadvantaged boys. One boy did not want college. His parents befuddled. He was smart. Took an apprenticeship to be a tool maker. His starting salary more than I made. My grandfather took the same starting in 1882. 12 years. More good vocational training important
Excellent....listened twice .
We hire for pedigrees and for certifications and now for work ethic. If you've spent summers flipping burgers or washing dishes or waiting tables because that was the work you could find and you needed money, you are will be good at most jobs.
And most of the things we hire new college grads to do, can be taught to someone with a strong work ethic in under six months.
I had a couple interesting apprenticeship offers 20 years ago - one as a finish carpenter and one as a pastry chef. Both of the people willing to hire me said they would hire me because I 1) showed up where I was supposed to be when I was supposed to be there (actually a little early), 2) I could do fractions, and 3) I showed up straight and could pass a drug screen. I thought these requirements were pretty basic and my potential teachers disabused me of that notion.
Basic math - fractions are taught in elementary school is going to be needed for many trades. Not showing up or showing up high and/or drug are also a problem. It may even be a bigger challenge now that drugs are legal in so many states.
Then there is what Mr. McWhorter refers to as "Black" English. I interviewed a kid who was clearly very bright and must have worked his ass off to accumulate the knowledge he displayed during our talk. He was bright and ambitious and would have walked through walls for us had we given him the chance but no one was willing to overlook his speech or figure out a way to help him overcome it. Our GM was concerned that if we brought him on and tried to send him to some kind of speech training we would open ourselves to charges of discrimination and lawsuits.
Six months later I found myself in a room with several black recruiters we were contracting with to help us recruit more minorities. I was a little confused because I am white.
This company is a now has a huge of DEI initiative and I bet they still would not hire this kid.
The issue is much broader. When we found that people with college degrees made more money, we drew the wrong conclusion: if everyone has a college degree, then everyone will make more money. It's more subtle.
In a workplace of 2,000 people, only perhaps ten of them will hold positions that require a college degree. The other 1,990 people will do perfectly well with a decent high school diploma and some technical or tradesman training. The ten holding positions needing a college degree will make a bit more than the others as they bear greater responsibility. In an enormous manufacturing plant employing 5,000 people the plant manager, the director of finance, the head of robotics requirements, and perhaps two to ten others will benefit from a formal four- or six-year program. The most highly skilled precision robotics repair technicians do not need anything more than a good apprenticeship program.
My wife's brother is relatively wealthy - certainly financially better off than I, who worked for forty years in an environment where most of my coworkers had MBA degrees or the Industrial Engineering equivalent. He was an elevator repairman for forty years, a profession that in the U.S. is only available through apprenticeship run by unions. Nearly all new entrants to the program are legacy, which results in an unchanging demographic. The positions are lucrative because they cross all the trades plus computer technology and controls.
Another problem that needs to be addressed is how basic jobs require a college degree. For example, my cousins son was working temp for UCSF doing data entry. He was offered this exact position, that he had been doing for awhile, as a permanent gig. It would have been a game changer for him..he has had some serious struggles w mental health & drug abuse. All he wanted was benefits. Well UC found out he didn't have a college degree and said sorry we can't hire you. That is completely absurd. When did a college degree become mandatory for jobs like data entry? This is a huge part of the problem.
I want to advise a colleague from undergrad biology, (He is a PhD Biologist professor/scientist) to send his kids to technical school for home-cable installation or hospital X-ray technician so that they can become financially independent and then they can enter a 4-yr university to study their passion independent of expected job potential. My academic study after financial independence has been more enjoyable than that prior.
Some red states have removed 4-yr degree requirement of gov job applicants. That is a good idea.
The issue of the American economy not producing enough jobs for people with high school educations or less for whom that is all they want or can have is not exclusively a race issue.
50 years ago my mom had almost exclusively vastly underprepared students like that and chose to go back to school to get an MBA due to the frustration. (Harris-Stowe is technically an HBCU but represents the merger of a Black and a white teachers college. In recent years it has begun to emphasize STEM education but still takes seriously being the only place some of the students could attend college.) However the Chronicle has pointed me to this report
https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/cew-after_affirmative_action-fr.pdf which is almost angry about the lack of investment in the education of simply above-average students, not brilliant people who will succeed if they simply do not get into legal trouble. I have also seen anecdata about how prison education programs have changed lives because nothing in the inmates' previous education asked the thinking skills of ordinary college students of them. (I assume if they could not read above a certain level they would not be in the class at all.)
As I understand it, students who applied but did not win the lottery for Harlem Success, were followed and vastly underperformed those who won the lottery. This seems to me to take parental involvement as an explanatory variable off the table and place the blame squarely on the government monopoly schools. One of the problems, in my view, has been that Teachers Colleges have taught a lot of bunk like Whole Language and New Math and the New New Math which were adopted by school systems and have proven (at a minimum by continuing low test scores) to be a failure. In any event, the teachers unions blame money, parents, students, anything but themselves. Competition works to make us all better and it is happening in red states through school choice but the teachers unions own the democrats and many parents continue to vote for them in spite of them being captured by a group whose job is to protect teachers not kids. If this analysis is correct, red state students will start to do better than blue state children. Time will tell.
Besides a misguided notion that pushing kids into college gets them to middle class, I suspect there is an indoctrination motive behind the all kids go to college agenda.
For as long as I've been an alumnus (a long time), my university alumni magazines have been filled with "first in my family to go to college stories". The subjects seem to be disproportionately female Hispanic, and the majors are not STEM. I wonder how the proud parents feel when their daughter comes home with vastly different values than she was raised with. Will they realize they've been duped?
Robert touched the third rail when he was so bold as to bring up cognitive deficits. It's absolutely true but no one wants to say it. You can lower grading standards, you can offer a long list of useless 4 year degrees. But with a technical programs, you need results. When you take your car to the mechanic you don't care if the guys great great grandparents were slaves, was raised in a bad area or the color of his skin. You want the car to start and run. At your house, you want the heater and ac to work, you want the retaining wall the mason put up to work. None of this bodes well for the guy that has lived his life by pulling the race card and has been pushed along by social promotion.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. After 60 years of trying, this is as good as it gets. Deal with it. Robert touched on the cognitive issue. Now throw in being lazy and violent and you have a permanent underclass.
Doesn’t the problem begin way before the college years? While there will always be kids who are below average intellectually, the schools seem to fail a far larger proportion so these kids get to community college or vocational training programs without basic academic skills. I would point to Harlem Success and KIPP vs the public schools to support my point.
College by any name is purported to be Road to happiness when I taught after completing my masters, I taught at a school for troubled, disadvantaged boys. One boy did not want college. His parents befuddled. He was smart. Took an apprenticeship to be a tool maker. His starting salary more than I made. My grandfather took the same starting in 1882. 12 years. More good vocational training important