Is ‘college for all’ the real enemy?
After reading Complete College America‘s Time is the Enemy report, which details very low graduation rates for low-income and part-time students, Fordham Foundation’s Mike Petrilli wonders if the college-for-all push is setting students up for failure.
. . . less than half of Pell-eligible students pursuing a four-year degree graduate within six years. For part-time Pell students, it’s more like 17 percent. The numbers are similar for African-American and Hispanic students.
It’s worth trying to strengthen K-12 to cut the need for remediation, Petrilli writes. It should be easier for students to transfer credits and move quickly to a degree.
But I can’t help but wonder: with so many kids dropping out of college–and especially so many poor kids–should we reconsider our assumption that higher education is the ticket to the middle class? Isn’t it possible that lots of these kids would be better off pursuing the trades or (dare I say) the military? If you could figure out a way to do a rigorous study, I’d bet a lot of money that the military has a much better retention rate than higher education for similar young adults–and a much better track record at propelling its “graduates” into middle-class jobs.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be so sure” that education is “the ticket to a better life,” Petrilli writes.
If students actually got an education, it probably would be a ticket to somewhere, even in a job-poor economy. Going to college to flunk remedial math is not the path to success.
College shouldn’t be the only K-12 goal
Higher education shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of K-12 education, writes “edu-traitor” Cathy Davidson, an English professor, in an Inside Higher Ed commentary.
Higher education is incredibly valuable, even precious, for many. But it is bad for individuals and society to be retrofitting learning all the way back to preschool, as if the only skills valuable, vital, necessary in the world are the ones that earn you a B.S., BA, or a graduate and professional degree.
Many jobs require specialized knowledge, intelligence and skills, but not a college education, Davidson notes. Yet our educational system “defines learning so narrowly that whole swaths of human intelligence, skill, talent, creativity, imagination, and accomplishment do not count.”
Schools are cutting art, music, P.E. and shop to focus on college prep, Davidson complains. (I’d say schools are cutting electives — especially shop — to focus on basic reading and math skills.)
. . . many brilliant, talented young people are dropping out of high school because they see high school as implicitly “college prep” and they cannot imagine anything more dreary than spending four more years bored in a classroom when they could be out actually experiencing and perfecting their skills in the trades and the careers that inspire them.
We need value “the full range of intellectual possibility and potential for everyone,” Davidson writes.
The brilliant, talented kid who drops out to pursue a passion for art, carpentry or cosmetology is a rare bird, I think. But Davidson is right about the college-or-bust mentality in K-12 education. Many students who are bored by academics could be motivated — maybe even inspired — by a chance to develop marketable skills.
Some 80 percent of new community college students say they want to earn a bachelor’s degree. They sign up for remedial or general education courses. Few succeed. Students who pursue vocational goals — a welding certificate, an associate degree in medical technology — are far more likely to graduate.
Pushing the trades
Fewer students are training for jobs in the skilled trades, despite the demand for welders, plumbers and skilled manufacturing and construction workers, reports Community College Times.
The Trades in Focus Community College Initiative, a campaign through the American Association of Community Colleges, is trying to connect employers, colleges and potential students. W.W. Grainger Inc., a distributor of industrial products, is the sponsor.
For example, Joe Snyder works full-time as an electrical technician apprentice at a MAG machine tool facility while taking free night classes in manufacturing engineering technology at Gateway Community and Technical College (GCTC) in Kentucky. He hopes to earn an associate degree.
Today at the annual AACC convention, college presidents and industry executives will discuss attracting more students to industrial trades’ careers.
The skilled labor shortage will get worse in the next few years as aging workers retire, predicts Trade in Focus. ”One-third of all skilled plumbers will leave the workforce in the next few years, while demand for plumbers is expected to increase by 10 percent through 2016.”
However, many job seekers don’t know that trades jobs require problem-solving and technical skills, says Erin Ptacek, director of corporate brand and reputation for Grainger.
Since 2006, Grainger has funded $2,000 Tools for Tomorrow scholarships for community college students pursuing careers in the industrial trades, such as welding, plumbing, HVAC, electrical and construction. One third of the scholarships now go to military veterans, who often learned transferable skills while serving. In 2011, Grainger will offer 200 scholarships through 100 community colleges across the country.
Gary Green, president of Forsyth Technical Community College (FTCC) in North Carolina, has seen enrollment in the skilled trades programs start to grow.
FTCC is working with Caterpillar, which is helping to train students to work in its new plant.
In addition, the college is training students for work in the state’s $6 billion motor sports industry. Producing and operating racing cars for the NASCAR circuit calls for “high levels of skill and exacting specifications,” Green says.
. . . “There is always a risk that these jobs could be outsourced if we don’t produce the highly skilled workers needed to undertake that kind of manufacturing,” Green says.
San Diego Community College District (SDCCD) can’t meet the demand for training in skilled trades. There are opportunities in infrastructure and commercial construction, as well as energy-efficient construction.
The large military presence in San Diego has spurred SDCCD to recruit military veterans and pair their broad-based skills with jobs in aircraft maintenance, automotive technology and other trades, (Dean Lynne) Ornelas says. The Vets2Jets program at SDCCD’s Miramar College provides counseling and career workshops to help people leaving the military make the transition to college.
Kentucky has lost low-wage, low-skill jobs. Gateway is training workers for new jobs in electronics, mechatronics, hydraulics and pneumatics, which pay an average of $51,000.
The MAG plant where Joe Snyder works has automated its processes for manufacturing equipment to make aircraft fuselages.
“The operator has to know how to operate and program the machine, how to test the quality of materials produced, and understand how the machine fits into the overall production process,” Hughes says.
GCTC has partnered with several local companies that work with the college to design apprenticeship and training programs and subsidize all or part of students’ tuition while they work in paid jobs.
The college created its “gee-whiz center” equipped with computer-run manufacturing machines to interest high school students in manufacturing careers. In addition, GCTC instructors teach mechatronics courses at local high schools.
Wanted: plumbers, electricians, carpenters
Worldwide, there’s a shortage of skilled trades workers, concludes a Manpower survey, Strategic Migration: A Short-Term Solution to the Skilled Trades Shortage. On Marketplace, Nancy Marshall Genzer interviews Manpower CEO Jeff Joerres, who says parents push their children to go college “no matter what.”
Jeff Joerres: It almost seems better to spend $30,000 and end up waiting tables after four years of college than to spend half of that and be productive and have a career in the skilled trades.
Despite the recession, which has hit construction hard, construction firms are having trouble hiring skilled plumbers, electricians and carpenters, says Clark University business professor Gary Chaison. If the economy recovers, employers may look overseas to find skilled tradesmen. The long-term solution is to offer more and better vocational programs to train Americans.
Skilled trades workers are the number one or two hiring challenge in the United States, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Brazil, according to Manpower.
Jobs, jobs, jobs
Preparing students for jobs “should be front and center in the thinking of educators,” writes Camille Paglia in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics.
Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where students can work with their hands as “ceramicists, weavers, woodworkers, metal smiths, jazz drummers.” They’re a lot happier than students with “trendy, word-centered educations,” she writes.
Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity. Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children.
. . . educators whose salaries are paid by hopeful parents have an obligation to think in practical terms about the destinies of their charges. That may mean a radical stripping down of course offerings, with all teachers responsible for a core curriculum. But every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools.
A word-centered education worked fine for me. My only manual skill is touch-typing. But many young people are wasting a lot of time and money in college because their real goal is not to get an education but to get job credentials. Often they end up with a lot of debt and no degree.
Hands on, brains on
In Shakespeare with Power Tools, Erin Carlyle explains how St. Paul College in Minnesota made it to number one on the Washington Monthly’s list of the 50 best community colleges. Once a vocational high school, St. Paul is now a “community and technical college,” blending liberal arts programs with vocational classes.
About two-thirds of Saint Paul students are either first-generation college-goers, of color, from low-income families, or some combination of the three. Many are immigrants, reflecting the area’s high concentration of Somalis and Hmong. Students like that tend to drown in impersonal lectures. So Saint Paul classes are small, averaging nineteen students. Teachers roam the rooms, providing guidance as students work on individual assignments and group projects.
On the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, “nearly all of the students surveyed at Saint Paul said they had discussed ideas or readings from class with their instructors outside of class time. At most two-year schools, close to half of the students never do this.”
Ninety-three percent of Saint Paul students work with their instructors on activities other than coursework. Nationwide, about 70 percent of students at two-year schools say that they never do this. Ninety-eight percent of Saint Paul students say they’ve taught or tutored other students. Less than one-third of students nationwide have had the same experience.
St. Paul instructors in both trades and liberal arts classes stress problem solving.
Compared to other community colleges, the instructors at Saint Paul spend more time teaching students to evaluate and synthesize information, make judgments about it, and apply concepts to perform new skills. This is as true in vocational classes as it is in the traditional liberal arts disciplines.
. . . Saint Paul hasn’t just brought the hands-on ethos and intense student-faculty interaction of the trades to the liberal arts. It’s brought the critical thinking and wide perspective of the liberal arts to the trades.
Saint Paul’s graduation rate of 41 percent is well above the national average for community colleges. If a student is struggling, the instructor can send an online “early alert” to a “retention specialist,” who will contact the student to offer help.
Despite the high number of immigrant students, the college has decided to set high expectations, says Thomas Matos, director of student services. “ ‘You have to work for the grades you get in the classroom.’ And then we work to give them the services that support them.”
