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Tuesday, June 20. 2023

Do Colleges Prepare Students for Jobs?

It's a complex question, especially in US higher ed. Do Colleges Prepare Students for Jobs?


Just for the sake of argument, let's pretend that public secondary education is meant to produce competent youth with good citizenship.  That's an impossible goal, but a good idea.


But the US anyway, "higher ed" can mean almost anything from pure job-training to deep explorations of the liberal arts with higher STEM things (not job training, but more intellectual adventure for young adults).


Thus "college" has no specific meaning in the US now.



Posted by Bird Dog in Education at 15:11 | Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)

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It used to be that high school prepared students for school. Kids knew most of what they needed in order to live in the adult world. These days a majority of high school students don't know how to even balance a checkbook...or even how to write a check.

They don't understand what jobs require such as showing up for the job, being punctual, learning and performing the job duties. It applies whether one is working in a convenience store, a restaurant, hardware store, farm, or farther along in their lives, the hospital, the office, the lab, the job site, the factory, or whatever.

The thing is that college doesn't really prepare them either. In fact, college has tendency to extend their idle adolescent years.
#1 DCE (Link) on 2023-06-20 16:08 (Reply)
And nearly everyone gets A's for excellence and student loan payments that last as long as a mortgage if they could even afford the student debt and mortgage at the same time.
Zero study goes into teaching anything about debt obligations in either K-12 or college. Small wonder we are trillions in debt?
#2 indyjonesouthere on 2023-06-20 16:20 (Reply)
Yes in fields like computer science, engineering, medicine, etc. What colleges "can" do is help identify people who are smart and will work at something and finish it. But some of the smartest people I have known either didn't go to college or didn't finish college. So... it depends on so many factors.
#3 OneGuy on 2023-06-20 18:57 (Reply)
College is a construct of the white male patriarchy. (honk!)
The old saying a rich boy goes to college, a poor boy goes to work, has been overturned.
Making college "educations" common as dirt and opening the doors to everyone no matter what their ability will make degrees more valuable? (honk!)
Muh socialism/communism is gonna work this time, my purple haired gender studies professor told me so at the intersectional rainbow poop emojis class.

O/T-Why is Bill Gates giving $50 million to the CCP's PLA and why is only Gab talking about it?
#4 Jed Swayze on 2023-06-20 22:18 (Reply)
Very much back in the day, when our offsprings were in high school, we told them straight up: you will graduate, you will take further training, and you will get jobs to help pay for said training.

Let me say that we were fortunate that we live close to both a university and a technical school, with a college not that far down the road. So we could cut a bit more slack for our offsprings than could sib and spouse who live in a small-town and semi-rural part of the country with no nearby post-secondary institutions. Their solution was to match the offspring's earnings to get them the degrees, which they did. However, as sib observed, the rural kids are at a serious disadvantage for getting scholarships as finances decree they have to take at least five courses a year and so can't compete with the kids who take the minimum required for "full time" enrollment but have more time to study for fewer courses. However, sib's offsprings have done well.

So, back to our offsprings, all of whom expressed interest in majoring in drama. My response to this was "great, and how do you propose to feed yourself down the road?". As it happened, the offsprings all decided to take degrees which were marketable, though youngest did manage to combine accounting and drama (which led to a lot of Enron jokes, though the drama crowd were delighted at the thought that there would FINALLY be an accountant who thought like them).

It's another generation now, and we're looking at the grandbrats and wondering which will be the best path for them. We come of the cohart where working-class parents who were able to send their children to university did so if at all possible (remember hearing about a classmate whose parents were preparing to re-mortgage their home to give him a chance but - fortunately - he received enough scholarships so they didn't have to make the sacrifice). But now, conditions have changed, and am looking at grandbrats and wondering what their futures hold. Though, given our emphasis on our offspings' getting degrees which were marketable, think the grandbrats will be well advised by their parents.
#5 Frances on 2023-06-21 01:01 (Reply)
Yes, but to attract their marks, colleges market themselves as preparation for good jobs. So, if they aren't it's the old bait and switch. I noticed this back in the '70s during Bowl Games. Neither of the schools talked about the liberal arts or whatever, all hyped their technical/science majors leading to jobs.

But the question is very old. Unfortunately, the modern American college is now producing hothouse flowers that wilt in the cruel world instead of blooming earlier. Well, really they are producing cult members, may win and unravel the modern world for their gnostic masters.

QUOTE:
The idea is, of course, that men are successful because they have gone to college. No idea was ever more absurd. No man is successful because he has managed to pass a certain number of courses and has received a sheepskin which tells the world in Latin, that neither the world nor the graduate can read, that he has successfully completed the work required. If the man is successful, it is because he has the qualities for success in him; the college "education" has merely, speaking in terms' of horticulture, forced those qualities and given him certain intellectual tools with which to work—tools which he could have got without going to college, but not nearly so quickly. So far as anything practical is concerned, a college is simply an intellectual hothouse. For four years the mind of the undergraduate is put "under glass," and a very warm and constant sunshine is poured down upon it. The result is, of course, that his mind blooms earlier than it would in the much cooler intellectual atmosphere of the business world.

A man learns more about business in the first six months after his graduation than he does in his whole four years of college. But—and here is the "practical" result of his college work—he learns far more in those six months than if he had not gone to college. He has been trained to learn, and that, to all intents and purposes, is all the training he has received. To say that he has been trained to think is to say essentially that he has been trained to learn, but remember that it is impossible to teach a man to think. The power to think must be inherently his. All that the teacher can do is help him learn to order his thoughts—such as they are.

Marks, Percy, "Under Glass", Scribner's Magazine Vol 73, 1923, p 47


also from the article cited above:
QUOTE:
"A man does not come to college to learn to earn a living; he comes to college to learn live!"
#6 JK Brown on 2023-06-21 02:53 (Reply)
Many US colleges and universities have social justice mission. As such, they are an impediment to the "downtrodden" developing human capital.

QUOTE:
"Social justice is an actual impediment to acquiring human capital"
--Thomas Sowell


Many censor speech and inhibit open discussion, which means they inhibit the development of their students learning how to think rather than train them as happened in the past. For to learn to think, most people start by talking to others. Colleges formalize this by training students to write argumentative essays. But is topics, words, ideas are off limits, even if taken as "devil's advocate" then the students can't learn how to think. Thus the college is a credential mill.


Not to mention the college is doomed as AI can now replicate the professor so the value of a student learning and regurgitating what the professor knows is dropping below zero. If they are teaching problem solving the major is of little value in competition with AI. And if they are teaching discipline of intellect, regulation of emotions and establishing principles, then they aren't offering an education.
#7 JK Brown on 2023-06-21 03:06 (Reply)
College, and certifications too, don't help prepare for a job. They help get a job. Experience is the only way to learn how to do a job. That's why experience is, in many cases, more valuable than education.

I don't think that using high school to produce good citizens is an impossible goal. I think that and home economics should be the main purpose of high school.
#8 jack walter on 2023-06-21 07:02 (Reply)

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