post in space: BA

Showing posts with label BA. Show all posts

credential deflation

Choosing Democracy: This is a tough budget; CBP

Well California can certainly do something to help people in this crisis. A start would be enacting laws that require jobs in city and state government to be open to those with a high school degree. Rollback the BA if no one can get one. And if a high school degree gets you nothing, why should kids complete it? There are absolutely no incentives here but lots of legal harassment. If the entire K-12 compulsory education gets one nothing, we have a broken system.

Credentialism as exclusionary tactic has a long history but there has always been pushback against that in the US. I sat with many parents at a Rethinking Education conference many years ago discussing this very topic. We will have to be clear about the difference between education and schooling as well as between education and credentials in order to make changes. If we do not understand these core concepts, we cannot make policies that are coherent.

The high school diploma was a credential and if that credential loses all value, then the entire K-12 path is called into question. If two years of college is required or desired, then there has to be a path for people that is provided for all, as public schooling has been, since the decline of agricultural work. But this one isn't yet another easy extension to the ever-growing number of years of schooling as the length in and of itself is starting to impede the learning it tries to facilitate. It becomes a weeding out process rather than a social service.

And that's not good.

background post
how is requiring a BA legal?

the $10,000 degree

Governor Perry called for $10,000 degree in his State of the Union address recently. It turns out Texas already has a $10,000 degree and it may be cut soon.

South Texas College is one of three community colleges in Texas — the others are Brazosport College and Midland College — authorized to offer a Bachelor of Applied Technology degree. It’s a real, honest-to-goodness bachelor’s degree, designed for students who already have an Associate of Applied Science — a technical degree that often doesn’t transfer to traditional universities. It can be leveraged into middle management positions or even the pursuit of a master’s degree. And the cost tends to be in the $10,000 range.

Joanne Jacobs has a post up on how to do one of these degrees: a large initial investment, online lectures and classes, and, of course, it would testing.

Provide mandatory state-wide standardized tests for each year of each program, providing an accurate measure of student learning. The College Learning Assessment, as well as CLEP and GRE Subject exams, could be used to measure students’ progress in critical thinking, logic, writing skills, and discipline-specific competencies. These results could be used to evaluate both courses and instructors on a rigorous, value-added basis for students of different backgrounds and aptitudes.

Jacobs has this to say:

Well-prepared, motivated learners could earn a $9,900 degree in three years. The average college student, shaky on math and writing skills and used to hand-holding in high school, isn’t likely to make it without a lot more support. But it would be very interesting to see how many students would rise to the challenge in hopes of saving time and money.

Most students at traditional schools get very little support, if any. School structure is costly and all factors weigh against kids, the poorer, the harder it is. Schools scold kids for being unprepared while doing a poor job of providing support and structure and coherency. The big state university is an administrative and unresponsive institution: it is not student centered. Ivies give real support but not most schools.

And poorly-prepared students are not causing higher ed to cost more, just as poor people who want housing didn't cause the mortgage crisis. Students are poorly prepared because of schooling itself.

An even better way to do it would be for Texas to let each student use the 10,000 in ways that they choose and this method would allow the students to drive the process and might bring more and better results. And if that was done by all schools, K-12, as voluntary learning centers, we may even be able to reinvigorate the high school diploma and pack more education in less time.

Wouldn't all this hurt the schools, the large institutions, that benefit whether kids learn or not? We need states to make investments in green energy and perhaps big upfront investments could be made into other areas that would provide more return and sustainability.

Related articles

Krugman on degrees

Degrees and Dollars, an op ed by Paul Krugman, questions whether college degrees for all are the key to a middle-class life. From the essay:

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

...

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.
What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

It seems to me that the huge move within the past 30 years for everyone to get a college degree actually contributed to this situation. The oversupply and abundance of BAs created the required BA for many jobs that did not previously need them. This in turn boosts requirements all across the board as American tried to out-compete themselves.

Boosting the wages and quality of all jobs is vital. The blogosphere seems to only recognize unions as the way forward to good wages. Unions are fine and needed in many places. But there is more we can do: how about more co-ownership, stock sharing and everyone-in plans not unlike what some Silicon Valley companies have done. In addition, a social safety net that put a floor on poverty would allow us to actually upgrade all jobs in incremental ways such as vacations, time off, and green methods that make jobs safer. We need all jobs to be good jobs. Job sharing and flex-time all over with more time off would help the economy and people.

Mass schooling (not to be confused with learning) creates the credentialism that is actively harming most kids as they try to get what it takes for a job even as debt loads explode. People are attending community colleges that teach remedial classes designed to overcome the poor classes previously taken. Mass schooling creates good jobs in administering mass schools. Credential manufacturing also inflates the worth of the credentialed and it is a game for the elite.

education (aka mass schooling) is not the answer to wage inequality

In Brief: The schools were never designed to function as a jobs program, wage inequality has grown, and calls for youth to all pay money for a BA will not fix the problem.

Open Economics has a piece, discussing the power gap, based on Lawrence Mishel's paper, Education is Not the Cure for High Unemployment or Income Inequality. which examines how education will not be the answer to the unemployment problem (China has large numbers of college grads who are unemployed). One quote from the paper:

Together, these trends suggest that the forthcoming supply of college graduates is meeting the growing demands of employers for such workers. Moreover, these trends suggest that a rapid expansion of the supply of college graduates will cause the wages of college graduates to decline, assuming that the productivity–pay gap continues unabated. We can expect the wages of young college graduates and male college graduates (whose wages are currently in decline) to experience the steepest declines.
That may or may not be a desirable outcome, but it is definitely not the outcome that most people would expect given the claims that graduating many more people from college will prevent a rise of inequality or reduce inequality.

and the author concludes (emphasis mine):

The challenge, in my view, is to provide a much broader path to prosperity, one that encompasses those at every education level. The nation’s productivity has grown a great deal in the last 30 years, up 80% from 1979 to 2009, and such productivity growth or better can be expected in the future. Yet with all the income generated in the past and expected in the future it is difficult to explain why more people have not seen rapid income growth. It is not the economy that has limited or will limit strong income growth, but rather the economic policies pursued and the distribution of economic and political power that are the limiting factor.

via Wikimedia Commons

As the studies show, just getting more people a BA will not fix this problem. Unaddressed by these discussions of BA, yes or no, is the question of our new and problematic reliance on schooling as job training and placement. Is this a sustainable and healthy system of providing jobs? Never before in US history have Americans had to depend solely on a centralized education structure for jobs: training was diverse and local when most jobs were agricultural or local businesses and schools provided a broad base of skills for most, a road to advanced training for some, and not a system of credentialing -- which the calls for universal BAs would imply it is now.

And now we have allowed the schools, instead of providing a free service to citizens, to flip that and require that citizens begin to pay the schools for additional training after 12 long years. That is a significant change and an ominous one.

Meanwhile, my post on one company's hiring policies shows a way companies can make entry paths for a wider variety of employees. Zoho finds these employees do well.

the required BA

I have always wondered how exactly a BA can be required when a college education is not provided free to everyone, as public schooling was when the high school degree became standard after WWII. In other industrialized countries, college is free but in the US, it is not.

Is it legally justifiable for a hiring company to require a college diploma?

The industrial education complex is at its most powerful when we don't even question the assumptions it puts on the public. One of its greatest triumphs is establishing "a college degree" as a prerequisite for advanced degrees and entry level corporate jobs.
But does anyone other than colleges benefit from this? Is this a symbiotic relationship for the stakeholders of a business and society as a whole? Or is it a "we do it because we have done it" situation?

Clark Aldrich also has another post up, The College Problem, about what John Holt called the credentialing process that is also excellent.

Having said that, the value of college degrees are artificially propped up by discriminatory corporate hiring practices. Many of the best entry and even mid-level jobs assume a college degree, despite the dubious connection between the skills bestowed by many colleges and the skills required in the job itself.

I do have a post up about Zoho's hiring practices.

free college

The title says it all: The Hell with Student Loans -- It's Time for College to Be Free, as it is many other industrialized countries. And in the past in the US, college was not necessary for the majority of people to get a job that could sustain a family.

And the case against Early Admissions argues that financially-strapped students are at a disadvantage

the necessity of college?

A post about families being forced to choose between paying for college and retirement savings. This post concludes with easy acceptance of this situation. I was in a homeschooling conference group talking about credentialing and monopoly many years ago and we were far more critical of the situation.

Now that a college degree is a prerequisite to obtaining a decent job, voters should support candidates who will make increasing financial aid a priority and who are committed to investing in our nation’s higher education infrastructure.

We do not have to accept that the BA is a standard prerequisite to a good job. In fact, accepting that a BA is a prerequisite to a good job, i.e., a job that can support a family, means accepting an unsustainable system not driven from the grassroots but from a corporate-school alliance that makes good jobs manufacturing people. It means citizens will not only pay taxes for a public system of education, expensively run with a top-down design and funded by compulsory attendance laws, but we will all pay additional private money for job training (college is not free in the US unlike in other industrialized countries) for the first time in US history. And it won't end there: next will be more degrees ...

I posted about Zoho's experiments in this area here. Many businesses already do extensive training. Advanced training is not the same as a degree, whose many requirements only serve to fund schools.

And with increasing numbers of young people unable to afford college or being drained of their slim financial resources by community and state colleges that never graduate them, there will be a great number of people who can educate themselves online. They will have to pioneer alternative ways of providing qualifications and look for alternative hiring practices that will allow them access and a chance to perform.

UPDATE: via Joanne Jacobs, no money for all these degrees

hiring practices at Zoho

(Updated: 6/22/13 New link at Zoho, old one was down)
Zoho's blog has a post up Grades Measure Test-Taking Skills and Interviews Measure Interviewing Skills that discusses their positive experiences hiring people without college degrees. Sridhar explains:

Our company in India always faced trouble recruiting, because most college graduates, particularly from well-known colleges, would prefer big-brand-name firms. Simply out of sheer necessity, we started to disregard the kind of college a person graduated from, and the grades they obtained. In India, that task was made even easier, because much of the Indian industry is boringly conventional, and job advertisements that specify things like "Must have a minimum of 80% average in college" are fairly common (so if you got only 79%, don't bother to apply). As a result, we get a lot of the arbitrarily-cut-off category applicants. What we found over time was that there is a lot of really good talent in that pool, which the industry had overlooked. Based on a few years of observation, we noticed that there was little or no correlation between academic performance, as measured by grades & the type of college a person attended, and their real on-the-job performance. That was a genuine surprise, particularly for me, as I grew up thinking grades really mattered.

He then explains how they expanded their hiring to deliberately pick students who were not going to college and train them and how these people were virtually indistinguishable from other employees. To their credit, Zoho continues this practice.

the expensive and overrated BA

The recent acceptance (within he last 30 years) of the BA as the "new high school degree," reflects the greatest privatization and steepest price hike in job training in US history. Yglesias linked to this report summary (report here) describing how expensive getting a college education actually is in the US:

The United States is the most expensive country in which to pursue a postsecondary education. On average, it costs almost $125,000 in public and private expenditures, and the US is more skewed towards private costs than any other nation except Korea. Americans must personally invest nearly $60,000 to obtain a degree, almost three times more than the next highest country, Canada, where citizens must pay an average of just over $20,000. We spend more public dollars than all but six countries as well.

At the same time, college degrees pay off the most in the United States. Even after the large financial investment, a postsecondary degree is worth $113,000 in today’s dollars to American males and $82,000 for American women. For males, this is 33% higher than any other country, and for females the figure is 47%.

Many, many jobs that only required a high school degree now routinely require a BA even though a BA cannot be gotten in a free public institution like the public schools (not really free because the fees required in public schools are shockingly high and climbing.) The wage differential reflects the substantially smaller safety net and lack of progressive economic policies that preserve the economic habitat in the US. That puts immense pressure on citizens to somehow fund a college education in order to get one of the few good jobs left.

It is really not clear how the BA is any better than a high school degree for many positions currently requiring one. As soon as mass, compulsory education was achieved, the US moved to the high school degree from the 8th-grade graduation as the majority of jobs moved from agricultural to industrial though most jobs still do extensive training. And even if many jobs will need higher math and science skills, it is not clear that people need a BA to achieve these. The computer industry was built by self-taught programmers working within a healthy economic environment. Over time, colleges have struggled to ensure they can manufacture computer degrees and now they finally cornered the market. Rather, it seems that the bulky and ineffective K-12 so-called system is assumed to be dysfunctional and a BA ensures that educational levels rise, a BA being the new high school degree, and system reform or even democratic system change is remote.

Years ago I sat with other homeschooling parents in a session (at the wonderful Rethinking Education conferences; this link is an example, not the actual conference I attended which was one of the early ones) where many parents discussed this credentialing as a way of creating a monopoly. Parents discussed how Lincoln could read the law and take the exam and how that had changed over time to requiring law school. It is an unsustainable system that feeds on itself. It is not unlike the military that now threatens to sink the country economically in the name of patriotism.