If only 30 percent of America’s young adults manage to obtain a college degree, and if most new jobs do not require a bachelor’s, does it make sense to push college for all students in our K-12 system? A new report from Harvard’s “Pathways to Prosperity Project“ argues it does not. “The United States is expected to create 47 million jobs in the 10-year period ending in 2018,” the report notes, however ”only a third of these jobs will require a bachelor’s or higher degree.”
“We are the only developed nation that depends so exclusively on its higher education system as the sole institutional vehicle to help young people transition from secondary school to careers, and from adolescence to adulthood,” says the Harvard school of education’s Robert Schwartz, who lead the project. “Unless we are willing to provide more flexibility and choice in the last two years of high school, and more opportunities for students to pursue program options that link work and learning, we will continue to lose far too many young people along the path to graduation.”
The report calls for a broadening “the range of high-quality pathways that we offer young adults” including ”far more emphasis on career counseling and high-quality career education, as well as apprenticeship programs and community colleges as viable routes to well-paying jobs.” The report also calls for “a new social compact between society and our young people.”
“The compact’s central goal would be that by the time they reach their mid-20s, every young adult will be equipped with the education and experience he or she needs to lead a successful life as an adult. Achieving this goal would require far bigger contributions from the nation’s employers and governments.”
College for all is powerful moral argument, but it’s still a means to an end. The biggest picture goal of American education is to uphold the grand promise of upward mobility. It is perfectly obvious–at least to most teachers–that watered down standards and phony credit recovery schemes to boost graduation rates have done little to increase the number of truly college ready students produced by our K-12 system. It’s the education equivalent of kicking the can down the road. Also, we almost certainly lose far more low-SES students who do not see school as a means to any worthwhile end in their lives and quit the system completely.
Then too, there’s the fact that student loan debt now outpaces credit card debt in the U.S. In essence, we make the following bargain with too many young people: We’re insisting on pushing you through high school, taking classes for which you may be academically unprepared, and lowering the bar so you can pass (or use phony credit recovery schemes to say you passed). Then we’ll force you to rack up tens of thousands of dollars in debt for the privilege of failing in school, and getting frustrated in your attempt to get the kind of job we’re not creating in the first place.
Not everyone is happy with the report. “Every single time we create multiple tracks, we always send disproportionate numbers of poor kids and kids of color down the lesser one,” Ed Trust’s Kati Haycock tells Education Week. ”Until we can find a way not to do that, then people like me will object.”
What’s condemning young people to poverty, Joanne Jacobs observes, is not the lack of a degree, but the failure to learn reading, writing and math and dropping out of high school. “I think many low achievers could be motivated to learn academic skills in order to train for a job,” she writes. ”If the only motivation is the chance to spend more years in a classroom — almost certainly a remedial classroom — with a better job as a vague hope for the distant future . . . Maybe a few kids will catch college fever and go all the way to a bachelor’s degree. But not very many.”
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Pingback by Tweets that mention Common Sense Comes to Cambridge « The Core Knowledge Blog, The Core Knowledge Blog -- Topsy.com — February 4, 2011 @ 12:05 am
“Every single time we create multiple tracks, we always send disproportionate numbers of poor kids and kids of color down the lesser one,” Ed Trust’s Kati Haycock tells Education Week. ”Until we can find a way not to do that, then people like me will object.”
I love this logic. In order to prevent an undesirable outcome that already exists, we’re going to choose to continue pursuing a system that is failing.
That is, what people like Kati Haycock object to is that poor kids and minorities are going to be underrepresented in college if we track. Umm, aren’t poor kids ALREADY underrepresented? Wouldn’t it be better if the kids who fail to reach or succeed in higher education had the opportunity to pursue other pathways to a middle class life?
Also, I object to her contention that non-college pathways to careers are “lesser.” Isn’t the point of the Harvard research that the idea that careers that don’t require college degrees are “lesser ones” is antiquated? Isn’t this the very idea that leads so many poor and minority kids to miss out on a middle class life?
I’m tired of hearing education pundits sacrifice reality for utopian ideals and non-college bound kids’ futures for feelings. It’s an outrage.
Comment by Anthony Guzzaldo — February 4, 2011 @ 5:55 pm
If we can’t get them to support voc ed, maybe we can get the Kati Haycocks of the world to support the Core Knowledge curriculum. It seems to me that CK would increase the numbers of poor and minority kids who turn out college-ready.
Comment by Ben F — February 5, 2011 @ 1:51 am
@Ben Let me state unequivocally that Kati Haycock has been absolutely stalwart in her support for Core Knowledge, both personally and professionally. While CK is not a college prep curriculum per se — the perceived benefits of shared knowledge and language competence are essential for ALL people from professors to cab drivers — it is clearly a means of turning out K-12 students who are closer to meeting the test of college ready. I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with Kati on initiatives related to CK. Suffice it to say, she gets it.
Comment by Robert Pondiscio — February 5, 2011 @ 8:34 am
I’m glad that Kati Haycock supports Core Knowledge. But that doesn’t excuse her from criticism on this issue. Of course, in the Education Week piece, she is not given space to express her complete view, but what she did say would take an awful lot of clarification to move it out of the “thoughtless knee-jerk” category of response. We here in the trenches, remember, are the ones who deal the human wreckage after the gods and goddesses on Wonkolympus have indulged their latest whimsy. I am particularly critical of Michael Cohen, cited in the Ed Week article. He thinks the “College for All” trope is a “strawman.” This is a woefully uninformed comment. I’ve seen “College-for-all” destroy the vocational education program in my middle school and reduce our high school’s award-winning program to a hollow shell. Our town had put a half-million dollars, at least, just into the equipment of my school’s shop and home-ec programs. Twice a day in a 7 period schedule the kids enjoyed an exploratory courses in wood shop, electronics and mechanics shop, home economics, chorus, band, and computers. For the time that these programs flourished, most kids actually thought middle school was fun. And the kids who didn’t have an academic bone in their bodies—and that is not a comment about their intelligence—these kids could understand the worth of the fundamental instructional paradigm. But then, taking her cue from the Wonkolympians, who were enthralled by “higher order thinking skills” at the time—the wretched precursor to College-for-all—a new, ambitious Superintendent eliminated the shop and home-ec programs, and cut deeply into all the rest so that today our non-academic kids failing to get even the faintest exposure to the real world of work where, as the Harvard study points out, only about a 3rd of our jobs need a four-year degree and do not require any sort of ancillary manual skills. Our 7 period schedule now is a drudgery. Since band is an elective, the only relief they get from the dreary grind is art every other day for one semester, then chorus every other day the next. The computer course remains, but the kids spend far too much time on their own hooks in front of video displays to consider this a stimulating activity. Strawman indeed! It is the same nationwide. Vocational education in the local districts has been defunded and destroyed. The systems of state tech schools, such as those mentioned in CA and MA in the Edweek article, are in some cases well funded. But in almost every state that funding has come at the expense of of the feeder programs, your initial exposure programs, in the local districts. They are gone in middle schools, gutted in rural and suburban high schools, and have long been eliminated in city schools. Here in Rhode Island we have as exhibit A in that last category, Central Falls High School, where, but for the rump-end of a business ed. program that once was strong, there is no credible vocational program.Vocational education is not on the agenda. It has been sucked out of the room by this truly imbecilic idea, College-for-all. That’s the bottom line that the Harvard study draws. It’s a very real, crucial phenomenon, Kati Haycock and Michael Cohen. You can quantify it. You are wonks, aren’t you? Do your jobs! Or at least when somebody else does the job as the Harvard people have done, pay some respectful attention.
Comment by bill eccleston — February 5, 2011 @ 3:08 pm
I absolutely agree with Ms. Haycock’s concerns about poor or minority students being funneled into a “lesser” track. But I wonder how much less equipped poorer students are to handle the $20,000+ college loan debt the average American university graduate leaves with than students of means.
As a recent graduate, I can vouch that the promise of a college education–that the more education you have the richer and happier you will be–has been debunked by the recession. It’s time for us to consider new paradigms for our education system and economy!
Comment by Alison F. Solove — February 5, 2011 @ 3:16 pm
It’s been a few years, but to discuss the non-college track honestly I think one would do well to get a copy of Matthew Crawford’s Shopcraft as Soulcraft.
here’s a link to the essay that became the 2006 book
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-soulcraft
Crawford eloquently argues that we’re misjudging the challenges (and rewards) inherent in high quality craftsmanship when we tell kids that becoming a carpenter, plumber or mechanic is less valuable or remunerative than college.
well worth another look
Comment by matthew — February 7, 2011 @ 12:10 am
The truly skilled trades are harder than being a marketing associate or a loan officer. Probably harder in some ways than being a K-3 teacher But let’s not forget that the skilled trades are not the typical route for non-college-seeking youth, just based on the numbers.
Comment by pinetree — February 7, 2011 @ 9:12 am