Why we need more vocational education
And realize that college is not the right choice for most youths.
I believe that government policy should be based on three key goals:
Promote long-term economic growth (the topic of my second book)
Create a prosperous working class
Promote a clear pathway that enables youths from low-income families to enter the prosperous working class (the topic of this article).
To implement the third goal, we need a Pathway to Success so youths from low-income families promote their own Upward Mobility. The first step in the Pathway to Success is to graduate from high school. The days of being able to earn a good living on a high school degree alone are long gone, however. Employers require technical and interpersonal skills that are far above what is taught in a typical high school. The Pathway to Success must have an additional education step to prepare youths for the job environment.
While there is very broad agreement on the goal of graduating from high school, what to do afterward is more controversial. Typically, adults advise youth, whether their children or others, to go to college and graduate. Unfortunately, only about a third of youths achieve that goal. Another third acquire some form of post-secondary schooling, but this generally does not help them as much as completing a four-year degree.
It is important that going to college and graduating with a four-year degree is not a required step in the Pathway to Success. This is a classic case of shooting too high and causing far too many youths to fail. It is simply not realistic to expect 90+% of youths to graduate with a four-year college degree. This would require:
a massive expansion in the number of universities
a radical decline in standards for admission
a lowering of standards for grading, reading assignments, and writing assignments
a very large investment in time and money for lower-income youths
an increase in college debt
Nor is it clear that it would increase wages for the additional youths who received college degrees. It is difficult to know if this is a long-term trend, but the college wage premium has declined since 2012. That in combination with increasing college debt makes college far less appealing for lower-income youths.
Going to university makes a great deal of sense for youths in the Top 25% of intelligence and academic aptitude, particularly if they want to pursue a career in law, business, finance, engineering, and physical sciences. But few youths from lower-income families fit into that category. If they do, of course, they should have the opportunity to do so and compete as equals with those from higher-income families, but it should not be considered the default pathway to success.
The vast majority of the content that is taught in universities is simply not relevant for the vast majority of youths from working-class and lower-income families. And, yes, I used to be a professor so I know a little bit about the subject.
The reality is that employers value workers with a four-year degree, not for what youths learned while in college, but as a simple criterion for characteristics that are more difficult to measure. Employers know that a graduate with a four-year college degree likely has higher-than-average intelligence and the ability to make short-term sacrifices for long-term goals. By requiring a four-year college degree, employers are effectively screening out the bottom two-thirds of Americans on those key characteristics. And if employers make hiring decisions based on the prestige of the university, they can screen out even more applicants.
Because employers do not care so much about what youths learn in university, if more youths graduate with four-year degrees, employers will simply raise the hiring standards. Employers will insist that employees have a graduate degree or that they go to a very prestigious university. Youths will be put on an academic treadmill of constantly increasing levels of education to get the same job.
Increasing the proportion of youths who graduate from college will not change American jobs in the slightest. It will only remove youths from employment for longer and longer periods.
There are, of course, some degrees that do teach important skills that employers desire. Degrees in law, business, finance, engineering, and physical sciences are coveted by employers who look for talent with those skills.
But those who have four-year degrees in those fields make up at most 10% of the American population. I do not doubt that increasing the number of graduates in those fields will benefit American youths and the American economy, but that is a completely different message from the far more common “go to college” message.
See more articles on Upward Mobility:
I also will be writing a significant number of excerpts from my forthcoming book: Upward Mobility: A Radical New Agenda to Uplift the Poor and Working Class. Most of these excerpts will only be available to paid subscribers.
Vocational Education
Fortunately, there is another educational model that we can learn from: vocational education. Widely used in Central Europe and Scandinavia, vocational education combines academic and vocational training in secondary school. Nations such as Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland all have some blend of vocational training in secondary school. Students typically rotate a period learning a practical job skill with a period of academic classes.
While some portray vocational education as an inegalitarian class-based system, all the nations with vocational education have lower levels of income inequality than the United States. Rather than pushing the “go to college” mantra, these nations acknowledge that many youths are better served with practical job training.
Switzerland has a particularly strong program. Switzerland has a prosperous economy that is highly competitive in the world marketplace. Switzerland also has a population that is ethnically diverse (with German, French, Italian, and Romance citizens) and religiously diverse (with Catholics and Protestants). Finally, the Swiss vocational education program is strongly supported by labor unions, businesses as well as parties on both the left and the right.
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