Colleges and High Schools Aren't Preparing Students for the Workplace

[Geee]

Washington Examiner:

Colleges and high schools aren’t preparing students for the workplace
By: J.P. FREIRE
Associate Commentary Editor
07/12/10 2:55 PM EDT

Jobs are hard to come by, but as they do become more available, employers are having a hard time filling positions with qualified candidates. The problem? Lack of math skills. It seems that everyone makes out well from high school and college, except those who must pay for and attend them.

Remember all those college administrators and high school teachers who talk about ethnic and cultural studies, and all those other education fashions conservatives love to riff on? Turns out they don’t make a lick of difference to employers’ bottom line. From the New York Times:

Plenty of people are applying for the jobs. The problem, the companies say, is a mismatch between the kind of skilled workers needed and the ranks of the unemployed.

Economists expect that Friday’s government employment report will show that manufacturers continued adding jobs last month, although the overall picture is likely to be bleak. With the government dismissing Census workers, more jobs might have been cut than added in June.

That’s not the embarrassing part, though. The embarrassing part comes down to how, for all the government’s carping about getting more people into college, our workers know less and less coming out of even high school, a government monopoly where teachers unions have been running the asylum for years. What, do you think that the applicants these manufacturers are rejecting are coming out of private schools? The unions make out just fine with near-permanent jobs from which their members can’t be fired. The students? Not so much:

The Obama administration has advocated further stimulus measures, which the Senate rejected, and has allocated more money for training. Still, officials say more robust job creation is the real solution.

But a number of manufacturers say that even if demand surges, they will never bring back many of the lower-skilled jobs, and that training is not yet delivering the skilled employees they need.

You know what’s a good place to consider job training? High school, which is currently center stage for news-of-the-day fights over which textbooks to use or whether certain American flag-embroidered t-shirts are inappropriate. It makes sense when you think that all of this is preparation for college — which is less about job training now, and more a seminar in political orthodoxy. (Here are the Boston Phoenix’s Muzzle awards, which highlight prohibitions of freedom of speech, if you need an example. Or go to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and look at their speech code database.)

Oh but don’t worry about the enforcement of political orthodoxy — the kids aren’t listening. In fact, they’re not even studying:

…[N]ew research, conducted by two California economics professors, shows that over the past five decades, the number of hours that the average college student studies each week has been steadily dropping. According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s average student hits the books for just 14 hours.

The decline, Babcock and Marks found, infects students of all demographics. No matter the student’s major, gender, or race, no matter the size of the school or the quality of the SAT scores of the people enrolled there, the results are the same: Students of all ability levels are studying less.

So what if they want to live a little and study less? Our students are better at multitasking these days, right? So they can do more with less! Except Georgetown University’s one-year pricetag for a single student is $40,000. Just what is that $40,000 for? Check the mission statement on the main “about” page:

Today, Georgetown is a major international research university that embodies its founding principles in the diversity of our students, faculty, and staff, our commitment to justice and the common good, our intellectual openness, and our international character.

So there you go. We structure our high schools to churn out as many eager candidates for college on the false pretense it’ll help you get a job. That way you can pay your $40,000 to become a face in a school’s diversity pledge, and to tie yourself to the faculty’s “commitment to justice and the common good,” whatever that means relative to the academic fashions of the day.

Oh, by the way, that school’s president, John DeGioia, earns a salary just under $1 million, as the Examiner’s own Emily Babay reported last week. (Let’s remind everyone that Georgetown is a non-profit institution.) So I guess all this does make sure somebody gets a high-paying job — it’s just not you or your kids. It’s the high school teachers union and the high-rolling university president.