"Education Costs" - Deb Milbrath, Cartoon Movement
Showing posts with label school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label school. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 12, 2019
Privately educated still take most top jobs
Although, this article is highlighting a report on British education system & the resultant employment prospects from the private institutions of that education system, this can easily be extended to everywhere around the world.
Private schools, colleges, & universities in US & Canada are similarly regarded as producing highly talented individuals, who then are employed in top jobs. Although, there are no private universities in Canada, yet, but the cost of education in public universities is skyrocketing, & obtaining that education is becoming a luxury for many. The pricier the degree, the more respect it earns from the industry.
It's the same case in developing countries, like Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, India, Pakistan, etc. Private education system has merely become the profit-making tool for a few industrialists. Public education system has been eroded or the industry sector doesn't favour the graduates of those. Graduates of private education system are highly regarded in the industry, & even there, the more expensive the degree (i.e. IBA & LUMS), the more respect the grad earns, & hence, obtaining that top spot in the industry becomes that much easier.
Of course, this disparity will continue on, even if the private education system starts taking in students on the basis of merit. The reason being that the graduates of these top private schools have strong alumni networks in the top tiers of industry, who pull their fellow graduates up, while leaving behind the graduates of public education system. This "networking" will continue on. Coupled this networking issue in the developed world with the not-so-strong financial situation of the immigrants there, & you can see that immigrants & their children do not make it to the top tiers of the industry in the developed world.
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Individuals educated at private schools continue to land the majority of top jobs in leading fields, including law, politics, journalism and the arts ... .
Results published by the Sutton Trust ... show that while the previous decade has shown “small signs” of narrowing inequality levels, often more than 70% of top jobs are given to those who were privately educated.
Only 7% of British youngsters attend private school, but the study showed that 74% of judges and 71% of high ranking military officers attended fee-paying schools.
In journalism, 51% of top print writers were privately educated, as well as 61% of doctors.
Respectively, only 12% of military chiefs were educated in comprehensive schools, and 22% of doctors attended grammar schools. Only one-fifth of leading journalists had a state education.
In politics the gap has narrowed, the report found, with 32% of MPs having attended a private school. But when examining the Tory cabinet, some 50% of the ministers went to independent schools, compared to 13% in Labour’s shadow cabinet.
The report also examined the prevalence of Oxford and Cambridge universities among top ranking positions, and found that alumni from the famous academic institutions were more likely to take high positions.
In law, Oxbridge graduates make up 74% of the top positions, with 54% of journalists having also attended the two universities.
Some 47% of the Conservative cabinet also attended Oxford or Cambridge, more than 10% higher than the shadow cabinet, which features 32% Oxbridge graduates.
The arts is also not exempt from the privately educated/Oxbridge bubble, with award-winning actors and actresses 50% more likely to have had a private education than pop stars. A total of 42% of BAFTA winners were awarded to fee-paying school attendees.
Sir Peter Lampl, chair of the Sutton Trust, said the report showed a need for more social mobility.
“Our research shows that your chances of reaching the top in so many areas of British life are very much greater if you went to an independent school.
“As well as academic achievement, an independent education tends to develop essential skills such as confidence, articulacy and teamwork, which are vital to career success.
“The key to improving social mobility at the top is to open up independent schools to all pupils based on merit not money... as well as support for highly able students in state schools.”
Monday, December 26, 2016
"Subsidized Housing" by Mike Luckovich
"Subsidized Housing" - Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Atlanta, GA, US
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
How a single-gender environment can lead girls to choose a STEM career
I believe I read an article in 2015 that co-ed education does not help either genders. Boys & girls learn in different ways because their brains are structured differently. But, in co-education system, & since most teachers end up being females, boys are treated the same as girls. This adversely affects the learning abilities of boys, so much so, that post-secondary education institutes in North America are reporting more female enrollment than males.
Now, here's an article highlighting the research how an all-girls education system provides positive role models & peers, which help more girls in learning & accepting that they can also achieve a successful career in STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) fields.
So, all this new research in 21st century is saying that co-education has worse outcomes for both genders. Didn't old religions also practice that thousands of years ago? I don't know about other religions whether they ever dealt with co-education issue, but Islam specifically said to keep the genders separate. Now, Islam's gender separation has a much bigger scope in society than only mixed gender schooling but schooling is a huge part of a student's life.
Western countries ridiculed the separate gender schooling system of the Islamic countries for hundreds of years. They systematically broke that system down in the guise of gender equality in education, even when, gender equality can still be achieved with separate education system. Islamic countries instituted co-education system in the name of modern & Western education system. Now, the research from Western education institutes is coming out to affirm the benefits of single-gender education system.
Western countries, & their public, are like those stubborn & rebellious children that when they are told by their parents not to do something, they will still do it, & when they suffer because of their actions, then they learn the benefits what their parents said, based on their knowledge & wisdom. Except, the difference in a child doing something wrong & then learning from it, & countries changing their social, educational, & political systems to follow certain other countries, & then learning that they might've made a mistake is not the same. Turning around such social, educational, & political systems take decades & decades, & affect generations after generations.
So the hard lesson here is, & especially for Muslims, that blindly following the West will only lead you to disaster. Critically analyse what & why something is positive & negative in the light of modern science of the time & religion, & then implement it if it seems beneficial.
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It's a call heard from academia to business: More women are needed in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering & math. But how best to encourage girls to consider careers in STEM?
It turns out simply encouraging them to take risks & be the best they can in any subject leads many to consider STEM fields.
This is the strategy of many all-girls' schools.
For St. Clement’s School principal Martha Perry, simply ensuring that her pupils receive a well-rounded education is the focus of the school.
“Our emphasis is girls learning, and if girls are interested and keen on a STEM subject then we’re going to make sure we support them and we are going to make sure that they have access to the best possible instruction, the best possible facilities and the best possible experience to be learning,” she says.
Not that she has to be overly concerned. Of the Toronto all-girls school’s most recent graduating class, roughly one third of the 64 students were going on to study STEM subjects at the post-secondary level.
Studying at a single-sex school may have a bearing on that. According to a study by Goodman Research Group, which evaluates programs, graduates of girls’ schools are six times more likely to consider majoring in math, science & technology at the postsecondary level compared with their peers at co-ed schools.
A similar study undertaken by the University of California, Los Angeles, commissioned by the U.S.-based National Coalition of Girls’ Schools, suggests that girls’ school graduates are three times more likely than their co-ed independent-school peers to consider engineering careers.
From Ms. Perry’s perspective, the nurturing surroundings of an all-girls school play an important part in their development. St. Clement’s doesn’t put an overarching emphasis on STEM subjects, believing instead that the school’s best role is to give its students the opportunity to believe that they have the capacity to make a difference in anything they do.
“I think a girls-only environment actually allows girls to explore their own passions and their own interests and affords us the opportunity to provide them with a wealth of different options to explore,” she says.
The reasons for this vary. According to Megan Murphy, the executive director of the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools (NCGS) in Virginia, two of the biggest are peer role models & overcoming a media message that too often portrays women as being less capable than their male counterparts in STEM subjects. In addition, she says, historically the majority of science teachers at girls’ schools were women, too.
“Whether it’s from a faculty perspective, a graduate perspective, or a peer perspective, girls at girls schools have a wealth of role models and I think that’s probably the key factor as to why we see so many more girls at girls’ schools pursuing STEM subjects as undergraduates,” she says.
In addition, she explains, being around peer role models who love science & math helps deflect some of the media or popular culture messages that portray women as less capable of successfully studying STEM subjects than men.
Being among peers doing the same thing, whether in a physics club or a science Olympiad, helps build girls’ confidence that they can thrive in STEM subjects. That confidence is key to a long-term commitment to a field of study. For instance, the UCLA study suggests that 47.7% of women entering postsecondary education from single-sex schools felt well prepared in math, compared to 36.6% entering college from co-ed schools.
“When you check out of Algebra 1, even in a little way, that’s a critical building block for every single science or technology class that comes after that,” Ms. Murphy says. “So if you lose them in the pipeline as middle schoolers, it’s really hard to get them back.”
...
Much like St. Clement’s, Elmwood School in Ottawa doesn’t put a direct emphasis on teaching STEM subjects, but helps its students build what headmistress Cheryl Boughton refers to as “balanced brains,” based on a concept explored by American educator & psychologist Dr. JoAnn Deak.
Consequently, the responsibility charged to Ms. Boughton & the rest of the faculty is to ensure that by the time the girls graduate from Elmwood, they are well versed in all areas of academia & not just the subjects in which they are particularly strong.
...
Now, here's an article highlighting the research how an all-girls education system provides positive role models & peers, which help more girls in learning & accepting that they can also achieve a successful career in STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) fields.
So, all this new research in 21st century is saying that co-education has worse outcomes for both genders. Didn't old religions also practice that thousands of years ago? I don't know about other religions whether they ever dealt with co-education issue, but Islam specifically said to keep the genders separate. Now, Islam's gender separation has a much bigger scope in society than only mixed gender schooling but schooling is a huge part of a student's life.
Western countries ridiculed the separate gender schooling system of the Islamic countries for hundreds of years. They systematically broke that system down in the guise of gender equality in education, even when, gender equality can still be achieved with separate education system. Islamic countries instituted co-education system in the name of modern & Western education system. Now, the research from Western education institutes is coming out to affirm the benefits of single-gender education system.
Western countries, & their public, are like those stubborn & rebellious children that when they are told by their parents not to do something, they will still do it, & when they suffer because of their actions, then they learn the benefits what their parents said, based on their knowledge & wisdom. Except, the difference in a child doing something wrong & then learning from it, & countries changing their social, educational, & political systems to follow certain other countries, & then learning that they might've made a mistake is not the same. Turning around such social, educational, & political systems take decades & decades, & affect generations after generations.
So the hard lesson here is, & especially for Muslims, that blindly following the West will only lead you to disaster. Critically analyse what & why something is positive & negative in the light of modern science of the time & religion, & then implement it if it seems beneficial.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's a call heard from academia to business: More women are needed in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering & math. But how best to encourage girls to consider careers in STEM?
It turns out simply encouraging them to take risks & be the best they can in any subject leads many to consider STEM fields.
This is the strategy of many all-girls' schools.
For St. Clement’s School principal Martha Perry, simply ensuring that her pupils receive a well-rounded education is the focus of the school.
“Our emphasis is girls learning, and if girls are interested and keen on a STEM subject then we’re going to make sure we support them and we are going to make sure that they have access to the best possible instruction, the best possible facilities and the best possible experience to be learning,” she says.
Not that she has to be overly concerned. Of the Toronto all-girls school’s most recent graduating class, roughly one third of the 64 students were going on to study STEM subjects at the post-secondary level.
Studying at a single-sex school may have a bearing on that. According to a study by Goodman Research Group, which evaluates programs, graduates of girls’ schools are six times more likely to consider majoring in math, science & technology at the postsecondary level compared with their peers at co-ed schools.
A similar study undertaken by the University of California, Los Angeles, commissioned by the U.S.-based National Coalition of Girls’ Schools, suggests that girls’ school graduates are three times more likely than their co-ed independent-school peers to consider engineering careers.
From Ms. Perry’s perspective, the nurturing surroundings of an all-girls school play an important part in their development. St. Clement’s doesn’t put an overarching emphasis on STEM subjects, believing instead that the school’s best role is to give its students the opportunity to believe that they have the capacity to make a difference in anything they do.
“I think a girls-only environment actually allows girls to explore their own passions and their own interests and affords us the opportunity to provide them with a wealth of different options to explore,” she says.
The reasons for this vary. According to Megan Murphy, the executive director of the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools (NCGS) in Virginia, two of the biggest are peer role models & overcoming a media message that too often portrays women as being less capable than their male counterparts in STEM subjects. In addition, she says, historically the majority of science teachers at girls’ schools were women, too.
“Whether it’s from a faculty perspective, a graduate perspective, or a peer perspective, girls at girls schools have a wealth of role models and I think that’s probably the key factor as to why we see so many more girls at girls’ schools pursuing STEM subjects as undergraduates,” she says.
In addition, she explains, being around peer role models who love science & math helps deflect some of the media or popular culture messages that portray women as less capable of successfully studying STEM subjects than men.
Being among peers doing the same thing, whether in a physics club or a science Olympiad, helps build girls’ confidence that they can thrive in STEM subjects. That confidence is key to a long-term commitment to a field of study. For instance, the UCLA study suggests that 47.7% of women entering postsecondary education from single-sex schools felt well prepared in math, compared to 36.6% entering college from co-ed schools.
“When you check out of Algebra 1, even in a little way, that’s a critical building block for every single science or technology class that comes after that,” Ms. Murphy says. “So if you lose them in the pipeline as middle schoolers, it’s really hard to get them back.”
...
Much like St. Clement’s, Elmwood School in Ottawa doesn’t put a direct emphasis on teaching STEM subjects, but helps its students build what headmistress Cheryl Boughton refers to as “balanced brains,” based on a concept explored by American educator & psychologist Dr. JoAnn Deak.
Consequently, the responsibility charged to Ms. Boughton & the rest of the faculty is to ensure that by the time the girls graduate from Elmwood, they are well versed in all areas of academia & not just the subjects in which they are particularly strong.
...
Thursday, March 31, 2016
What's the point of college?
This whole piece from New Yorker is a fantastic one. It's quite a long one, so I will keep my blog post on it rather short.
What I like to say here is that I've been saying what this article is saying for, at least, a year or so. Education nowadays doesn't have the same respect or weight as it used to carry about 5 decades ago. For instance, I met an 18-year-old about 6 months ago who said to me that he is learning to be a salesperson, right after graduating from high school, & have no intention to go to post-secondary school, because business education is learned best out in the field than in a class. So, in essence, he will save thousands upon thousands of dollars in education & will ultimately come out ahead because he will have hands-on work experience coupled with a valuable network. (I couldn't reply since my own experiences are not so great).
Everyone, from Canada to Chile to Egypt to South Africa to Spain to Russia to Australia to Saudi Arabia, loves to talk about how education is essential for everyone, regardless to gender, skin colour, language, religion etc. And, in an ideal & utopian world, it definitely will be ... but, we are not living in an ideal & utopian world. Education has become a business in itself. It has become so expensive to even get a 4-year bachelor's degree that families & students take out thousands of student loans to earn that degree.
But after graduation a serious question needs to be asked is that degree, for which I just paid thousands of dollars (or whatever other currency), worth anything? Personally, my 2 degrees, a Bachelor's in Accounting & an MBA, for which I paid about 100,000 Canadian dollars (excluding my time & effort) in total, & 2 certificates (Six Sigma & Project Management) have earned me a job as a cashier in a local superstore. So, for me, my education was definitely not worth it. I would have been better off by not getting an education & spent my time working in retail, for instance. That decade in education would've saved me some hard cold cash & I would've been a supervisor, or even a manager, of a store by now. The article does point out this fact that how highly educated graduates, even STEM graduates (science, tech, engineering, & mathematics), are working in measly jobs, perhaps, due to technological advancements.
So, education is important but we need to look at its worth. The article states examples of colleges & universities, & a lot of statistics & studies, in trying to answer the primary question of the worth of education. Eventually, it asks what is the purpose of colleges & universities, since their graduates, which are constantly increasing in number, are not really earning that much, & their wages are actually falling. This seems counterintuitive since education is supposed to increase your worth, & not decrease it in the labour market.
A theory the article puts forward is that degrees & certificates perhaps try to signal to potential employers the competency of the candidate. Potential employers are thus merely using the degrees as a filter in the hiring process. Perhaps, that is why, "branding" of a university comes into play. Since, everyone around you is getting a degree, if you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to "buy" a degree from a so-called "prestigious" school. Then, it becomes an arms race, & it is only helping educational institutes & financial services companies (i.e. banks) in making huge profits.
Unfortunately, the article stops short of giving a definite reason why this is happening that education is not paying off for many, nowadays. One reason it gives, with which I do agree, is that this blind corporate race of cost-cutting is increasing more tech solutions implementation with fewer graduates being hired to train for future management positions.
One other reason I would give for education not paying off in modern times is the absence of meritocracy. We all like to think that education improves the personal financial bottom line, but we forget, that it will happen only when the labour market is merit based, which it is not. We all have heard of that accursed word, "networking," which merely implies that your education & qualifications matter less if you know the right people in the right places. Nowadays, employers get so many resumes / CVs / bio-datas, which are all essentially similar, too, that instead of sifting through all of them to find that perfect candidate, employers simply ask the people around them to recommend them a candidate.
This disease of "networking" is very common in developing countries because, due to their large population, & in their push for more education, everyone has a similar educational base. But networking is relatively new in Western countries because up until a few years ago, your education still played a major part what job & earning potential you ended up with in your life. It was somewhat of a meritocracy. But not anymore. Networking disrupts a level playing field, since, your education & qualifications are useless in the face of "how many influential people are your / family's friends".
Anyway, my blog post has become a long one & I would prefer it that you read the article, which is still quite informative & thought-provoking. We all like to think that education is essential to succeed in life but we forget that the world is an unfair place, & in the near future, your education will matter less & your connections will matter more.
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If there is one thing most Americans have been able to agree on over the years, it is that getting an education, particularly a college education, is a key to human betterment & prosperity. ... Already, the cost of higher education has become a big issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign. ...
Promoters of higher education have long emphasized its role in meeting civic needs. The Puritans who established Harvard were concerned about a shortage of clergy; during the Progressive Era, John Dewey insisted that a proper education would make people better citizens, with enlarged moral imaginations. Recently, as wage stagnation & rising inequality have emerged as serious problems, the economic arguments for higher education have come to the fore. “Earning a post-secondary degree or credential is no longer just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few,” the White House Web site states. “Rather, it is a prerequisite for the growing jobs of the new economy.” Commentators & academic economists have claimed that college doesn’t merely help individuals get higher-paying jobs; it raises wages throughout the economy & helps ameliorate rising inequality. In an influential 2008 book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz argued that technological progress has dramatically increased the demand for skilled workers, & that, in recent decades, the American educational system has failed to meet the challenge by supplying enough graduates who can carry out the tasks that a high-tech economy requires. “Not so long ago, the American economy grew rapidly and wages grew in tandem, with education playing a large, positive role in both,” they wrote in a subsequent paper. “The challenge now is to revitalize education-based mobility.”
The “message from the media, from the business community, and even from many parts of the government has been that a college degree is more important than ever in order to have a good career,” Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at Wharton, notes in his informative & refreshingly skeptical new book, “Will College Pay Off?” (PublicAffairs). “As a result, families feel even more pressure to send their kids to college. This is at a time when more families find those costs to be a serious burden.” During recent decades, tuition & other charges have risen sharply—many colleges charge more than 50,000 dollars a year in tuition & fees. Even if you factor in the expansion of financial aid, Cappelli reports, “students in the United States pay about four times more than their peers in countries elsewhere.”
Despite the increasing costs — & the claims about a shortage of college graduates — the number of people attending & graduating from four-year educational institutions keeps going up. In the 2000-01 academic year, American colleges awarded almost 1.3 million bachelor’s degrees. A decade later, the figure had jumped nearly 40%, to more than 1.7 million. About 70% of all high-school graduates now go on to college, & half of all Americans between the ages of 25 & 34 have a college degree. That’s a big change. In 1980, only 1 in 6 Americans 25 & older were college graduates. 50 years ago, it was fewer than 1 in 10. To cater to all the new students, colleges keep expanding & adding courses, many of them vocationally inclined. At Kansas State, undergraduates can major in Bakery Science & Management or Wildlife & Outdoor Enterprise Management. They can minor in Unmanned Aircraft Systems or Pet Food Science. Oklahoma State offers a degree in Fire Protection & Safety Engineering & Technology. At Utica College, you can major in Economic Crime Detection.
In the fast-growing for-profit college sector, which now accounts for more than 10% of all students, vocational degrees are the norm. DeVry University — which last year taught more than 60,000 students, at more than 75 campuses — offers majors in everything from multimedia design & development to health-care administration. On its Web site, DeVry boasts, “In 2013, 90% of DeVry University associate and bachelor’s degree grads actively seeking employment had careers in their field within six months of graduation.” That sounds impressive — until you notice that the figure includes those graduates who had jobs in their field before graduation. (Many DeVry students are working adults who attend college part-time to further their careers.) Nor is the phrase “in their field” clearly defined. “Would you be okay rolling the dice on a degree in communications based on information like that?” Cappelli writes. He notes that research by the nonprofit National Association of Colleges & Employers found that, in the same year, just 6.5% of graduates with communications degrees were offered jobs in the field. It may be unfair to single out DeVry, which is one of the more reputable for-profit education providers. But the example illustrates Cappelli’s larger point: many of the claims that are made about higher education don’t stand up to scrutiny.
“It is certainly true that college has been life changing for most people and a tremendous financial investment for many of them,” Cappelli writes. “It is also true that for some people, it has been financially crippling. . . .The world of college education is different now than it was a generation ago, when many of the people driving policy decisions on education went to college, and the theoretical ideas about why college should pay off do not comport well with the reality.”
No idea has had more influence on education policy than the notion that colleges teach their students specific, marketable skills, which they can use to get a good job. Economists refer to this as the “human capital” theory of education, & for the past 20 or 30 years it has gone largely unchallenged. If you’ve completed a two-year associate’s degree, you’ve got more “human capital” than a high-school graduate. And if you’ve completed a four-year bachelor’s degree you’ve got more “human capital” than someone who attended a community college. Once you enter the labor market, the theory says, you will be rewarded with a better job, brighter career prospects, & higher wages.
There’s no doubt that college graduates earn more money, on average, than people who don’t have a degree. And for many years the so-called “college wage premium” grew. In 1970, according to a recent study by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, people with a bachelor’s degree earned about 60,000 dollars a year, on average, & people with a high-school diploma earned about 45,000 dollars. 35 years later, in 2005, the average earnings of college graduates had risen to more than 70,000 dollars, while high-school graduates had seen their earnings fall slightly. (All these figures are inflation-adjusted.) The fact that the college wage premium went up at a time when the supply of graduates was expanding significantly seemed to confirm the Goldin-Katz theory that technological change was creating an ever-increasing demand for workers with a lot of human capital.
During the past decade or so, however, a number of things have happened that don’t easily mesh with that theory. If college graduates remain in short supply, their wages should still be rising. But they aren’t. In 2001, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, workers with undergraduate degrees (but not graduate degrees) earned, on average, $30.05 an hour; last year, they earned $29.55 an hour. Other sources show even more dramatic falls. “Between 2001 and 2013, the average wage of workers with a bachelor’s degree declined 10.3 percent, and the average wage of those with an associate’s degree declined 11.1 percent,” the New York Fed reported in its study. Wages have been falling most steeply of all among newly minted college graduates. And jobless rates have been rising. In 2007, 5.5% of college graduates under the age of 25 were out of work. Today, the figure is close to 9%. If getting a bachelor’s degree is meant to guarantee entry to an arena in which jobs are plentiful & wages rise steadily, the education system has been failing for some time.
And, while college graduates are still doing a lot better than nongraduates, some studies show that the earnings gap has stopped growing. The figures need careful parsing. If you lump college graduates in with people with advanced degrees, the picture looks brighter. But almost all the recent gains have gone to folks with graduate degrees. “The four-year-degree premium has remained flat over the past decade,” the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland reported. And one of the main reasons it went up in the first place wasn’t that college graduates were enjoying significantly higher wages. It was that the earnings of nongraduates were falling.
Many students & their families extend themselves to pay for a college education out of fear of falling into the low-wage economy. That’s perfectly understandable. But how sound an investment is it? One way to figure this out is to treat a college degree like a stock or a bond & compare the cost of obtaining one with the accumulated returns that it generates over the years. (In this case, the returns come in the form of wages over & above those earned by people who don’t hold degrees.) When the research firm PayScale did this a few years ago, it found that the average inflation-adjusted return on a college education is about 7%, which is a bit lower than the historical rate of return on the stock market. Cappelli cites this study along with one from the Hamilton Project, a Washington-based research group that came up with a much higher figure — about 15% — but by assuming, for example, that all college students graduate in 4 years. (In fact, the four-year graduation rate for full-time, first-degree students is less than 40%, & the six-year graduation rate is less than 60%.)
These types of studies, & there are lots of them, usually find that the financial benefits of getting a college degree are much larger than the financial costs. But Cappelli points out that for parents & students the average figures may not mean much, because they disguise enormous differences in outcomes from school to school. He cites a survey, carried out by PayScale for Businessweek in 2012, that showed that students who attend M.I.T., Caltech, & Harvey Mudd College enjoy an annual return of more than 10% on their “investment.” But the survey also found almost 200 colleges where students, on average, never fully recouped the costs of their education. “The big news about the payoff from college should be the incredible variation in it across colleges,” Cappelli writes. “Looking at the actual return on the costs of attending college, careful analyses suggest that the payoff from many college programs—as much as 1 in 4—is actually negative. Incredibly, the schools seem to add nothing to the market value of the students.”
So what purpose does college really serve for students & employers? Before the human-capital theory became so popular, there was another view of higher education—as, in part, a filter, or screening device, that sorted individuals according to their aptitudes & conveyed this information to businesses & other hiring institutions. By completing a four-year degree, students could signal to potential employers that they had a certain level of cognitive competence & could carry out assigned tasks & work in a group setting. But a college education didn’t necessarily imbue students with specific work skills that employers needed, or make them more productive.
Kenneth Arrow, one of the giants of twentieth-century economics, came up with this account, & if you take it seriously you can’t assume that it’s always a good thing to persuade more people to go to college. If almost everybody has a college degree, getting one doesn’t differentiate you from the pack. To get the job you want, you might have to go to a fancy (& expensive) college, or get a higher degree. Education turns into an arms race, which primarily benefits the arms manufacturers—in this case, colleges & universities.
The screening model isn’t very fashionable these days, partly because it seems perverse to suggest that education doesn’t boost productivity. But there’s quite a bit of evidence that seems to support Arrow’s theory. In recent years, more jobs have come to demand a college degree as an entry requirement, even though the demands of the jobs haven’t changed much. Some nursing positions are on the list, along with jobs for executive secretaries, salespeople, & distribution managers. According to one study, just 20% of executive assistants & insurance-claims clerks have college degrees but more than 45% of the job openings in the field require one. “This suggests that employers may be relying on a B.A. as a broad recruitment filter that may or may not correspond to specific capabilities needed to do the job,” the study concluded.
It is well established that students who go to elite colleges tend to earn more than graduates of less selective institutions. But is this because Harvard & Princeton do a better job of teaching valuable skills than other places, or because employers believe that they get more talented students to begin with? An exercise carried out by Lauren Rivera, of the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern, strongly suggests that it’s the latter. Rivera interviewed more than a hundred recruiters from investment banks, law firms, & management consulting firms, & she found that they recruited almost exclusively from the very top-ranked schools, & simply ignored most other applicants. The recruiters didn’t pay much attention to things like grades & majors. “It was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige,” Rivera concluded.
If higher education serves primarily as a sorting mechanism, that might help explain another disturbing development: the tendency of many college graduates to take jobs that don’t require college degrees. Practically everyone seems to know a well-educated young person who is working in a bar or a mundane clerical job, because he or she can’t find anything better. Doubtless, the Great Recession & its aftermath are partly to blame. But something deeper, & more lasting, also seems to be happening.
In the Goldin-Katz view of things, technological progress generates an ever-increasing need for highly educated, highly skilled workers. But, beginning in about 2000, for reasons that are still not fully understood, the pace of job creation in high-paying, highly skilled fields slowed significantly. To demonstrate this, 3 Canadian economists, Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, & Benjamin M. Sand, divided the US workforce into a hundred occupations, ranked by their average wages, & looked at how employment has changed in each category. Since 2000, the economists showed, the demand for highly educated workers declined, while job growth in low-paying occupations increased strongly. “High-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers,” they concluded, thus “pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder.”
Increasingly, the competition for jobs is taking place in areas of the labor market where college graduates didn’t previously tend to compete. As Beaudry, Green, & Sand put it, “having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less educated workers for the Barista or clerical job.” Even many graduates in science, technology, engineering, & mathematics—the so-called STEM subjects, which receive so much official encouragement—are having a tough time getting the jobs they’d like. Cappelli reports that only about a fifth of recent graduates with STEM degrees got jobs that made use of that training. “The evidence for recent grads suggests clearly that there is no overall shortage of STEM grads,” he writes.
Why is this happening? The short answer is that nobody knows for sure. One theory is that corporate cost-cutting, having thinned the ranks of workers on the factory floor & in routine office jobs, is now targeting supervisors, managers, & other highly educated people. Another theory is that technological progress, after favoring highly educated workers for a long time, is now turning on them. With rapid advances in processing power, data analysis, voice recognition, & other forms of artificial intelligence, computers can perform tasks that were previously carried out by college graduates, such as analyzing trends, translating foreign-language documents, & filing tax returns. In “The Second Machine Age” (Norton), the M.I.T. professors Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee sketch a future where computers will start replacing doctors, lawyers, & many other highly educated professionals. “As digital labor becomes more pervasive, capable, and powerful,” they write, “companies will be increasingly unwilling to pay people wages that they’ll accept, and that will allow them to maintain the standard of living to which they’ve been accustomed.”
Cappelli stresses the change in corporate hiring patterns. In the old days, Fortune 500 companies such as General Motors, Citigroup, & I.B.M. took on large numbers of college graduates & trained them for a lifetime at the company. But corporations now invest less in education & training, &, instead of promoting someone, or finding someone in the company to fill a specialized role, they tend to hire from outside. Grooming the next generation of leadership is much less of a concern. “What employers want from college graduates now is the same thing they want from applicants who have been out of school for years, and that is job skills and the ability to contribute now,” Cappelli writes. “That change is fundamental, and it is the reason that getting a good job out of college is now such a challenge.”
Obtaining a vocational degree or certificate is one strategy that many students employ to make themselves attractive to employers, &, on the face of it, this seems sensible. If you’d like to be a radiology technician, shouldn’t you get a B.A. in radiology? If you want to run a bakery, why not apply to Kansas State & sign up for that major in Bakery Science? But narrowly focussed degrees are risky. “If you graduate in a year when gambling is up and the casinos like your casino management degree, you probably have hit it big,” Cappelli writes. “If they aren’t hiring when you graduate, you may be even worse off getting a first job with that degree anywhere else precisely because it was so tuned to that group of employers.” During the dot-com era, enrollment in computer-science & information-technology programs rose sharply. After the bursting of the stock-market bubble, many of these graduates couldn’t find work. “Employers who say that we need more engineers or IT grads are not promising to hire them when they graduate in four years,” Cappelli notes. “Pushing kids into a field like health care because someone believes there is a need there now will not guarantee that they all get jobs &, if they do, that those jobs will be as good as workers in that field have now.”
So what’s the solution? Some people believe that online learning will provide a viable low-cost alternative to a live-in college education. ... Another approach is to direct more students & resources to two-year community colleges & other educational institutions that cost less than four-year colleges. President Obama recently called for all qualified high-school students to be guaranteed a place in community college, & for tuition fees to be eliminated. Such policies would reverse recent history. In a new book, “Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth” (Yale), James Bessen, a technology entrepreneur who also teaches at Boston University School of Law, points out that “the policy trend over the last decade has been to starve community colleges in order to feed four-year colleges, especially private research universities.” Some of the discrepancies are glaring. Richard Vedder, who teaches economics at Ohio University, calculated that in 2010 Princeton, which had an endowment of close to fifteen billion dollars, received state & federal benefits equivalent to roughly 50,000 dollars per student, whereas the nearby College of New Jersey got benefits of just 2,000 dollars per student. There are sound reasons for rewarding excellence & sponsoring institutions that do important scientific research. But is a twenty-five-to-one difference in government support really justified?
Perhaps the strongest argument for caring about higher education is that it can increase social mobility, regardless of whether the human-capital theory or the signalling theory is correct. A recent study by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco showed that children who are born into households in the poorest fifth of the income distribution are 6 times as likely to reach the top fifth if they graduate from college. Providing access to college for more kids from deprived backgrounds helps nurture talents that might otherwise go to waste, & it’s the right thing to do. (Of course, if college attendance were practically universal, having a degree would send a weaker signal to employers.) But increasing the number of graduates seems unlikely to reverse the over-all decline of high-paying jobs, & it won’t resolve the income-inequality problem, either. As the economist Lawrence Summers & two colleagues showed in a recent simulation, even if we magically summoned up college degrees for a tenth of all the working-age American men who don’t have them—by historical standards, a big boost in college-graduation rates—we’d scarcely change the existing concentration of income at the very top of the earnings distribution, where C.E.O.s & hedge-fund managers live.
Being more realistic about the role that college degrees play would help families & politicians make better choices. It could also help us appreciate the actual merits of a traditional broad-based education, often called a liberal-arts education, rather than trying to reduce everything to an economic cost-benefit analysis. “To be clear, the idea is not that there will be a big financial payoff to a liberal arts degree,” Cappelli writes. “It is that there is no guarantee of a payoff from very practical, work-based degrees either, yet that is all those degrees promise. For liberal arts, the claim is different and seems more accurate, that it will enrich your life and provide lessons that extend beyond any individual job. There are centuries of experience providing support for that notion.”
What I like to say here is that I've been saying what this article is saying for, at least, a year or so. Education nowadays doesn't have the same respect or weight as it used to carry about 5 decades ago. For instance, I met an 18-year-old about 6 months ago who said to me that he is learning to be a salesperson, right after graduating from high school, & have no intention to go to post-secondary school, because business education is learned best out in the field than in a class. So, in essence, he will save thousands upon thousands of dollars in education & will ultimately come out ahead because he will have hands-on work experience coupled with a valuable network. (I couldn't reply since my own experiences are not so great).
Everyone, from Canada to Chile to Egypt to South Africa to Spain to Russia to Australia to Saudi Arabia, loves to talk about how education is essential for everyone, regardless to gender, skin colour, language, religion etc. And, in an ideal & utopian world, it definitely will be ... but, we are not living in an ideal & utopian world. Education has become a business in itself. It has become so expensive to even get a 4-year bachelor's degree that families & students take out thousands of student loans to earn that degree.
But after graduation a serious question needs to be asked is that degree, for which I just paid thousands of dollars (or whatever other currency), worth anything? Personally, my 2 degrees, a Bachelor's in Accounting & an MBA, for which I paid about 100,000 Canadian dollars (excluding my time & effort) in total, & 2 certificates (Six Sigma & Project Management) have earned me a job as a cashier in a local superstore. So, for me, my education was definitely not worth it. I would have been better off by not getting an education & spent my time working in retail, for instance. That decade in education would've saved me some hard cold cash & I would've been a supervisor, or even a manager, of a store by now. The article does point out this fact that how highly educated graduates, even STEM graduates (science, tech, engineering, & mathematics), are working in measly jobs, perhaps, due to technological advancements.
So, education is important but we need to look at its worth. The article states examples of colleges & universities, & a lot of statistics & studies, in trying to answer the primary question of the worth of education. Eventually, it asks what is the purpose of colleges & universities, since their graduates, which are constantly increasing in number, are not really earning that much, & their wages are actually falling. This seems counterintuitive since education is supposed to increase your worth, & not decrease it in the labour market.
A theory the article puts forward is that degrees & certificates perhaps try to signal to potential employers the competency of the candidate. Potential employers are thus merely using the degrees as a filter in the hiring process. Perhaps, that is why, "branding" of a university comes into play. Since, everyone around you is getting a degree, if you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to "buy" a degree from a so-called "prestigious" school. Then, it becomes an arms race, & it is only helping educational institutes & financial services companies (i.e. banks) in making huge profits.
Unfortunately, the article stops short of giving a definite reason why this is happening that education is not paying off for many, nowadays. One reason it gives, with which I do agree, is that this blind corporate race of cost-cutting is increasing more tech solutions implementation with fewer graduates being hired to train for future management positions.
One other reason I would give for education not paying off in modern times is the absence of meritocracy. We all like to think that education improves the personal financial bottom line, but we forget, that it will happen only when the labour market is merit based, which it is not. We all have heard of that accursed word, "networking," which merely implies that your education & qualifications matter less if you know the right people in the right places. Nowadays, employers get so many resumes / CVs / bio-datas, which are all essentially similar, too, that instead of sifting through all of them to find that perfect candidate, employers simply ask the people around them to recommend them a candidate.
This disease of "networking" is very common in developing countries because, due to their large population, & in their push for more education, everyone has a similar educational base. But networking is relatively new in Western countries because up until a few years ago, your education still played a major part what job & earning potential you ended up with in your life. It was somewhat of a meritocracy. But not anymore. Networking disrupts a level playing field, since, your education & qualifications are useless in the face of "how many influential people are your / family's friends".
Anyway, my blog post has become a long one & I would prefer it that you read the article, which is still quite informative & thought-provoking. We all like to think that education is essential to succeed in life but we forget that the world is an unfair place, & in the near future, your education will matter less & your connections will matter more.
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If there is one thing most Americans have been able to agree on over the years, it is that getting an education, particularly a college education, is a key to human betterment & prosperity. ... Already, the cost of higher education has become a big issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign. ...
Promoters of higher education have long emphasized its role in meeting civic needs. The Puritans who established Harvard were concerned about a shortage of clergy; during the Progressive Era, John Dewey insisted that a proper education would make people better citizens, with enlarged moral imaginations. Recently, as wage stagnation & rising inequality have emerged as serious problems, the economic arguments for higher education have come to the fore. “Earning a post-secondary degree or credential is no longer just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few,” the White House Web site states. “Rather, it is a prerequisite for the growing jobs of the new economy.” Commentators & academic economists have claimed that college doesn’t merely help individuals get higher-paying jobs; it raises wages throughout the economy & helps ameliorate rising inequality. In an influential 2008 book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz argued that technological progress has dramatically increased the demand for skilled workers, & that, in recent decades, the American educational system has failed to meet the challenge by supplying enough graduates who can carry out the tasks that a high-tech economy requires. “Not so long ago, the American economy grew rapidly and wages grew in tandem, with education playing a large, positive role in both,” they wrote in a subsequent paper. “The challenge now is to revitalize education-based mobility.”
The “message from the media, from the business community, and even from many parts of the government has been that a college degree is more important than ever in order to have a good career,” Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at Wharton, notes in his informative & refreshingly skeptical new book, “Will College Pay Off?” (PublicAffairs). “As a result, families feel even more pressure to send their kids to college. This is at a time when more families find those costs to be a serious burden.” During recent decades, tuition & other charges have risen sharply—many colleges charge more than 50,000 dollars a year in tuition & fees. Even if you factor in the expansion of financial aid, Cappelli reports, “students in the United States pay about four times more than their peers in countries elsewhere.”
Despite the increasing costs — & the claims about a shortage of college graduates — the number of people attending & graduating from four-year educational institutions keeps going up. In the 2000-01 academic year, American colleges awarded almost 1.3 million bachelor’s degrees. A decade later, the figure had jumped nearly 40%, to more than 1.7 million. About 70% of all high-school graduates now go on to college, & half of all Americans between the ages of 25 & 34 have a college degree. That’s a big change. In 1980, only 1 in 6 Americans 25 & older were college graduates. 50 years ago, it was fewer than 1 in 10. To cater to all the new students, colleges keep expanding & adding courses, many of them vocationally inclined. At Kansas State, undergraduates can major in Bakery Science & Management or Wildlife & Outdoor Enterprise Management. They can minor in Unmanned Aircraft Systems or Pet Food Science. Oklahoma State offers a degree in Fire Protection & Safety Engineering & Technology. At Utica College, you can major in Economic Crime Detection.
In the fast-growing for-profit college sector, which now accounts for more than 10% of all students, vocational degrees are the norm. DeVry University — which last year taught more than 60,000 students, at more than 75 campuses — offers majors in everything from multimedia design & development to health-care administration. On its Web site, DeVry boasts, “In 2013, 90% of DeVry University associate and bachelor’s degree grads actively seeking employment had careers in their field within six months of graduation.” That sounds impressive — until you notice that the figure includes those graduates who had jobs in their field before graduation. (Many DeVry students are working adults who attend college part-time to further their careers.) Nor is the phrase “in their field” clearly defined. “Would you be okay rolling the dice on a degree in communications based on information like that?” Cappelli writes. He notes that research by the nonprofit National Association of Colleges & Employers found that, in the same year, just 6.5% of graduates with communications degrees were offered jobs in the field. It may be unfair to single out DeVry, which is one of the more reputable for-profit education providers. But the example illustrates Cappelli’s larger point: many of the claims that are made about higher education don’t stand up to scrutiny.
“It is certainly true that college has been life changing for most people and a tremendous financial investment for many of them,” Cappelli writes. “It is also true that for some people, it has been financially crippling. . . .The world of college education is different now than it was a generation ago, when many of the people driving policy decisions on education went to college, and the theoretical ideas about why college should pay off do not comport well with the reality.”
No idea has had more influence on education policy than the notion that colleges teach their students specific, marketable skills, which they can use to get a good job. Economists refer to this as the “human capital” theory of education, & for the past 20 or 30 years it has gone largely unchallenged. If you’ve completed a two-year associate’s degree, you’ve got more “human capital” than a high-school graduate. And if you’ve completed a four-year bachelor’s degree you’ve got more “human capital” than someone who attended a community college. Once you enter the labor market, the theory says, you will be rewarded with a better job, brighter career prospects, & higher wages.
There’s no doubt that college graduates earn more money, on average, than people who don’t have a degree. And for many years the so-called “college wage premium” grew. In 1970, according to a recent study by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, people with a bachelor’s degree earned about 60,000 dollars a year, on average, & people with a high-school diploma earned about 45,000 dollars. 35 years later, in 2005, the average earnings of college graduates had risen to more than 70,000 dollars, while high-school graduates had seen their earnings fall slightly. (All these figures are inflation-adjusted.) The fact that the college wage premium went up at a time when the supply of graduates was expanding significantly seemed to confirm the Goldin-Katz theory that technological change was creating an ever-increasing demand for workers with a lot of human capital.
During the past decade or so, however, a number of things have happened that don’t easily mesh with that theory. If college graduates remain in short supply, their wages should still be rising. But they aren’t. In 2001, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, workers with undergraduate degrees (but not graduate degrees) earned, on average, $30.05 an hour; last year, they earned $29.55 an hour. Other sources show even more dramatic falls. “Between 2001 and 2013, the average wage of workers with a bachelor’s degree declined 10.3 percent, and the average wage of those with an associate’s degree declined 11.1 percent,” the New York Fed reported in its study. Wages have been falling most steeply of all among newly minted college graduates. And jobless rates have been rising. In 2007, 5.5% of college graduates under the age of 25 were out of work. Today, the figure is close to 9%. If getting a bachelor’s degree is meant to guarantee entry to an arena in which jobs are plentiful & wages rise steadily, the education system has been failing for some time.
And, while college graduates are still doing a lot better than nongraduates, some studies show that the earnings gap has stopped growing. The figures need careful parsing. If you lump college graduates in with people with advanced degrees, the picture looks brighter. But almost all the recent gains have gone to folks with graduate degrees. “The four-year-degree premium has remained flat over the past decade,” the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland reported. And one of the main reasons it went up in the first place wasn’t that college graduates were enjoying significantly higher wages. It was that the earnings of nongraduates were falling.
Many students & their families extend themselves to pay for a college education out of fear of falling into the low-wage economy. That’s perfectly understandable. But how sound an investment is it? One way to figure this out is to treat a college degree like a stock or a bond & compare the cost of obtaining one with the accumulated returns that it generates over the years. (In this case, the returns come in the form of wages over & above those earned by people who don’t hold degrees.) When the research firm PayScale did this a few years ago, it found that the average inflation-adjusted return on a college education is about 7%, which is a bit lower than the historical rate of return on the stock market. Cappelli cites this study along with one from the Hamilton Project, a Washington-based research group that came up with a much higher figure — about 15% — but by assuming, for example, that all college students graduate in 4 years. (In fact, the four-year graduation rate for full-time, first-degree students is less than 40%, & the six-year graduation rate is less than 60%.)
These types of studies, & there are lots of them, usually find that the financial benefits of getting a college degree are much larger than the financial costs. But Cappelli points out that for parents & students the average figures may not mean much, because they disguise enormous differences in outcomes from school to school. He cites a survey, carried out by PayScale for Businessweek in 2012, that showed that students who attend M.I.T., Caltech, & Harvey Mudd College enjoy an annual return of more than 10% on their “investment.” But the survey also found almost 200 colleges where students, on average, never fully recouped the costs of their education. “The big news about the payoff from college should be the incredible variation in it across colleges,” Cappelli writes. “Looking at the actual return on the costs of attending college, careful analyses suggest that the payoff from many college programs—as much as 1 in 4—is actually negative. Incredibly, the schools seem to add nothing to the market value of the students.”
So what purpose does college really serve for students & employers? Before the human-capital theory became so popular, there was another view of higher education—as, in part, a filter, or screening device, that sorted individuals according to their aptitudes & conveyed this information to businesses & other hiring institutions. By completing a four-year degree, students could signal to potential employers that they had a certain level of cognitive competence & could carry out assigned tasks & work in a group setting. But a college education didn’t necessarily imbue students with specific work skills that employers needed, or make them more productive.
Kenneth Arrow, one of the giants of twentieth-century economics, came up with this account, & if you take it seriously you can’t assume that it’s always a good thing to persuade more people to go to college. If almost everybody has a college degree, getting one doesn’t differentiate you from the pack. To get the job you want, you might have to go to a fancy (& expensive) college, or get a higher degree. Education turns into an arms race, which primarily benefits the arms manufacturers—in this case, colleges & universities.
The screening model isn’t very fashionable these days, partly because it seems perverse to suggest that education doesn’t boost productivity. But there’s quite a bit of evidence that seems to support Arrow’s theory. In recent years, more jobs have come to demand a college degree as an entry requirement, even though the demands of the jobs haven’t changed much. Some nursing positions are on the list, along with jobs for executive secretaries, salespeople, & distribution managers. According to one study, just 20% of executive assistants & insurance-claims clerks have college degrees but more than 45% of the job openings in the field require one. “This suggests that employers may be relying on a B.A. as a broad recruitment filter that may or may not correspond to specific capabilities needed to do the job,” the study concluded.
It is well established that students who go to elite colleges tend to earn more than graduates of less selective institutions. But is this because Harvard & Princeton do a better job of teaching valuable skills than other places, or because employers believe that they get more talented students to begin with? An exercise carried out by Lauren Rivera, of the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern, strongly suggests that it’s the latter. Rivera interviewed more than a hundred recruiters from investment banks, law firms, & management consulting firms, & she found that they recruited almost exclusively from the very top-ranked schools, & simply ignored most other applicants. The recruiters didn’t pay much attention to things like grades & majors. “It was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige,” Rivera concluded.
If higher education serves primarily as a sorting mechanism, that might help explain another disturbing development: the tendency of many college graduates to take jobs that don’t require college degrees. Practically everyone seems to know a well-educated young person who is working in a bar or a mundane clerical job, because he or she can’t find anything better. Doubtless, the Great Recession & its aftermath are partly to blame. But something deeper, & more lasting, also seems to be happening.
In the Goldin-Katz view of things, technological progress generates an ever-increasing need for highly educated, highly skilled workers. But, beginning in about 2000, for reasons that are still not fully understood, the pace of job creation in high-paying, highly skilled fields slowed significantly. To demonstrate this, 3 Canadian economists, Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, & Benjamin M. Sand, divided the US workforce into a hundred occupations, ranked by their average wages, & looked at how employment has changed in each category. Since 2000, the economists showed, the demand for highly educated workers declined, while job growth in low-paying occupations increased strongly. “High-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers,” they concluded, thus “pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder.”
Increasingly, the competition for jobs is taking place in areas of the labor market where college graduates didn’t previously tend to compete. As Beaudry, Green, & Sand put it, “having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less educated workers for the Barista or clerical job.” Even many graduates in science, technology, engineering, & mathematics—the so-called STEM subjects, which receive so much official encouragement—are having a tough time getting the jobs they’d like. Cappelli reports that only about a fifth of recent graduates with STEM degrees got jobs that made use of that training. “The evidence for recent grads suggests clearly that there is no overall shortage of STEM grads,” he writes.
Why is this happening? The short answer is that nobody knows for sure. One theory is that corporate cost-cutting, having thinned the ranks of workers on the factory floor & in routine office jobs, is now targeting supervisors, managers, & other highly educated people. Another theory is that technological progress, after favoring highly educated workers for a long time, is now turning on them. With rapid advances in processing power, data analysis, voice recognition, & other forms of artificial intelligence, computers can perform tasks that were previously carried out by college graduates, such as analyzing trends, translating foreign-language documents, & filing tax returns. In “The Second Machine Age” (Norton), the M.I.T. professors Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee sketch a future where computers will start replacing doctors, lawyers, & many other highly educated professionals. “As digital labor becomes more pervasive, capable, and powerful,” they write, “companies will be increasingly unwilling to pay people wages that they’ll accept, and that will allow them to maintain the standard of living to which they’ve been accustomed.”
Cappelli stresses the change in corporate hiring patterns. In the old days, Fortune 500 companies such as General Motors, Citigroup, & I.B.M. took on large numbers of college graduates & trained them for a lifetime at the company. But corporations now invest less in education & training, &, instead of promoting someone, or finding someone in the company to fill a specialized role, they tend to hire from outside. Grooming the next generation of leadership is much less of a concern. “What employers want from college graduates now is the same thing they want from applicants who have been out of school for years, and that is job skills and the ability to contribute now,” Cappelli writes. “That change is fundamental, and it is the reason that getting a good job out of college is now such a challenge.”
Obtaining a vocational degree or certificate is one strategy that many students employ to make themselves attractive to employers, &, on the face of it, this seems sensible. If you’d like to be a radiology technician, shouldn’t you get a B.A. in radiology? If you want to run a bakery, why not apply to Kansas State & sign up for that major in Bakery Science? But narrowly focussed degrees are risky. “If you graduate in a year when gambling is up and the casinos like your casino management degree, you probably have hit it big,” Cappelli writes. “If they aren’t hiring when you graduate, you may be even worse off getting a first job with that degree anywhere else precisely because it was so tuned to that group of employers.” During the dot-com era, enrollment in computer-science & information-technology programs rose sharply. After the bursting of the stock-market bubble, many of these graduates couldn’t find work. “Employers who say that we need more engineers or IT grads are not promising to hire them when they graduate in four years,” Cappelli notes. “Pushing kids into a field like health care because someone believes there is a need there now will not guarantee that they all get jobs &, if they do, that those jobs will be as good as workers in that field have now.”
So what’s the solution? Some people believe that online learning will provide a viable low-cost alternative to a live-in college education. ... Another approach is to direct more students & resources to two-year community colleges & other educational institutions that cost less than four-year colleges. President Obama recently called for all qualified high-school students to be guaranteed a place in community college, & for tuition fees to be eliminated. Such policies would reverse recent history. In a new book, “Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth” (Yale), James Bessen, a technology entrepreneur who also teaches at Boston University School of Law, points out that “the policy trend over the last decade has been to starve community colleges in order to feed four-year colleges, especially private research universities.” Some of the discrepancies are glaring. Richard Vedder, who teaches economics at Ohio University, calculated that in 2010 Princeton, which had an endowment of close to fifteen billion dollars, received state & federal benefits equivalent to roughly 50,000 dollars per student, whereas the nearby College of New Jersey got benefits of just 2,000 dollars per student. There are sound reasons for rewarding excellence & sponsoring institutions that do important scientific research. But is a twenty-five-to-one difference in government support really justified?
Perhaps the strongest argument for caring about higher education is that it can increase social mobility, regardless of whether the human-capital theory or the signalling theory is correct. A recent study by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco showed that children who are born into households in the poorest fifth of the income distribution are 6 times as likely to reach the top fifth if they graduate from college. Providing access to college for more kids from deprived backgrounds helps nurture talents that might otherwise go to waste, & it’s the right thing to do. (Of course, if college attendance were practically universal, having a degree would send a weaker signal to employers.) But increasing the number of graduates seems unlikely to reverse the over-all decline of high-paying jobs, & it won’t resolve the income-inequality problem, either. As the economist Lawrence Summers & two colleagues showed in a recent simulation, even if we magically summoned up college degrees for a tenth of all the working-age American men who don’t have them—by historical standards, a big boost in college-graduation rates—we’d scarcely change the existing concentration of income at the very top of the earnings distribution, where C.E.O.s & hedge-fund managers live.
Being more realistic about the role that college degrees play would help families & politicians make better choices. It could also help us appreciate the actual merits of a traditional broad-based education, often called a liberal-arts education, rather than trying to reduce everything to an economic cost-benefit analysis. “To be clear, the idea is not that there will be a big financial payoff to a liberal arts degree,” Cappelli writes. “It is that there is no guarantee of a payoff from very practical, work-based degrees either, yet that is all those degrees promise. For liberal arts, the claim is different and seems more accurate, that it will enrich your life and provide lessons that extend beyond any individual job. There are centuries of experience providing support for that notion.”
Monday, March 28, 2016
The Resegregation of American schools
I used to, & still do, love TheRealNews network. I used to post their stories & my thoughts on their stories on my personal Facebook page, but since last year, when I started this blog, I haven't been able to go through any of the stories of TheRealNews network. But now, I am finally going through them.
Anyway, this news story / analysis didn't surprise me that much. The developed / Western world is becoming that much racist, & in general, discrimination of all kinds are increasing. Now, this story only explores how the American schools are re-segregating students based on skin colour. But, this re-segregation, & the story alludes to it a little bit, is symptomatic of larger & deep-seated socioeconomic problem.
That problem is centuries old. That problem is ingrained in the minds of leaders, & the general public, of the Western world. The general public is not generally racist or discriminatory but it discriminates unconsciously. The white leaders & a large proportion of the general public, who is white, think they are superior to other races.
Let me show this with an example. Let's take the example of a segregated school &, as the story explains below, how adversely it impacts a child of a minority or discriminated public.
When a poor African child studies in a segregated school, he/she is pretty much slated to be poor all his/her life. Reason being is that poor people of all walks of life, with all different skin colours, enroll their kids in these urban schools. These schools lack sufficient funding from government. Even if they are getting funding from governments, which are usually insufficient, they have parents with such socioeconomic backgrouds that these schools cannot even fundraise on their own. The parents of these poor students then grow up & make friends which are going through similar situations; homelessness, poverty, drugs, gangs, crime, broken families, etc.
Even if a child goes through all these social problems, which are going around him / her, unscathed, he / she graduates from a university or college but lacks those vital connections, which can land him / her in a job from where he / she can meaningfully improve his / her future.
All the while, white or wealthy children of other races, which are usually not that many, attend schools which have more than enough resources to give them a "complete" education & prepare them for a good, & perhaps even private, universities, where they themselves & their parents make those vital connections, from where they can land those financially-rewarding jobs & careers.
That's how the wealth & achievement gap starts to appear & keeps widening. And the cycle, or history, repeats itself & it goes around again with their children.
That's the same case with immigrants & their children in the Western world. African populations in Western world came to these countries by force, but immigrants were shown a world where, if they themselves won't be able to achieve a good life, then at least, their children will. That dream is generally coming apart for most children of the immigrants. Why people immigrate & how the West is complicit in that regard, too, is a topic for another blog post & has been blogged earlier.
Good / financially rewarding jobs are going to the wealthy children because of their own & their parents' connections. Of course, the well-connected rich parents can easily pass down their rolodex or connection lists to their children. Some prime examples are current Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, using his father's vital connections to eventually become a leader of a country, or the Bushes, Clintons, Obamas, & multiple other children of the politicians becoming politicians themselves, with the help of their parents' connections or children of famous celebrities becoming celebrities themselves. Whenever I come across a personality who is successful, I first go through his / her past & try to find that one piece of connection that must have created that first big opportunity for them. I usually find one easily. Nowadays, there are very few people in this world who get to the top without anyone's help, whatsoever.
So that dream or expectation of achieving greatness with education when never materializes hurts the children a lot. Hence, those children, then lash out at the society through violence, because that's the only method they know how to vent their frustration at the injustice & false dreams / promises of the society. That violence can be in the form of being involved with trafficking of all kinds, big or small crimes, or even moving to another country to join terrorist groups like ISIS or Boko Haram.
So, as we can see, that the impact of discrimination is huge. I always say that slavery / serfdom hasn't actually died, yet. It has merely taken a different shape. White people, all over the world, are still at the top, for example, if you go visit Dubai, you will find all the rich & glamourous downtown Dubai residences are taken up by wealthy white people from Europe, UK, Canada, US, & Australia. Of course, they are living in those expensive residences with the help of big fat tax-free paycheques they are getting because of their high & influential positions in companies over there. Immigration, or even refugee asylum, in the West is due to the fact that these Western countries need workers for the jobs for which their own white populations is voluntarily unavailable, for example, for agricultural work.
So, this discrimination starts from segregated school & go all the way up to employment, & immigration in the public arena. Consequences of this discrimination are one of the worst but governments don't want to do anything substantive because this discrimination on all levels is all planned & not an effect of unplanned & haphazard policy making.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: There's a brand new story out detailing how one of desegregation's success stories in the South has become one of the nation's most racially & economically segregated schools. Today, a third of black students attend schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that look like the 60-year-old Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that said separate schools for black & white students is unequal never happened.
Writing for ProPublica, Nikole Hannah-Jones writes, quote:
"Tuscaloosa's school resegregation--among the most extensive in the country--is a story of city financial interests, secret meetings, & angry public votes. It is a story shaped by racial politics & a consuming fear of white flight. It was facilitated, to some extent, by the city's black elites. And it was blessed by a US Department of Justice no longer committed to fighting for the civil-rights aims it had once championed."
...
NOOR: So, Nikole, you really get into this story by talking about Central High in Tuscaloosa. It was an all-white school before Brown v. Board of Education. It was desegregated over ... a fairly decent, long period of time, & it became, when it was desegregated, one of the top schools in the whole state. Tell us the story of how it went from being desegregated to re-segregated now & what the impact has been on the students.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES, REPORTER, PROPUBLICA: Well, Central High School was actually created by a federal court order. Before Central existed--came to existence in 1979, there were two high schools in Tuscaloosa. One had been the historic black high school, & one had been the historic white high school. And even in 1979, 25 years after Brown v. Board, they were still segregated. So a federal judge ordered the merger of the two high schools into one, & they created Central High School.
So Central High School became a city-wide high school, meaning any public high school in the city, no matter their race, no matter where they lived, all went to the same school. And it became a true powerhouse in the state. It was the second-largest high school in the state. It was a school that swept up academic competitions, math competitions, just as easily as athletic competitions. And it really became the pride of the town & kind of a story of how integration in the South could be successful.
But what happened is there were white parents who had been turned off by desegregation. And as we've seen across the country, there was white flight from the school district. And city officials decided that the court order that had created this school was the problem & that they needed to break this school apart in order to bring white parents back to the district. So in 2000, when a federal judge dismissed Tuscaloosa from its federal desegregation order, immediately the school board voted to break apart Central High School. It created three new high schools, & it turned Central High School into a 100% black, almost entirely poor high school.
NOOR: And so talk about what that impact is for the students that go there.
HANNAH-JONES: Well, I think, one, we should make it clear that black kids don't have to sit with white kids in order to learn. But what we also know is never in the history of this country has separate been made equal. So, in Tuscaloosa, once these kids were separated off from the rest of the kids in the district, they were then kind of ignored. These kids spend their entire education, starting in kindergarten through graduation, in entirely segregated schools. These schools were once called the dumping ground for bad teachers. A teacher could be let go from a school that was an integrated school & could be hired on to work at Central or the other all-black schools in Tuscaloosa. Or, until last year, Central High School didn't even offer physics to the students. There were many years where it didn't offer advanced placement courses. So the most integrated high school in the city offered 12. So these kids were not given the same education opportunity as other kids, & they suffered for it.
NOOR: And this story of resegregation is not just happening at Central High or Tuscaloosa; it's really happening all over the South. Talk about its broader impacts.
HANNAH-JONES: Okay. I mean, first I think we should note that the reason that I focus on the South was in 1954 the South was completely segregated, & it was the most segregated part of the country, but because of these court orders, by the early '70s the South had become the most integrated part of the country, far more integrated than the Northeast or the Midwest, & it actually remains the most integrated part of the country. So I wrote about the South because the South has the most to lose. It educates more black students than anywhere else in the country. And because it had actually desegregated, where, as we know, many northern cities never have, this is the one place we got traction.
And what we're seeing is, as hundreds of school districts have been released from their court orders to integrate in the last 10 to 20 years. And as they release, within a few years these districts almost always start to take actions that resegregate black students. And so we're seeing a rise in the number of black students that are attending intensely segregated schools, which are schools that are less than 10% white. And a large number of students, black students, are now attending what some scholars call apartheid schools. And those are schools that are 1% or less white. And as a result, we're seeing the achievement gap that had started closing during the height of desegregation has widened, & it has remained wide.
NOOR: And as you mention in your story, this is not limited to the South. In fact, the Northeast has a really high number of schools. And according to a new report out by the UCLA's Civil Rights Project, it's actually New York State & New York City itself that has the highest number of these apartheid schools that you just mentioned. And I worked at a Museum in New York & I taught at public schools across New York City, & it'd be an ordinary experience for me for one day, for example, to teach in the upper West side, often children of investment bankers, people that worked on Wall Street, very wealthy, & the next day I'd teach at a school in West Harlem, just a few miles away, where all the families there were African-American & lived in the projects. And you could see the resources were different. In New York City each school gets the same amount of funding, but for example, the schools in the Upper West Side, the parents of those students would raise $1 million every year for extra resources & extra funding, & even extra teachers. So I would teach kids as young as kindergarten, but then all the way up to high school & college, & you could see what the long-term impact of the lack of resources & the isolation & segregation are.
HANNAH-JONES: Absolutely. And I think even outside of additional funding that these schools are able to raise, you have to look at--districts make very clear which students they prize, & those students tend to be middle-class students, & they also tend to be white students, I think largely because people believe that their parents are more influential in the community.
So what happens is black schools & Latino schools, not just in terms of additional resources, but they don't get the same quality of teachers. They tend to get the least experienced teachers. For instance, I live in Bedford-Stuyvesant & Brooklyn, which is an almost entirely black neighborhood, & there's not a single talented & gifted program in the schools in my neighborhood. So these kids aren't even getting access to the same types of courses, the same types of rigor. And those are resources that school officials are providing, & it has nothing to do with the wealth of parents.
NOOR: Right. And ever since No Child Left Behind, & now Race to the Top, teachers in schools are evaluated by their student performance. And we know that the biggest predictor of student performance is your socioeconomic background, so there's no incentive for teachers to really teach in the most challenging schools, because they know that they'll be held accountable for their students' performance.
HANNAH-JONES: That's right. Teachers will be penalized for the way that school districts have allowed high poverty to be concentrated in certain schools. So there is a disincentive. That's why you tend to see young teachers right out of college teaching in these schools. And once they get experience, they move on to more integrated schools.
NOOR: But what's being done in places like Alabama, & even in New York City, to challenge these policies, if anything? And do you see any hope of re-segregating these schools? You know, we're talking about 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education.
HANNAH-JONES: I mean, to be honest, very little, very little is being done. I think we've seen very little national will to deal with this issue. Even President Obama, while the administration says that they support integration, if you look into how they fund school, they offer no financial incentive & really no larger incentive for districts to voluntarily integrate. And, in fact, some of the biggest incentives are for charter schools, which, of course, research shows in many places are more segregated than traditional public schools.
So I think we don't have a lot of will about this. I think we're still trying to make separate equal. That's what No Child Left Behind does, that's what Race to the Top does, is it tries to say, okay, we have these high-poverty black & Latino schools, let's bring them up to par, instead of doing what everyone knows can have a great impact on achievement, which is: why don't you break up the racial & economic isolation of these schools? But we're not really willing to talk about that.
NOOR: Worth mentioning: all these policies are supported by Democrats & Republicans.
HANNAH-JONES: That's right.
Anyway, this news story / analysis didn't surprise me that much. The developed / Western world is becoming that much racist, & in general, discrimination of all kinds are increasing. Now, this story only explores how the American schools are re-segregating students based on skin colour. But, this re-segregation, & the story alludes to it a little bit, is symptomatic of larger & deep-seated socioeconomic problem.
That problem is centuries old. That problem is ingrained in the minds of leaders, & the general public, of the Western world. The general public is not generally racist or discriminatory but it discriminates unconsciously. The white leaders & a large proportion of the general public, who is white, think they are superior to other races.
Let me show this with an example. Let's take the example of a segregated school &, as the story explains below, how adversely it impacts a child of a minority or discriminated public.
When a poor African child studies in a segregated school, he/she is pretty much slated to be poor all his/her life. Reason being is that poor people of all walks of life, with all different skin colours, enroll their kids in these urban schools. These schools lack sufficient funding from government. Even if they are getting funding from governments, which are usually insufficient, they have parents with such socioeconomic backgrouds that these schools cannot even fundraise on their own. The parents of these poor students then grow up & make friends which are going through similar situations; homelessness, poverty, drugs, gangs, crime, broken families, etc.
Even if a child goes through all these social problems, which are going around him / her, unscathed, he / she graduates from a university or college but lacks those vital connections, which can land him / her in a job from where he / she can meaningfully improve his / her future.
All the while, white or wealthy children of other races, which are usually not that many, attend schools which have more than enough resources to give them a "complete" education & prepare them for a good, & perhaps even private, universities, where they themselves & their parents make those vital connections, from where they can land those financially-rewarding jobs & careers.
That's how the wealth & achievement gap starts to appear & keeps widening. And the cycle, or history, repeats itself & it goes around again with their children.
That's the same case with immigrants & their children in the Western world. African populations in Western world came to these countries by force, but immigrants were shown a world where, if they themselves won't be able to achieve a good life, then at least, their children will. That dream is generally coming apart for most children of the immigrants. Why people immigrate & how the West is complicit in that regard, too, is a topic for another blog post & has been blogged earlier.
Good / financially rewarding jobs are going to the wealthy children because of their own & their parents' connections. Of course, the well-connected rich parents can easily pass down their rolodex or connection lists to their children. Some prime examples are current Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, using his father's vital connections to eventually become a leader of a country, or the Bushes, Clintons, Obamas, & multiple other children of the politicians becoming politicians themselves, with the help of their parents' connections or children of famous celebrities becoming celebrities themselves. Whenever I come across a personality who is successful, I first go through his / her past & try to find that one piece of connection that must have created that first big opportunity for them. I usually find one easily. Nowadays, there are very few people in this world who get to the top without anyone's help, whatsoever.
So that dream or expectation of achieving greatness with education when never materializes hurts the children a lot. Hence, those children, then lash out at the society through violence, because that's the only method they know how to vent their frustration at the injustice & false dreams / promises of the society. That violence can be in the form of being involved with trafficking of all kinds, big or small crimes, or even moving to another country to join terrorist groups like ISIS or Boko Haram.
So, as we can see, that the impact of discrimination is huge. I always say that slavery / serfdom hasn't actually died, yet. It has merely taken a different shape. White people, all over the world, are still at the top, for example, if you go visit Dubai, you will find all the rich & glamourous downtown Dubai residences are taken up by wealthy white people from Europe, UK, Canada, US, & Australia. Of course, they are living in those expensive residences with the help of big fat tax-free paycheques they are getting because of their high & influential positions in companies over there. Immigration, or even refugee asylum, in the West is due to the fact that these Western countries need workers for the jobs for which their own white populations is voluntarily unavailable, for example, for agricultural work.
So, this discrimination starts from segregated school & go all the way up to employment, & immigration in the public arena. Consequences of this discrimination are one of the worst but governments don't want to do anything substantive because this discrimination on all levels is all planned & not an effect of unplanned & haphazard policy making.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: There's a brand new story out detailing how one of desegregation's success stories in the South has become one of the nation's most racially & economically segregated schools. Today, a third of black students attend schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that look like the 60-year-old Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that said separate schools for black & white students is unequal never happened.
Writing for ProPublica, Nikole Hannah-Jones writes, quote:
"Tuscaloosa's school resegregation--among the most extensive in the country--is a story of city financial interests, secret meetings, & angry public votes. It is a story shaped by racial politics & a consuming fear of white flight. It was facilitated, to some extent, by the city's black elites. And it was blessed by a US Department of Justice no longer committed to fighting for the civil-rights aims it had once championed."
...
NOOR: So, Nikole, you really get into this story by talking about Central High in Tuscaloosa. It was an all-white school before Brown v. Board of Education. It was desegregated over ... a fairly decent, long period of time, & it became, when it was desegregated, one of the top schools in the whole state. Tell us the story of how it went from being desegregated to re-segregated now & what the impact has been on the students.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES, REPORTER, PROPUBLICA: Well, Central High School was actually created by a federal court order. Before Central existed--came to existence in 1979, there were two high schools in Tuscaloosa. One had been the historic black high school, & one had been the historic white high school. And even in 1979, 25 years after Brown v. Board, they were still segregated. So a federal judge ordered the merger of the two high schools into one, & they created Central High School.
So Central High School became a city-wide high school, meaning any public high school in the city, no matter their race, no matter where they lived, all went to the same school. And it became a true powerhouse in the state. It was the second-largest high school in the state. It was a school that swept up academic competitions, math competitions, just as easily as athletic competitions. And it really became the pride of the town & kind of a story of how integration in the South could be successful.
But what happened is there were white parents who had been turned off by desegregation. And as we've seen across the country, there was white flight from the school district. And city officials decided that the court order that had created this school was the problem & that they needed to break this school apart in order to bring white parents back to the district. So in 2000, when a federal judge dismissed Tuscaloosa from its federal desegregation order, immediately the school board voted to break apart Central High School. It created three new high schools, & it turned Central High School into a 100% black, almost entirely poor high school.
NOOR: And so talk about what that impact is for the students that go there.
HANNAH-JONES: Well, I think, one, we should make it clear that black kids don't have to sit with white kids in order to learn. But what we also know is never in the history of this country has separate been made equal. So, in Tuscaloosa, once these kids were separated off from the rest of the kids in the district, they were then kind of ignored. These kids spend their entire education, starting in kindergarten through graduation, in entirely segregated schools. These schools were once called the dumping ground for bad teachers. A teacher could be let go from a school that was an integrated school & could be hired on to work at Central or the other all-black schools in Tuscaloosa. Or, until last year, Central High School didn't even offer physics to the students. There were many years where it didn't offer advanced placement courses. So the most integrated high school in the city offered 12. So these kids were not given the same education opportunity as other kids, & they suffered for it.
NOOR: And this story of resegregation is not just happening at Central High or Tuscaloosa; it's really happening all over the South. Talk about its broader impacts.
HANNAH-JONES: Okay. I mean, first I think we should note that the reason that I focus on the South was in 1954 the South was completely segregated, & it was the most segregated part of the country, but because of these court orders, by the early '70s the South had become the most integrated part of the country, far more integrated than the Northeast or the Midwest, & it actually remains the most integrated part of the country. So I wrote about the South because the South has the most to lose. It educates more black students than anywhere else in the country. And because it had actually desegregated, where, as we know, many northern cities never have, this is the one place we got traction.
And what we're seeing is, as hundreds of school districts have been released from their court orders to integrate in the last 10 to 20 years. And as they release, within a few years these districts almost always start to take actions that resegregate black students. And so we're seeing a rise in the number of black students that are attending intensely segregated schools, which are schools that are less than 10% white. And a large number of students, black students, are now attending what some scholars call apartheid schools. And those are schools that are 1% or less white. And as a result, we're seeing the achievement gap that had started closing during the height of desegregation has widened, & it has remained wide.
NOOR: And as you mention in your story, this is not limited to the South. In fact, the Northeast has a really high number of schools. And according to a new report out by the UCLA's Civil Rights Project, it's actually New York State & New York City itself that has the highest number of these apartheid schools that you just mentioned. And I worked at a Museum in New York & I taught at public schools across New York City, & it'd be an ordinary experience for me for one day, for example, to teach in the upper West side, often children of investment bankers, people that worked on Wall Street, very wealthy, & the next day I'd teach at a school in West Harlem, just a few miles away, where all the families there were African-American & lived in the projects. And you could see the resources were different. In New York City each school gets the same amount of funding, but for example, the schools in the Upper West Side, the parents of those students would raise $1 million every year for extra resources & extra funding, & even extra teachers. So I would teach kids as young as kindergarten, but then all the way up to high school & college, & you could see what the long-term impact of the lack of resources & the isolation & segregation are.
HANNAH-JONES: Absolutely. And I think even outside of additional funding that these schools are able to raise, you have to look at--districts make very clear which students they prize, & those students tend to be middle-class students, & they also tend to be white students, I think largely because people believe that their parents are more influential in the community.
So what happens is black schools & Latino schools, not just in terms of additional resources, but they don't get the same quality of teachers. They tend to get the least experienced teachers. For instance, I live in Bedford-Stuyvesant & Brooklyn, which is an almost entirely black neighborhood, & there's not a single talented & gifted program in the schools in my neighborhood. So these kids aren't even getting access to the same types of courses, the same types of rigor. And those are resources that school officials are providing, & it has nothing to do with the wealth of parents.
NOOR: Right. And ever since No Child Left Behind, & now Race to the Top, teachers in schools are evaluated by their student performance. And we know that the biggest predictor of student performance is your socioeconomic background, so there's no incentive for teachers to really teach in the most challenging schools, because they know that they'll be held accountable for their students' performance.
HANNAH-JONES: That's right. Teachers will be penalized for the way that school districts have allowed high poverty to be concentrated in certain schools. So there is a disincentive. That's why you tend to see young teachers right out of college teaching in these schools. And once they get experience, they move on to more integrated schools.
NOOR: But what's being done in places like Alabama, & even in New York City, to challenge these policies, if anything? And do you see any hope of re-segregating these schools? You know, we're talking about 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education.
HANNAH-JONES: I mean, to be honest, very little, very little is being done. I think we've seen very little national will to deal with this issue. Even President Obama, while the administration says that they support integration, if you look into how they fund school, they offer no financial incentive & really no larger incentive for districts to voluntarily integrate. And, in fact, some of the biggest incentives are for charter schools, which, of course, research shows in many places are more segregated than traditional public schools.
So I think we don't have a lot of will about this. I think we're still trying to make separate equal. That's what No Child Left Behind does, that's what Race to the Top does, is it tries to say, okay, we have these high-poverty black & Latino schools, let's bring them up to par, instead of doing what everyone knows can have a great impact on achievement, which is: why don't you break up the racial & economic isolation of these schools? But we're not really willing to talk about that.
NOOR: Worth mentioning: all these policies are supported by Democrats & Republicans.
HANNAH-JONES: That's right.
Thursday, February 11, 2016
"Testing Stress" by Nate Beeler
Monday, November 16, 2015
"Education Cuts" by David Fitzsimmons
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Black teachers still face racism on the job in Ontario
I used to be surprised when people used to get surprised at the news that there's racism in Canada; the country which thinks it is better than US in regards to such form of discrimination & hatred.
But I don't get surprised at them, because I already know those people, who are the majority of the population, are living under a rock, when it comes to their social knowledge. They may know a lot about their profession, politics, sports etc., but when it comes to know what's going on in their vicinity which is affecting adversely to their fellow human beings, they are completely clueless.
I know there's racism in Canada because I suffer it myself. I know there's racism in Canada because I hear from other people in my community who suffer from it. But most people in our supposedly "diverse" society live in so insularly that they are completely oblivious to these daily facts of life.
Recent riots & violence in US in regards to racism didn't come out of nowhere, but they were the result of years & decades of racism by the American "white" majority. Since, African-Americans are that many more in population in US than any other race, racism affects them with that much force.
In Canada, the adverse effects of racism are few but intense. Reason being that a large majority of some 35 million of Canadians are of one race, & other races make a small portion of the whole population. On top of that, many stories of racism never surface, so we never come to hear the full extent of racism in our society.
As interim president of ONABSE says in the article below that "racism is still deeply ingrained in society."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many black teachers across Ontario still face racism on the job, according to a new study of educators, half of whom said they believe being black has hurt their chance of promotion. Some told of hearing the ‘N’ word used in the staff room & being mistaken for a trespasser.
“I had a supply teacher tell me I am not allowed to park my car in staff parking,” said one of the 148 black educators across 12 Ontario school boards surveyed for a report ... . “The ‘N’ word was used in casual conversation in our staff room,” said another. “I was introduced as ‘home girl’ to a student teacher.”
The 63-page report, The Voices of Ontario Black Educators, prepared for the Ontario Alliance of Black School Educators (ONABSE), calls for Ontario to enact tough employment equity legislation, provide training against anti-black bias, set targets for promoting teachers of colour & cluster black teachers in particular in schools where there are high numbers of black students.
“We’re disappointed, but not surprised at the findings — racism is still deeply ingrained in society,” said Warren Salmon, interim president of ONABSE, which commissioned the report because of concerns expressed by its members.
Of the black teachers, principals & vice-principals surveyed, one-third said they believe they have been passed over for advancement because they are black. Some 27% said racial discrimination by colleagues affects their day-to-day work life & 51% said they believe anti-black bias at their school board affects who gets promoted.
Equity consultant Tana Turner of Turner Consultants conducted the survey, & called for school boards to “set equity goals & timetables — not just have an employment equity office which merely measures the numbers of employees …"
Toronto vice-principal Darlene Jones said she has not experienced racism either as a teacher or as vice-principal of Beverley Heights Middle School — “not at all; but I’m not alarmed that it exists. It’s our world; you just have to hope that by changing mindsets, things will change.”
...
The report included numerous anecdotes of “micro-aggressions … the everyday slights, insults & indignities” that imply black teachers don’t belong:
• One was “asked by a principal if I would ever consider straightening my hair.”
• Another was “told I should steer away from too much black history in the class as black history is not important when no black students are present.”
• On arriving at a new job assignment, “colleagues asked if I am a new caretaker.”
• “A colleague was shocked that I was raised by both parents — & expressed it in the staff room.”
Turner noted that in 2011, 26% of Ontarians were “racialized” (visible minorities) — a figure that soars to 72% in Markham, 66% in Brampton, 54% in Mississauga & 49% in Toronto. However, she said the percentage of teachers of colour lags behind the population.
Some 31% of the Toronto District School Board’s staff self-identified as visible minorities in 2012. At the University of Toronto’s faculty of education, 46% of current students self-identified as being part of a visible minority.
The ONABSE report calls for more rigorous tracking of the diversity of teachers in Ontario schools.
But I don't get surprised at them, because I already know those people, who are the majority of the population, are living under a rock, when it comes to their social knowledge. They may know a lot about their profession, politics, sports etc., but when it comes to know what's going on in their vicinity which is affecting adversely to their fellow human beings, they are completely clueless.
I know there's racism in Canada because I suffer it myself. I know there's racism in Canada because I hear from other people in my community who suffer from it. But most people in our supposedly "diverse" society live in so insularly that they are completely oblivious to these daily facts of life.
Recent riots & violence in US in regards to racism didn't come out of nowhere, but they were the result of years & decades of racism by the American "white" majority. Since, African-Americans are that many more in population in US than any other race, racism affects them with that much force.
In Canada, the adverse effects of racism are few but intense. Reason being that a large majority of some 35 million of Canadians are of one race, & other races make a small portion of the whole population. On top of that, many stories of racism never surface, so we never come to hear the full extent of racism in our society.
As interim president of ONABSE says in the article below that "racism is still deeply ingrained in society."
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Many black teachers across Ontario still face racism on the job, according to a new study of educators, half of whom said they believe being black has hurt their chance of promotion. Some told of hearing the ‘N’ word used in the staff room & being mistaken for a trespasser.
“I had a supply teacher tell me I am not allowed to park my car in staff parking,” said one of the 148 black educators across 12 Ontario school boards surveyed for a report ... . “The ‘N’ word was used in casual conversation in our staff room,” said another. “I was introduced as ‘home girl’ to a student teacher.”
The 63-page report, The Voices of Ontario Black Educators, prepared for the Ontario Alliance of Black School Educators (ONABSE), calls for Ontario to enact tough employment equity legislation, provide training against anti-black bias, set targets for promoting teachers of colour & cluster black teachers in particular in schools where there are high numbers of black students.
“We’re disappointed, but not surprised at the findings — racism is still deeply ingrained in society,” said Warren Salmon, interim president of ONABSE, which commissioned the report because of concerns expressed by its members.
Of the black teachers, principals & vice-principals surveyed, one-third said they believe they have been passed over for advancement because they are black. Some 27% said racial discrimination by colleagues affects their day-to-day work life & 51% said they believe anti-black bias at their school board affects who gets promoted.
Equity consultant Tana Turner of Turner Consultants conducted the survey, & called for school boards to “set equity goals & timetables — not just have an employment equity office which merely measures the numbers of employees …"
Toronto vice-principal Darlene Jones said she has not experienced racism either as a teacher or as vice-principal of Beverley Heights Middle School — “not at all; but I’m not alarmed that it exists. It’s our world; you just have to hope that by changing mindsets, things will change.”
...
The report included numerous anecdotes of “micro-aggressions … the everyday slights, insults & indignities” that imply black teachers don’t belong:
• One was “asked by a principal if I would ever consider straightening my hair.”
• Another was “told I should steer away from too much black history in the class as black history is not important when no black students are present.”
• On arriving at a new job assignment, “colleagues asked if I am a new caretaker.”
• “A colleague was shocked that I was raised by both parents — & expressed it in the staff room.”
Turner noted that in 2011, 26% of Ontarians were “racialized” (visible minorities) — a figure that soars to 72% in Markham, 66% in Brampton, 54% in Mississauga & 49% in Toronto. However, she said the percentage of teachers of colour lags behind the population.
Some 31% of the Toronto District School Board’s staff self-identified as visible minorities in 2012. At the University of Toronto’s faculty of education, 46% of current students self-identified as being part of a visible minority.
The ONABSE report calls for more rigorous tracking of the diversity of teachers in Ontario schools.
Thursday, October 22, 2015
How the 'poshness test' is denying working-class people top jobs
A few months ago, I blogged about how universities in US are laying out the red carpet for children of rich parents. That is skewing the education paradigm in favour of the rich. Well, this news from the UK is highlighting how the social favouritism for the rich doesn't stop at the school but continues on to working lives.
Now, this news may surprise that lot in the world, who think that there is merit & fairness in the Western world. In the Western world, most jobs, & definitely the good ones, are only available through the "power of Networking." Of course, employees of certain socio-economic background keep similar friends, & hence, when the boss says that a vacancy is coming up in a department (marketing, finance, human resources etc.), employees tell their friends (who are like them) about that vacancy.
Eventually, people of a certain socio-economic background end up in the same company. Promotions take place from that employee pool. And then, those people hire the same; other people in their own image. After all, it's just human psychology that we like other people who seem similar to us; in values, in finances, in habits, in education etc.
So, of course, the good jobs in the top firms will go to the people who are of a certain "posh" class. It doesn't matter what education or how good a person was in school, anymore; it all comes down to who you are friends with, nowadays. This is the case everywhere around the world.
At the end of the day, the so-called "modern" society is going back to the days of dark ages, when the few select elites of the society used to have everything in the society working for them; from politics to finances to education and work for their kids.
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Thousands of working-class people are being denied jobs at top firms, as they effectively need to pass a “poshness test” to join elite employers, according to the official body set up by the Government to promote social mobility.
Executives are more likely to judge potential recruits by how they speak than by how well they might do the job, research by Alan Milburn’s Social Mobility & Child Poverty Commission found.
Its review shows that more than two-thirds of the job vacancies in elite legal & City firms are filled by university graduates who have been through private or grammar schools. By comparison, nearly 90% of schoolchildren have a comprehensive education, compared to just 7% attending fee-paying schools & 4% going to selective grammar schools.
Discrimination comes about because the managers who conduct job interviews do not like working-class accents, the commission reported, but are impressed by young people who have travelled widely, which naturally favours those from well-off families.
One employer frankly admitted his firm’s recruitment practices were loaded against young working-class applicants. But, he asked: “How much mud do I have to sift through in that population to find that diamond?”
Even when a working-class youth is on first rung of the ladder, he or she is likely to be passed over for promotion because of “the tendency of more senior professionals to promote in their own image & thus ‘misrecognise’ merit,” the commission said.
“This research shows that young people with working-class backgrounds are being systematically locked out of top jobs,” said Mr. Milburn, the former Labour Cabinet minister who chairs the commission. “Elite firms seem to require applicants to pass a ‘poshness test’ to gain entry. Inevitably that ends up excluding youngsters who have the right sort of grades & abilities but whose parents do not have the right sort of bank balances.
“Thankfully, some of our country’s leading firms are making a big commitment to recruit the brightest & best, regardless of background. They should be applauded. But for the rest this is a ‘wake up & smell the coffee’ moment. “In some top law firms, trainees are more than 5 times likely to have attended a fee-paying school than the population as a whole. They are denying themselves talent, stymieing young people’s social mobility & fuelling the social divide that bedevils Britain. ”
The “poshness test” is one way in which Britain’s social divide is widening, despite the rise in the number of professional jobs, which is expected to increase by 2 million in the next 5 years.
Research has previously shown that graduates whose parents can support them while they do unpaid work have a marked advantage, because almost a third of graduates recruited for full-time jobs in the top firms have already worked for them, usually as unpaid interns. It has also been found that most major firms tend to recruit graduates from just 19 universities.
The commission, which advises the government on social mobility, has examined the recruiting history of 13 elite firms employing 45,000 of Britain’s highest paid professionals.
They concluded that the recruiting practices are now so skewed in favour of “poshness” that many of the firms’ own senior executives would have not been hired under the criteria now used.
Between 60% & 70% of job offers made by the leading accountancy firms are to graduates of the 24 leading universities that make up the Russell Group.
...
But on a positive note, some firms have acknowledged that A-level results are not always a good indicator of performance, & have stopped taking them into account. In one firm that was studied, more than 10% of recruits would have failed if they had been judged on their school results.
Dr. Louise Ashley, of Royal Holloway, University of London, who led the research, urged firms to recruit from a wider range of applicants, & make sure that those from “diverse” backgrounds were not at a disadvantage. “Selection processes which advantage students from more privileged backgrounds remain firmly in place,” she said.
Now, this news may surprise that lot in the world, who think that there is merit & fairness in the Western world. In the Western world, most jobs, & definitely the good ones, are only available through the "power of Networking." Of course, employees of certain socio-economic background keep similar friends, & hence, when the boss says that a vacancy is coming up in a department (marketing, finance, human resources etc.), employees tell their friends (who are like them) about that vacancy.
Eventually, people of a certain socio-economic background end up in the same company. Promotions take place from that employee pool. And then, those people hire the same; other people in their own image. After all, it's just human psychology that we like other people who seem similar to us; in values, in finances, in habits, in education etc.
So, of course, the good jobs in the top firms will go to the people who are of a certain "posh" class. It doesn't matter what education or how good a person was in school, anymore; it all comes down to who you are friends with, nowadays. This is the case everywhere around the world.
At the end of the day, the so-called "modern" society is going back to the days of dark ages, when the few select elites of the society used to have everything in the society working for them; from politics to finances to education and work for their kids.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thousands of working-class people are being denied jobs at top firms, as they effectively need to pass a “poshness test” to join elite employers, according to the official body set up by the Government to promote social mobility.
Executives are more likely to judge potential recruits by how they speak than by how well they might do the job, research by Alan Milburn’s Social Mobility & Child Poverty Commission found.
Its review shows that more than two-thirds of the job vacancies in elite legal & City firms are filled by university graduates who have been through private or grammar schools. By comparison, nearly 90% of schoolchildren have a comprehensive education, compared to just 7% attending fee-paying schools & 4% going to selective grammar schools.
Discrimination comes about because the managers who conduct job interviews do not like working-class accents, the commission reported, but are impressed by young people who have travelled widely, which naturally favours those from well-off families.
One employer frankly admitted his firm’s recruitment practices were loaded against young working-class applicants. But, he asked: “How much mud do I have to sift through in that population to find that diamond?”
Even when a working-class youth is on first rung of the ladder, he or she is likely to be passed over for promotion because of “the tendency of more senior professionals to promote in their own image & thus ‘misrecognise’ merit,” the commission said.
“This research shows that young people with working-class backgrounds are being systematically locked out of top jobs,” said Mr. Milburn, the former Labour Cabinet minister who chairs the commission. “Elite firms seem to require applicants to pass a ‘poshness test’ to gain entry. Inevitably that ends up excluding youngsters who have the right sort of grades & abilities but whose parents do not have the right sort of bank balances.
“Thankfully, some of our country’s leading firms are making a big commitment to recruit the brightest & best, regardless of background. They should be applauded. But for the rest this is a ‘wake up & smell the coffee’ moment. “In some top law firms, trainees are more than 5 times likely to have attended a fee-paying school than the population as a whole. They are denying themselves talent, stymieing young people’s social mobility & fuelling the social divide that bedevils Britain. ”
The “poshness test” is one way in which Britain’s social divide is widening, despite the rise in the number of professional jobs, which is expected to increase by 2 million in the next 5 years.
Research has previously shown that graduates whose parents can support them while they do unpaid work have a marked advantage, because almost a third of graduates recruited for full-time jobs in the top firms have already worked for them, usually as unpaid interns. It has also been found that most major firms tend to recruit graduates from just 19 universities.
The commission, which advises the government on social mobility, has examined the recruiting history of 13 elite firms employing 45,000 of Britain’s highest paid professionals.
They concluded that the recruiting practices are now so skewed in favour of “poshness” that many of the firms’ own senior executives would have not been hired under the criteria now used.
Between 60% & 70% of job offers made by the leading accountancy firms are to graduates of the 24 leading universities that make up the Russell Group.
...
But on a positive note, some firms have acknowledged that A-level results are not always a good indicator of performance, & have stopped taking them into account. In one firm that was studied, more than 10% of recruits would have failed if they had been judged on their school results.
Dr. Louise Ashley, of Royal Holloway, University of London, who led the research, urged firms to recruit from a wider range of applicants, & make sure that those from “diverse” backgrounds were not at a disadvantage. “Selection processes which advantage students from more privileged backgrounds remain firmly in place,” she said.
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