Harvard recently hosted a Creating Pathways to Prosperity conference for education, government, business, and third sector leaders from across the U.S. The goal was to address the growing concern for young people’s career prospects.
Among the invited participants were over 400 leaders, including governors, secretaries of education and workforce development, CEOs of major corporations, youth leaders, and champions of the most promising initiatives to help youth transition from school to success.
Career Cruising played a prominent role in this historic conference. I was invited to speak on a Guidance Panel, along with several distinguished U.S. guidance leaders. Career Cruising also introduced conference organizers to Thoughtstream, an online community engagement tool.
Career Cruising and Thoughtstream presented six questions to conference invitees a month ahead of the actual meeting dates. Well over a thousand ideas were painstakingly distilled into a clear pattern of collective priorities for the conference.
What follows is a very abbreviated, yet informative summary of the results. The implications for guidance and career development practitioners are profound. For a comprehensive summary and detailed reports, click here.
In 1983, the publication of A Nation at Risk inaugurated a 30-year wave of reform in the United States that has led to a system of education that is increasingly narrow in focus and has reduced high school to a mere stopping point on the way to the next level of education – college. In response to the popular perception that the United States is losing out to other nations whose children score better on academic tests, we have convinced ourselves that good jobs require a college degree. In the “college for all” movement, high school has become the new middle school.
How did this happen? Over the years, on the assumption that more (academics) must be better, states began to increase the academic requirements for graduation. One year of required high school math became three, and in many states, four. More science was demanded of students. Despite the addition of the equivalent of one full year of core academics to high school requirements since the early 1990s, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores in math, science, and literacy have remained essentially flat. In the meantime, although the high school graduation rate has been slowly improving, between one in four and one in five students starting ninth grade do not finish high school. Buried within these data is an alarming trend regarding boys. In a July 2012 New York Times opinion piece, David Brooks noted that fewer boys than girls finish high school, go to college, complete college, enter graduate school, or finish graduate school. Boys have the most discipline problems in schools and are awarded 75% of all the Ds and Fs. If there were any doubt, we have a very real boy problem in U.S. education.
So where is this getting us? Requiring more academic courses is not improving academic skills and may be pushing boys out of the education pipeline, but we may be getting more students to finish college. Since 2001, according to the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, we have seen a 31% increase in the number of associate’s degrees awarded, a 24% increase in baccalaureate degrees, a 45% increase in master’s degrees, and a 43% increase in doctoral degrees. The problem is, 47% of those graduates now have jobs that do not require a BA or BS—more than a third of these graduates have jobs that require only a high school diploma. The amount of postsecondary education one has does not affect the hourly rate at Walmart or Starbucks.
Although more education is intrinsically a good thing, the “college for all” movement has ignored both the costs of acquiring a college education and the realities of the labor market. Reports increasingly show the mismatch between what a college degree offers and what the labor market demands. Labor market signals strongly suggest the existence of a skills mismatch, and in some cases, a skills gap. Industry decries a lack of technicians, welders, and machinists to meet rising manufacturing demands. There are not enough medical assistants, pharmacy technicians, and health information workers to meet the extraordinary growth of the health care field. Many other jobs are going unfilled that require not a four-year degree but an industry-recognized credential (IRC). IRCs may require anything from 10 weeks of intensive training for a welding certificate to two years of postsecondary study for an associate’s degree in nursing, for example.
Given the realities of the labor market and the challenge of keeping young people engaged in education and getting them prepared for the job market, how can we make high schools matter to more youth?
Three years ago, when I published People Without Jobs Jobs Without People I had no idea of the interest the report would generate. To date I have made over seventy presentations, typically as a keynote speaker, to a wide variety of audiences (educators, labour planners, career counselors, businesses, government officials, etc.). As a result, it has become increasingly obvious that we have to do a lot better at matching people with jobs. Frustration among of our youth is setting in and that is not a good thing.
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