Money Speaks One Language

I read the below article right after reading our local paper and another activist group and their demands for full time available translators in schools to meet the needs of foreign language ELL learners and their parents. The idea is to be able to communicate with the faculty to assist and determine the needs of their children. A great idea that is utterly unfeasible.  The lack of funding for basic educational services is one, the other is fully trained and in turn compensated translators that speak one or more of the dozens of languages that are part of a school.

To understand that one only needs to visit the World School, a school set up for bi-lingual students grades 6-12.  It was utterly tragic and grim with students who were barely literate in their own language and the amount of students (200) that spoke well over a dozen languages with a 50% failure rate.  There were nowhere near enough translators, support staff and frankly well educated and trained teachers to not only teach English but the curriculum requirements that an average student of the same age is to meet in order to graduate under state law.  ELL teaching is a challenging and highly specialized form of teaching and frankly what I witnessed concerned me greatly with regards to that endorsement and the qualifications needed.  It explained why many positions were filled with Substitutes and the high numbers of staff churning and burning through the school.  If it was not serving a foreign based population it would be a school that parents would question and challenge as they do on a regular basis with regards to consistency in a district that fails that objective daily let alone annually.

I hated every minute working there as it was a set up for failure and the reality is that the school knew that and did nothing to actually change that so they spent a lot of time false cheerleading and burying the reality through absurd field trips, college visits, and other celebrations versus teaching time which further illustrated that they were not meeting let alone exceeding goals.   The problems go well beyond the schools walls and families who have relocated/migrated/immigrated to America are also struggling to integrate themselves which exacerbates the problem.   I can only imagine what it would be like to move to another country and find myself frustrated learning a language, raising a family, supporting myself and simply navigating a country and its laws, rules and social norms of which I was utterly unfamiliar would be near impossible on the average income that many of these immigrants earn. So it explains also why one would gravitate to live in a community that is segregated and isolated by choice, in turn furthering the divide and the ability to assimilate. It all is overwhelming, frustrating and confusing. And may explain why many resort to alternative options.

Then we have the idea that American education is the key to all success and riches, that meritocracy unicorn travels far.

And we also like to believe that those in foreign countries are surpassing and exceeding us and we frequently hear repeatedly that we must open the doors to importing more foreign educated individuals in supposed high demand fields from STEM to Medicine. And with that comes the idea that they are already trained and prepared to step into a university and take the slot that could be available to a student here that is in need with no less skills but actual better language management, but way less money

I have written about the fraud and lack of actual supervision, education and legitimacy of these supposed foreign schools that produce these supposed amazing graduates, especially those in the Asian corridor. This article in the Washington Post about Medical schools in India seems to confirm the worst and the reality is that because we have a shortage of Primary care providers many are immigrating to America to fulfill said roles.  Think medicine is in trouble now, well this will not make it better soon. Physician heal thyself.

And while ed reformers are complaining about American students needing remedial education imagine adding the next tier of language to the problem.  It again means numerous translators, well trained staff and of course services to ensure that the University is meeting its obligations to the state in order to maintain accreditation. The idea of money, both in revenue and in costs, and the overall reality of working within those constraints often are at odds when it comes to education.

Recruiting Students Overseas to Fill Seats, Not to Meet Standards

 By STEPHANIE SAUL
THE NEW YORK TIMES
APRIL 19, 2016 

 BOWLING GREEN, Ky. — “Hurry Up!!!” the online posting said. “Spot Admissions” to Western Kentucky University. Scholarships of up to $17,000 were available, it added. “Letter in one day.” The offer, by a college recruiter based in India, was part of a campaign so enticing that more than 300 students swiftly applied to a college that many had probably never heard of. More than 8,000 miles away, at Western Kentucky, professors were taken by surprise when they learned last fall of the aggressive recruitment effort, sponsored by their international enrollment office. Word began to spread here on campus that a potential flood of graduate students would arrive in the spring 2016 semester. The problem — or one of them — was that many of the students did not meet the university’s standards, faculty members said, and administrators acknowledged.

 Western Kentucky’s deal with the recruiting company, Global Tree Overseas Education Consultants, is a type of arrangement that is becoming more common as a thriving international educational consultancy industry casts a wide net in India and other countries, luring international students to United States colleges struggling to fill seats. The university agreed to pay Global Tree a commission of 15 percent of the first year’s tuition of students who enrolled, or about $2,000 per student. But as colleges increasingly rely on these international recruiters, educators worry that students may be victimized by high-pressure sales tactics, and that universities are trading away academic standards by recruiting less qualified students who pay higher tuition.

“There are some incentives for not delivering complete clunkers, but the underlying motivation for both the university and the agent is to get warm bodies in the door,” said Philip G. Altbach, the founding director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. At Western Kentucky, 106 of 132 students admitted through the recruitment effort scored below the university’s requirement on an English skills test, according to a resolution adopted last fall by the graduate faculty council, which raised questions about the program. “The vast majority either didn’t have any scores or there wasn’t documentation of their language skills,” said Barbara Burch, a faculty member of the university’s Board of Regents.

The university senate and the student government association also expressed concerns. “It is ethically wrong to bring students to the university and let them believe they can be successful when we have nothing in place to make sure they’re successful,” the student association president, Jay Todd Richey, said. With about 1,400 international students and a little more than 20,000 students over all, Western Kentucky, the state’s third-largest public university, has been at the forefront of efforts by universities across the country to increase foreign enrollment. Its slogan is “A leading American university with international reach.”

Administrators say the India Pilot Project, as the recruitment effort is known here, is an experiment to increase enrollment and to diversify the international student body, and fits in with a previously announced plan to double international enrollment. They also say the students — 57 of whom enrolled in January — were admitted conditionally and have been placed in remedial classes to help them adjust. “International is good, but it’s not always easy,” Gary Ransdell, the university’s president, said in an interview. “It can’t be business as usual. We’re learning that. There are growing pains.” Global Tree’s director, Subhakar Alapati, also acknowledged that the program had glitches, saying in a telephone interview, “A problem with the students has arisen because the education system in India is more theoretical than practical.”

Dr. Ransdell said the university had decided to recruit international students years ago to expose local students to global cultures. But recently, he said, the effort has become more of an economic necessity, partly because of drastic state funding cuts for higher education — a pattern seen across the country. To combat these cuts, colleges began to look at foreign students, who pay full tuition, as their financial salvation. And although federal law prohibits them from using recruiters in the United States who are paid based on the number of students they enroll, the law does not ban the use of such recruiters abroad. Concerned about the potential for recruiting abuses, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or Nacac, put out a draft policy in 2011 imposing a similar ban abroad.

“The use of agents who are compensated in the form of bonus, commission or other incentive payment on the basis of the number of students recruited or enrolled creates an environment in which misrepresentation and conflicts of interests are unavoidable,” the draft said. But the organization never imposed the policy because of pressure from its members. Since that decision in 2013, the use of international recruiters has increased, said Eddie West, the director of international initiatives for the organization. “Anecdotally and through surveys, we can tell there’s been an uptick in that type of recruitment,” Mr. West said.

 A major criticism of the recruiters is that their sales tactics can pressure students by creating a sense of urgency. Other international recruiting companies are also offering so-called “spot admission” or “spot assessment” to a variety of United States universities. One is Study Metro, in Bangalore, India, which posted notices on Facebook offering quick admission, seemingly to the University of Oklahoma, along with fast turnarounds on a document called the I-20, required to obtain a visa. “Dear Students, Study Metro invites you with open arms to make avail of the spot admission and I20 program on 31st Jan 2016,” it adds. “Don’t miss the opportunity to fulfill your aspiring dream of studying in USA. Call now for FREE registration.

 First comes First served.” Abhishek Bajaj, the managing director of Study Metro, said his company’s reference to the University of Oklahoma was an error. Its client, he said, is the University of Central Oklahoma. He defended the urgent tone of the posting, saying that university representatives were in his office that day. “The urgency is to tell them this is a golden opportunity to meet,” Mr. Bajaj said. Global Tree, the company working with Western Kentucky, also recently offered on Facebook “spot assessment” to “world top” Purdue University, with a notice saying, “Low Scores, Don’t Worry.” The smaller print reveals that the ad is for Purdue University Calumet, in Hammond, Ind., about 100 miles from the flagship campus in West Lafayette. After being notified about the Facebook posting, a spokesman for Purdue Calumet said the university was reviewing its relationship with Global Tree, calling the message “unfortunate and disconcerting.”

 “We do not lower the requirements for our international students,” the spokesman, Wes Lukoshus, said. Photo An ad for Study Metro, another recruiting company. Global Tree’s director, Mr. Alapati, said in the telephone interview that Purdue Calumet had approved its marketing materials in advance. Recruiting students who are not qualified or encouraging students to attend campuses that are not the right fit could undermine the perceived value of being educated in the United States, said Dale Gough, the international education services director for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

“The families are going to pay to have their students flown here, but they’re going to flunk out because they don’t have the academic preparation, and then go home,” Mr. Gough said. “That’s not good.”

 The State Department and its program EducationUSA, which promotes international study in the United States, also, because of potential conflicts, prohibit arrangements with recruiters paid based on student enrollment, as it explains in a statement on the EducationUSA website. Mr. Alapati said that Global Tree had dealt with Western Kentucky for years, but that the recent India project was the first time the university had sent its own employees “on site in India doing evaluations on the spot.” The idea of “spot admission” was to eliminate long waiting times, he said. He recently visited Western Kentucky’s computer science department, where most of the students enrolled. A professor told him that the students’ knowledge was below that of second-year undergraduates.

 “The dean said the department is going to give extra help,” Mr. Alapati said. Eric S. Reed, the interim dean of the graduate school, said that nearly all the conditionally admitted students were required to take language remediation classes, and that some were required to take “deficiency” classes to teach them a necessary skill. In addition to recruiting international students, Western Kentucky has promoted programs for studying abroad, received federal money for a Chinese-language flagship program, and become host to a Confucius Institute financed by Hanban, a Chinese government agency. One of the newer buildings on campus is the Honors College/International Center, a three-story, $22 million structure that houses the university’s 17-member international staff. A large bronze globe dominates the atrium-style lobby. Underneath the globe, the woodwork is etched with the phrase “Gateway to the World.”

 “The university is always striving to diversify our international population,” said Raza Tiwana, the school’s chief international officer, who first arrived on campus as a student from Pakistan. James Gary, the computer science chairman, said his department had approved the students admitted this spring.

“From my perspective, it has not been a disaster,” Dr. Gary said. But he acknowledged concerns about whether some of them can be successful. “We really won’t be able to tell anything about that until the end of the semester,” he said.

Help Wanted?

There is not a store, coffee shop or business that does not have a “help wanted” sign in front. Even the Post Office is hiring and yet I see little change despite the claims that the economy is booming. This may be why.

America’s hiring paralysis

Last week the Labor Department offered some seemingly very good news: U.S. employers now have more job openings than ever previously recorded. There is a bounty of opportunities to be had.

And yet to unemployed workers, it may not feel that way.
Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post.

That’s because many companies are acting like big teases. They say they want to hire, then drag their feet. In fact, the average time required to fill a job opening has also just reached an all-time high: 27.3 days, or almost a month, according to an important and underappreciated monthly data release called the DHI-DFH Mean Vacancy Duration Measure. Firms took about half as long to make a hire in mid-2009. Among the largest firms, this hiring paralysis lasts an almost comical 64 days.

It’s hard to know exactly what explains firms’ seemingly interminable indecision.

One possible explanation relates to so-called “skills mismatch,” the idea that today’s workers simply don’t possess the qualifications necessary for the jobs available. Absent additional training, a recently laid-off construction worker can’t easily fill a nursing slot; a newly idle travel agent is unlikely to pass muster as a software engineer.

Companies themselves are indeed reporting difficulty acquiring talent. Nearly half of small and medium-size businesses with recent vacancies say they could find few or no “qualified applicants,” according to the latest monthly survey of the National Federation of Independent Business. Over the past couple of years, firms have also become increasingly likely to say that “quality of labor” is the “single most important problem” facing their businesses.

I have generally been skeptical of the “skills mismatch” story, mostly because wage growth has been so pitiful during this recovery. If qualified applicants were really so scarce, businesses should be bidding up the salaries of the few hot commodities available. But Steven J. Davis , an economics professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and one of the creators of the vacancy duration metric, says it’s unclear how a widespread skills mismatch, if one exists, would actually affect wages. Maybe a shortage of some highly desirable skill would lead employers to bid up the price of that qualification, he says, but that same scarcity might also lead firms to instead settle “for workers who have less of [or] lower-quality versions of the desired skills.” That could, in theory, cause hourly wages to fall overall. Robust research on the connection between skills mismatch and wages is in short supply.

Davis says that it makes sense that vacancy durations are rising as the labor market improves and unemployment shrinks. There are, after all, fewer people pounding the pavement, so it might take more time for firms to find the right candidate. The puzzle is instead why vacancy durations are so much higher than we’ve seen in previous periods with similar levels of unemployment. He says no one knows for sure, but he points to a couple of possible explanations.

One is that innovations in the recruiting process, such as the use of LinkedIn, have made it easier for employers to locate workers who already have jobs and are not actively seeking new positions. For reasons both fair and unfair, candidates who have jobs tend to look much more attractive than those who don’t. It can take time to coax a worker away from another employer.

Second, Davis notes that changes to the legal environment surrounding hiring and retention decisions — some states have eroded “at-will” employment arrangements in ways that can make it harder to shed workers, for example — have encouraged firms to be more cautious about whom they hire. Innovations in screening technology — more involved background checks, personality tests, technical skill assessments, etc. — have meanwhile proliferated. These kinds of hiring hoops are sometimes pitched to firms as tools to make the process more accurate or efficient, but they might also tack on time, especially if a promising candidate fails a test late in the game and a search must begin anew.

For now, in any case, employers can afford to be picky. We’ll see what happens if the recovery strengthens, demand picks up and fallow openings start to feel more like wasted opportunities — for the impatient candidates left cooling their heels and the companies themselves. Hiring at such a leisurely pace might become an unaffordable luxury once work piles up.

These are just some of the many comments from the article and this makes it clear that the sign on the door is not the same as actually getting in the door. From race, to gender to age, the hurdles are of Olympic decathalon level that Caitlyn Jenner would have a problem jumping; however, Bruce not so much.

If employees still trained people, there’d be no alleged “shortage of talent.” Likewise Unions, notably the Machinists’ Union trained people, back when they still existed.

That’s also just the way it is.

We might want to consider taking our destines back into our own hands.

Initial job training is a “fixed cost” — it costs the same regardless of how long that person is employed. These days there is so much uncertainty that businesses will only add variable costs. They want to be able to shed costs in an instant if needed.

That’s what they did and are doing. It doesn’t seem to have worked out too well, so far.

Short-term thinking starts with the assumption that the future doesn’t matter. Maybe it does matter, and more than people assumed.

A man on tv last week said he could ‘not’ hire a person to fill his positions.. NO.. he wanted a fully qualified person to run a very dangerous milling machine.. and he did NOT want to train them.. idiot.. no heck no.. no one on street can do that.. I am a IT person with 30yrs experience.. and NO i could not walk in door and operate it without some training.. they have vacancies .. but do NOT want to spend one dime training a person to work for them

Is that 30 years experience in IT or one-year’s experience repeated 30 times? And how relevant is any IT experience more than a decade ago, given how much things have changed. The person with 10 year’s experience will probably cost a lot less than someone with 30 year’s experience but brings the same skills to the table.

No, it is not fair. But that is the way it is.

30 years experience in IT makes you an person with skills assumed by many in the IT world to be obsolete.

30 years IT work reapplied to CNC machinery makes you a relatively rare person with valuable skills, especially if you can turn around prototypes quickly.

You have to find your market, which may not be the next hot computer or network architecture, in an industry where “old” is 30 years.

That’s also the way it is.

I think the “skills mismatch” phenomenon boils down to companies wanting the “perfect” candidate – namely, the candidate who is already doing that exact job somewhere else. Take your pick of reasons why: HR software that screens out candidates who aren’t a perfect-enough match; HR departments that don’t know the industry jargon and can’t translate resumes to determine if skills/experience are equivalent (one of the reasons people are told to customize their resume for a particular opening and use the exact language spelled out in the job req); companies increasingly unwilling to spend any money whatsoever training employees (I’m a project manager and I had to pay for my PMP exam boot camp and PMP exam myself AND use personal leave time).

Personally, if I see a resume that is a perfect match for the job req that immediately makes me want to ask why the person is leaving their current position and call the reference(s) listed for their last company if the answer isn’t along the lines of “I moved” or “My commute will be much shorter with this job.” Because a person who is a perfect fit for a job req and who doesn’t have some kind of external factor forcing a job change is, IMO, not stretching themselves. And that makes me wonder if they’re going to give me 100% or if they’re going to coast along and do just enough to get by.

If I Had a Hammer and You a Diploma

We are sure that the hallowed halls of ivory are the solution to reducing income inequity. If you saddle someone up with enough debt that eventually they will have to take a job doing something that will pay for it.

We have every year or so another declaration of which will be the hot field to enter when you get your degree. This you are to determine at age 17, pick the appropriate major, complete the requirements in the needed time frame and then walk in ready to hit it to win it in 4 to 6 years (the added two is for the advanced degrees required now in pretty much every profession) and immediately earn enough to pay off the loans and live an up and coming middle class lifestyle.

Lord I can see why we are moving towards legalizing marijuana as you really need to put that American myth in your pipe and smoke it.

That was ideally the case but today the economic realities are not quite as clear cut or simplistic as that implies.

Paul Krugman has a great column today discussing this supposed skills gap and Builder has another great article about this issue when it comes to construction and labor shortages of 2015.They found this:

It’s interesting in terms of disciplines we’ve been having trouble with,” comments Morrison on the analysis’ early findings. “Most people would think it’s those that would require a multi-year apprenticeship, but what we’re hearing is that it’s framers, finish carpenters, plumbers, electricians, so it’s really the guts of the house.”

Noteworthy among the pain-point areas, Morrison says, “every single respondent who builds more than 250 homes said that they are having labor problems.” More big builders work to counter the exodus of trade contractors from their jobs with “builder-of-choice” programs that, as Morrison points out, offer “better pay, better, benefits, they’re offering more training, they’re trying to get involved with vocational and tech schools to offer alternatives to career paths that don’t necessarily involve a college degree.”

As we re-examine the needs of work with who is working the changing demands and fields that often were designed by gender still remain as such but the actual critical needs skills, the flexibility and in turn the willingness to do work outside the expected also plays into this. We have few women actually entering the supposed nirvana of fields, STEM and in turn entering the health care marketplace, an always open door when it came to women past and it appears present.

Women still dominate the education field and if you note the amazing speech by Patricia Arquetteat last nights Oscars, it also may be why they are the least paid when it comes to income parity. Why wield a book or a needle when a hammer can pay more. And the fact is that many of the jobs available are physically demanding and you see few women on those sites but you do see – immigrants who do so as day labor without the skill set either but they are cheaper, uncomplaining and undemanding. Back to that whole how dare these workers want compensation, protection, longevity, training. And you say there is a skill set lacking. For what – arrogance? We gots plenty of that!

That has to be what Mike Rowe, the true speaker of the house for the trades, calls profoundly disconnected. It is that all right.

I am watching first hand the hysteria of many returning to college to get numerous degrees and certificates only to find doors firmly shut in their face. The MOOC’s or online education programs that were touted to ensure access and affordability are not exactly throwing down the pigskin or well any skin in the game. The Public schools are bursting at the seams and there are many many qualified and willing educators currently substitituing while districts claim a substitute shortage and in turn cutting the education budgets to the edge while still touting sports at all the levels of education, especially the higher ones. We are seeing repeatedly across the country education budgets slashed as touted to save the bottom line yet while the same time touting the education is the key to prosperity.

Perhaps we could all be as lucky as Scott Walker to be elected Governor without completing an education. I look forward to seeing across America community college grads with associate degrees running the country in the next few years, they’ll be free right? They couldn’t be worse than the kids I see now in high schools who are total assholes and think they can do so right now. Well they are public school students and we know the rich want that style of education changed as well. What is good for their gander is not what they want the geese to have or do. Plessy v. Ferguson the 21st century.

Knowledge Isn’t Power
Paul Krugman
The New York Times
FEB. 23, 2015

Regular readers know that I sometimes mock “very serious people” — politicians and pundits who solemnly repeat conventional wisdom that sounds tough-minded and realistic. The trouble is that sounding serious and being serious are by no means the same thing, and some of those seemingly tough-minded positions are actually ways to dodge the truly hard issues.

The prime example of recent years was, of course, Bowles-Simpsonism — the diversion of elite discourse away from the ongoing tragedy of high unemployment and into the supposedly crucial issue of how, exactly, we will pay for social insurance programs a couple of decades from now. That particular obsession, I’m happy to say, seems to be on the wane. But my sense is that there’s a new form of issue-dodging packaged as seriousness on the rise. This time, the evasion involves trying to divert our national discourse about inequality into a discussion of alleged problems with education.

And the reason this is an evasion is that whatever serious people may want to believe, soaring inequality isn’t about education; it’s about power.

Just to be clear: I’m in favor of better education. Education is a friend of mine. And it should be available and affordable for all. But what I keep seeing is people insisting that educational failings are at the root of still-weak job creation, stagnating wages and rising inequality. This sounds serious and thoughtful. But it’s actually a view very much at odds with the evidence, not to mention a way to hide from the real, unavoidably partisan debate.

The education-centric story of our problems runs like this: We live in a period of unprecedented technological change, and too many American workers lack the skills to cope with that change. This “skills gap” is holding back growth, because businesses can’t find the workers they need. It also feeds inequality, as wages soar for workers with the right skills but stagnate or decline for the less educated. So what we need is more and better education.

My guess is that this sounds familiar — it’s what you hear from the talking heads on Sunday morning TV, in opinion articles from business leaders like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, in “framing papers” from the Brookings Institution’s centrist Hamilton Project. It’s repeated so widely that many people probably assume it’s unquestionably true. But it isn’t.

For one thing, is the pace of technological change really that fast? “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” the venture capitalist Peter Thiel has snarked. Productivity growth, which surged briefly after 1995, seems to have slowed sharply.

Furthermore, there’s no evidence that a skills gap is holding back employment. After all, if businesses were desperate for workers with certain skills, they would presumably be offering premium wages to attract such workers. So where are these fortunate professions? You can find some examples here and there. Interestingly, some of the biggest recent wage gains are for skilled manual labor — sewing machine operators, boilermakers — as some manufacturing production moves back to America. But the notion that highly skilled workers are generally in demand is just false.

Finally, while the education/inequality story may once have seemed plausible, it hasn’t tracked reality for a long time. “The wages of the highest-skilled and highest-paid individuals have continued to increase steadily,” the Hamilton Project says. Actually, the inflation-adjusted earnings of highly educated Americans have gone nowhere since the late 1990s.

So what is really going on? Corporate profits have soared as a share of national income, but there is no sign of a rise in the rate of return on investment. How is that possible? Well, it’s what you would expect if rising profits reflect monopoly power rather than returns to capital.

As for wages and salaries, never mind college degrees — all the big gains are going to a tiny group of individuals holding strategic positions in corporate suites or astride the crossroads of finance. Rising inequality isn’t about who has the knowledge; it’s about who has the power.

Now, there’s a lot we could do to redress this inequality of power. We could levy higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and invest the proceeds in programs that help working families. We could raise the minimum wage and make it easier for workers to organize. It’s not hard to imagine a truly serious effort to make America less unequal.

But given the determination of one major party to move policy in exactly the opposite direction, advocating such an effort makes you sound partisan. Hence the desire to see the whole thing as an education problem instead. But we should recognize that popular evasion for what it is: a deeply unserious fantasy.

Ladders to Climb

I have no way of actually saying with certainty that apples are good for your health the same way college is good for your life.

I have met many College degreed people serving me lattes. I have met many college degreed people who need to serve me lattes. In all honesty I have no way of saying that either apples or college is good for you.

I recall dropping out of the Masters/Doctorate program years ago as I made more money remodeling houses.  True I gave up the “dream” of being called Doctor and that dream was up there with winning the lotto. Okay I have never played the lotto.  But I have also met many “Doctors” of the M.D., J.D. and Ph.D kind and frankly many of them need to learn I like a rich foam.

The numbers of letters following ones name may be actually added by “K’s” as in the denomination of them.  When you leave an ivy hall with a piece of paper that you just spent 6 figures for I would hope that is akin to owning a house – deed or degree – you need to be able to vest it as an investment that rises in value over time. Well that clearly is an analogy that I need to work on as it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

Eduardo Porter below discusses the diminishing but still clear value in what education offers for those who do pursue an advanced degree. But what he fails to mention that degrees are like cars, what is in fad today may not have the longevity and in turn value of the future.   He states that it adds over 365K in a lifetime.  OK in what professions? And from where were the degrees issued? The gender and income of the family and color as well should also figure into this historical “average”  Just a blanket statement seems vague and misleading.  Or as they say in law “heresay”   Ah don’t you miss the Mustang?

Rethinking the Rise of Inequality

By EDUARDO PORTER
Published: November 12, 2013

Many Americans have come to doubt the proposition that college delivers a path to prosperity.

In a poll conducted last month by the College Board and National Journal, 46 percent of respondents — including more than half of 18- to 29-year-olds — said a college degree was not needed to be successful. Only 40 percent of Americans think college is a good investment, according to a 2011 poll by the Pew Research Center.

On a pure dollars-and-cents basis, the doubters are wrong. Despite a weak job market for recent graduates, workers with a bachelor’s degree still earn almost twice as much as high school graduates. College might be more expensive than ever, but a degree is worth about $365,000 over a lifetime, after defraying all the direct and indirect costs of going to school. This is a higher payoff than in any other advanced nation, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Still, the growing skepticism about the value of a degree has fed into a deeper unease among some economists about the ironclad trust that policy makers, alongside many academics, have vested in higher education as the weapon of choice to battle widening income disparities and improve the prospects of the middle class in the United States.

It has given new vigor to a critique, mostly by thinkers on the left of the political spectrum, that challenges the idea that educational disparities are a main driver of economic inequality.

“It is absolutely clear that educational wage differentials have not driven wage inequality over the last 15 years,” said Lawrence Mishel, who heads the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning center for economic policy analysis. “Wage inequality has grown a lot over the last 15 years and the educational wage premium has changed little.”

The standard analysis of the interplay between technology and education, developed by economists like Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin of Harvard, and David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is based on a simple proposition: Technological progress increased the demand for highly educated workers who could deploy it profitably, increasing their incomes. Like trade, it rendered many less-skilled occupations obsolete, eliminating what used to be solid, middle-class jobs.

This rendition of history suggests that improvements in technology — coupled with a college graduation rate that slowed sharply in the 1980s — have been principal drivers of the nation’s widening income gap, leaving workers with less education behind.

But critics like Mr. Mishel point out that this theory has important blind spots.

For instance, why have wages for college graduates stagnated over the last decade, even as innovation continues at a breathtaking pace? Between 2000 and 2008 the typical earnings of men with at least a bachelor’s degree fell by more than $2,000, after inflation, to $70,332 a year. Between 2008 and last year they fell a further $3,500. Though somewhat less pronounced, the pattern is similar for women.

Both sides agree that the overall weakness of the job market since the turn of the millennium is a prime culprit. As Professor Katz noted: “The only moments we’ve had of broadly shared prosperity have been in tight labor markets.”

Still, the sluggish job growth of the last decade — following the rapid expansion during the second half of the 1990s — demands an explanation, which the interplay between technology and skill does not provide.

“We have no handle on what happened in the 2000s,” Professor Autor told me. “That is a mystery that nobody I know understands, and I can’t point to a single policy lever or a single external force that would explain it.” ‘

Most notably, the skills-and-tech story leaves aside one of the most perplexing and important dynamics of the last 30 years: the rise of the 1 percent, a tiny sliver of the population that last year took in almost a dollar out of every $4 generated by the American economy.

“I don’t think the college to noncollege wage premium gives you any insight into why such a large share of the economic gains has accrued to such a tiny share of the population,” said David Card, a noted labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mr. Mishel’s preferred explanation of inequality’s rise is institutional: a shrinking minimum wage cut into the earnings of the nation’s least-skilled workers while falling trade barriers, deregulation and the decline of labor unions eroded the income of the middle class. The rise of the top 1 percent, he believes, is mostly about executive pay and the growing footprint of finance.

In coming weeks, Mr. Mishel and two co-authors, Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute and John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, expect to publish a study called “Don’t Blame the Robots: Assessing the Job Polarization Explanation of Growing Wage Inequality.”

In a conversation, Mr. Mishel argued that while education would improve workers’ economic mobility, if the ever-deepening concentration of income has little to do with the education gap, more education is unlikely to close it.

“Kids should still go to college, and when a whole lot more do we’ll have more opportunity,” he said. “But college wages will fall,” he added, as the supply of graduates increases. “This won’t really bring us broad-based wage growth, which is the central challenge to getting improved social mobility and expanding/rebuilding the middle class.”

When it comes to policy, however, the debate about the specific role that education and other factors play in deepening income inequality may contribute less light than heat.

Professors Katz and Autor agree that an array of policies is needed to address the labor market’s lopsided distribution of economic rewards. They range from a higher minimum wage to help lift the income of service workers at the bottom of the market to a larger earned-income tax credit.

More technical training could help upgrade the skills of high school graduates. Steeper income taxes on the very rich could curb the accumulation of income at the top. Perhaps most important, the design of macroeconomic policies might give more weight to maintaining low unemployment.

“Education is certainly part of the answer, but it is certainly not a complete answer,” Professor Katz said.

There is good reason to resist the proposition that education and technology are solely responsible for growing inequality. It provides political leaders an excuse to cast the problem as beyond the reach of policy.

“It can suck all the air out of the conversation,” Professor Autor acknowledged. “All economists should be pushing back against this simplistic view.”

Still, education plays a crucial role. A study a few years ago by Thomas Lemieux at the University of British Columbia concluded that increases in the returns on a college education accounted for almost 60 percent of the change in wage inequality between 1973 and 2005.

While Professor Lemieux’s data excluded the top few percent of earners, there is a lot of room for improvement left over.

Professor Katz illustrates this with a nifty calculation. Between 1979 and 2012 the share of national income captured by the richest 1 percent of taxpayers increased from 10 percent to 22.5 percent. Had their share instead remained at 10 percent and the rest been distributed equitably among taxpayers in the bottom 99 percent, each would have $7,105 more to spend.

By contrast, between 1979 and 2012 the gap between the annual wages of a typical family of two full-time workers with college degrees and one made up of two high school graduates grew by $30,000, after inflation.

“Nothing we do with the education supply will have a big impact among the top 1 percent,” Professor Katz said. But “could it improve the upward mobility and the prospects of a better job for Americans born in the bottom half of the income distribution? Yes.”

Get Behind

In the line of workers waiting for a job, a food stamp, an opportunity to work. Then find out that you do not have the skills/education, the desperation or the youth frankly to get help of any kind.  We have a “skills gap” in this country or we have something else – stupidity.

Yes that is what we have, stupidity. It’s an epidemic and without big Pharma to give us our meds we our dying the slow death from it.

We certainly may work harder but smarter? 

In my book, Conversations with Idiots, I will add the woman I spoke to today.  I was teasing the vendor at the farmer’s market about someone asking if she was from Pakistan.  She neither looks like a woman from SE Asia or carry herself as such.  She is Latino and there lies the problem in Seattle, a City who likes its Racism like it likes it income inequality – not discussed.  The woman standing there overheard me and goes “didn’t I ask you if you were of Indian decent?” And she responded yes. My response was to burst out laughing.  The woman goes “I go to India every year” and I go “then you should know of all people she is so not Indian”  Then I was asked if I had been there. I go decades ago and saw such poverty and tragedy that I will never go again and add to that the blatant misogyny and recent sexual assaults I would see no purpose.  If I just want random poverty and tragedy I can head to the Carribean or Haiti and pretend that I am on vacation there without the 18 hours of flying time. Or frankly a drive through most of American heartland which shows the equivalent.

She then informed me that she had a home in Honduras and that the poverty there was not as severe as India.  Oh good I said then when you do nothing there it must not be a problem. I wonder if Oscar deLa Renta feels the same about his home in the Dominican Republic as Haiti is just next door and there must not be a downwind odor from that.  As I just saw a recent story on Al Jazeera about the rapes of women in the camps and that was largely the result of having no lighting as the flashlights they used to carry died and the solar panels have been stolen so the darkness is synonymous with danger.

Her response was that it was no different than living here in America. Interesting then why travel at all when you can’t even leave your own home.   So at least if I am going to do nothing to improve a quality of life for myself let alone the community I live in,  I can do so with cable.  She walked away.  BITCH and classic Seattle woman, passive aggressive, smug, racist and idiotic.  I am only two of those – bitch and aggressive, I wear it proudly like badges of honor. 

So when I read Eduardo Porter’s column today it was in response to yesterday’s article that fairly confirms the fact.  Americans are stupid. Not lazy but stupid.  It explains why 10% control the money. They are the ones with the access to Education and can’t have a society of equality it would mean having less and working more.  Sorry but a recent Attorney I met said point blank “my job is to maximize results with minimum effort.”  And people wonder why in my malpractice case I am going pro se.  I like to maximize my results and my efforts reflect that equally.

Conversations with Idiots are regardless of degrees and positions. What I find is ironically the higher on the food chain, the bigger the idiot.

Americans perform only slightly above two Countries – “socialist” Spain and Italy. Having lived in Spain I would happily like my multinational corporations renounce my citizenship and move there. Their idiots are at least more fun and interesting. 

Stubborn Skills Gap in America’s Work Force

 By Eduardo Porter
Published: October 8, 2013

 One of the few things that nearly everyone in Washington agrees on is that American workers are the best. Republicans, somewhat less exuberant, are nonetheless sure that American workers “can surpass the competition” on any level playing field.

Even the United States Chamber of Commerce — not always a worker’s best friend — asserts that, along with the nation’s entrepreneurs and companies, America’s workers “are the best in the world.” Fact is, they are not.

 To believe an exhaustive new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the skill level of the American labor force is not merely slipping in comparison to that of its peers around the world, it has fallen dangerously behind.

The report is based on assessments of literacy, math skills and problem-solving using information technology that were performed on about 160,000 people age 16 to 65 in 22 advanced nations of the O.E.C.D., plus Russia and Cyprus. Five thousand Americans were assessed.   The results are disheartening.

Though we possess average literacy skills, we are far below the top performers. Twenty-two percent of Japanese adults scored in the top two of six rungs on the literacy test. Fewer than 12 percent of Americans did. We are also about average in terms of problem-solving with computers.

Paradoxically, our biggest deficits are in math, the most highly valued skill in the work force. Only Italians and Spaniards performed worse.

Some 34 percent of adult Americans scored in the top three rungs of the assessment for numeracy, 12.5 percentage points less than the average across all countries. Twenty-nine percent of Americans scored in the lowest two rungs — 10 percentage points more than the average. By percentage, more than twice as many Finns as Americans scored in the top two.

The O.E.C.D. study lands in the midst of a contentious debate over whether the United States faces a skills shortage. Over the last couple of years, employers have been saying that they can’t find enough skilled workers. Economists and other commentators have pointed out that employers would probably find them if they offered higher wages.

The report suggests that the sluggish employment growth since the nation emerged from recession probably has little to do with a skills deficit that has been a generation in the making. But it pretty forcefully supports the case that this deficit is an albatross around the economy’s neck.

“The recession did not fundamentally change the structure of the economy in terms of the supply and demand for skills or education,” argues Jonathan Rothwell of the Brookings Institution, who produced a study last year about the education gap afflicting the job markets of America’s largest cities. “Before the recession, inadequate education was a major problem. It continues to be.”

Mr. Rothwell says that the problem is getting bigger: while just under a third of the existing jobs in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas require a bachelor’s degree or more, about 43 percent of newly available jobs demand this degree. And only 32 percent of adults over the age of 25 have one.

The O.E.C.D. puts this deficit into an international context. It finds that advanced economies are generating very few jobs for workers with middling skills. Yet while other countries seem to have gotten the message, racing ahead to build skills, the American skills set is standing still.

For instance, the youngest Koreans, age 16 to 24, scored 49 points more, on average, on literacy tests than the oldest cohort of 55- to 65-year-olds. Young Americans, by contrast, scored only nine points more than their elders.

While younger cohorts in other countries are consistently better educated than older ones, in the United States that is not always the case: 30-year-olds in 2012 scored lower, on average, in literacy tests than 30-year-olds in 1994.

“Unless there is a significant change of direction,” the report notes, “the work force skills of other O.E.C.D. countries will overtake those of the U.S. just at the moment when all O.E.C.D. countries will be facing (and indeed are already facing) major and fast-increasing competitive challenges from emerging economies.”

This will be unsurprising to anybody who has been paying attention to the performance of American students in international tests run by the O.E.C.D. The mediocre skills exhibited by Americans in their early 20s today map precisely onto the mediocre scores recorded by American teenagers in 2000.

And yet, the report raises a couple of vexing questions. The highly skilled in the United States earn a much larger wage premium over unskilled workers than in most, if not all, other advanced nations, where regulations, unions and taxes tend to temper inequality. So if the rewards for skills are so high, why is the supply of skilled workers so sluggish?

“The human capital base in the United States is quite thin,” said Andreas Schleicher, the O.E.C.D, deputy director for education and skills. “The American economy rewards skill very well, but the supply hasn’t responded.”

The United States was the first country to provide for universal high school education. Today, one high school student in five leaves without a diploma, a weaker outcome than in most O.E.C.D. countries. The math and reading scores of American teenagers in O.E.C.D. tests have not improved over the last 10 years. And our college graduation rates have slipped substantially below those of other rich nations.

Schools do not appear to be adding much value. Nor do employers, which do little to train workers. Immigration by less educated workers from Latin America plays some role. But as the O.E.C.D. notes, two-thirds of low-skilled Americans were born in the United States. And the United States has a poor track record in improving immigrants’ skills.

Socioeconomic status is a barrier. Not only is inequality particularly steep, little is done to redress the opportunity deficit of poorer students. Public investment in the early education of disadvantaged children is meager. Teachers are not paid very well, compared with other countries. And the best teachers tend to end up teaching in affluent schools.

Indeed, the United States is one of only three O.E.C.D. countries in which socioeconomically disadvantaged schools have lower student-teacher ratios. But the skills deficit is not only a problem of poverty and marginalization. American college graduates, notes Mr. Schleicher, perform worse than their peers elsewhere: “looking at certificates, the United States looks much better than looking at skills.”

The other question is equally perplexing: if the supply of skilled workers is so poor, how can the United States remain such an innovative, comparatively agile economy? In other words, even if the American skill set is poor compared with that of its peers, who cares?

Mr. Schleicher answered that question like this: today, the American labor market is good at attracting talented foreigners, offering them more money than they could make elsewhere.

Still, it might be risky to stake the nation’s future on maintaining a steady stream of skill from abroad. What would happen if other countries started rewarding their talented workers? What would happen if America’s influx of talent stalled?

Consider Japan, which has some of the most skilled workers in the O.E.C.D but uses them poorly. Regulations make it difficult for firms to hire and fire. Social mores keep companies from rewarding talent with higher pay. Many women are marginalized in the work force.

“Japan has fantastic human capital but uses it quite poorly,” Mr. Schleicher told me. “The United States is the opposite. It has mediocre assets but is good at extracting value from them.”

The question is, which country has the most difficult challenge? Mr. Schleicher says it’s no contest. In Japan, all you have to do is liberalize labor market regulations and allow firms to exploit human capital to its fullest. Here, human capital has to be painstakingly built, one cohort at a time. That work cannot begin soon enough.

Hey Dummy!

Yes the results are in and Americans are stupid. This came as a shock to me; a shock in equivalence to rubbing bare feet along a carpet shock.

I have been in and out of Education for 20 years now. I desperately want to return full time to work on/in a school that focuses on Sustainability and the idea that it is a vocation, a life’s work and philosophy. There is little I can offer in the way of traditional education that I feel works for me and the kind of skills and expectations I believe Students need to move us forward and onward socially and economically.

So when I read this in the paper today, I turned around and looked at the classroom of students I was substituting in. I had already had Security and the Principal take two young women out earlier in the day, I have seen a parade walk in and out with little attention nor ability demonstrated, despite what appears is a demanding curriculum – therein might be the problem.

This is one of the lowest performing schools in my district and they have added the prestigious International Baccalaureate program in which to elevate the standards and reputation within the district. Good luck with that. I believe a strong voc tech with basic curriculum, reading, writing and arithmetic is what is needed here. Giving kids a chance to learn skills and a trade that can make them self sustainable. The idea that they are going to high achieving academies or colleges is I believe is setting them up for a larger disappointment if not utter indebtedness as they will not qualify for the aid and grants they will need to complete the coursework let alone support needed to do so.

I find it interesting that the article clearly states that this is well classified by age with those in the beginning of the boomer cohort doing better academically (and presumbably ecnomically) and the Gen X cohort and, what I call the Boomertails (those at the latter end of the cohort) doing less well. Why? Because they were coming of age in the late 70s to early 80s when the economy began to collapse followed by the Reagan years and the slow move to diminish federal financial support to Education. The result? A very divided and fractionalized system of achievement and in turn economic well being.

As for the tests I have no clue what “technology” means? Operating vs programming a computer or understanding and applying the varying ways to search, to write or do financial/accounting data? Word or Excel skills? Is that what they are testing? Without more information I am assuming the term “technology” means operate basic computer software programs for performance not actually write them.

Funny that the predominant wealth in this country is handled, managed and owned by the upper cohort and their elders, who were already secure in their scholastic achievements, attending well financed and supported suburban public schools (who only of late have now realized what urban districts have been managing with) or elite private academies that oddly are not part of the supposed need and urgent demand of reform. To think that they are somehow ever ahead of the curve or more advanced, no. I know an acquaintance who substitutes at an elite academy here, the only thing he ever speaks of is the quality of food served in the lunchroom. When I ask questions of the curriculum he has no clue. For the record he reminds me of many ex teachers and yes current ones who are not qualified to train dogs, but to say that is the norm and the fault of unions, think again. Very simply we recruit and train teachers inadequately and compensate accordingly. So the kind of people drawn to the field, well let’s put it this way, when I told people I wanted to be a teacher at age 30 their comment/question was: “Why you are so smart and could do and make so much more money.”

You want good schools find and more importantly pay people in proportion to the work you demand and expect. Bankers make BILLIONS and yet they handle only your money, Teachers care for your children, their future and thier role in the community yet they are maligned for tenure. Really? Is that is the only thing that matters? It might be why as adults we have this problem. You get what you pay for.

U.S. Adults Fare Poorly in a Study of Skills
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: October 8, 2013

American adults lag well behind their counterparts in most other developed countries in the mathematical and technical skills needed for a modern workplace, according to a study released Tuesday.

The study, perhaps the most detailed of its kind, shows that the well-documented pattern of several other countries surging past the United States in students’ test scores and young people’s college graduation rates corresponds to a skills gap, extending far beyond school. In the United States, young adults in particular fare poorly compared with their international competitors of the same ages — not just in math and technology, but also in literacy.

More surprisingly, even middle-aged Americans — who, on paper, are among the best-educated people of their generation anywhere in the world — are barely better than middle of the pack in skills.

Arne Duncan, the education secretary, released a statement saying that the findings “show our education system hasn’t done enough to help Americans compete — or position our country to lead — in a global economy that demands increasingly higher skills.”

The study is the first based on new tests developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a coalition of mostly developed nations, and administered in 2011 and 2012 to thousands of people, ages 16 to 65, by 23 countries. Previous international skills studies have generally looked only at literacy, and in fewer countries.

The organizers assessed skills in literacy and facility with basic math, or numeracy, in all 23 countries. In 19 countries, there was a third assessment, called “problem-solving in technology-rich environments,” on using digital devices to find and evaluate information, communicate, and perform common tasks.

In all three fields, Japan ranked first and Finland second in average scores, with the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway near the top. Spain, Italy and France were at or near the bottom in literacy and numeracy, and were not included in the technology assessment.

The United States ranked near the middle in literacy and near the bottom in skill with numbers and technology. In number skills, just 9 percent of Americans scored in the top two of five proficiency levels, compared with a 23-country average of 12 percent, and 19 percent in Finland, Japan and Sweden.

“The first question these kinds of studies raise is, ‘If we’re so dumb, why are we so rich?’ ” said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “Our economic advantage has been having high skill levels at the top, being big, being more flexible than the other economies, and being able to attract other countries’ most skilled labor. But that advantage is slipping.”

In several ways, the American results were among the most polarized between high achievement and low. Compared with other countries with similar average scores, the United States, in all three assessments, usually had more people in the highest proficiency levels, and more in the lowest. The country also had an unusually wide gap in skills between the employed and the unemployed.

In the most highly educated population, people with graduate and professional degrees, Americans lagged slightly behind the international averages in skills. But the gap was widest at the bottom; among those who did not finish high school, Americans had significantly worse skills than their counterparts abroad.

“These kinds of differences in skill sets matter a lot more than they used to, at every level of the economy,” Dr. Carnevale said. “Americans were always willing to accept a much higher level of inequality than other developed countries because there was upward mobility, but we’ve lost a lot of ground to other countries on mobility because people don’t have these skills.”

Among 55- to 65-year-olds, the United States fared better, on the whole, than its counterparts. But in the 45-to-54 age group, American performance was average, and among younger people, it was behind.

American educators often note that the nation’s polyglot nature can inhibit performance, though there is sharp debate over whether that is a short-run or long-run effect.

The new study shows that foreign-born adults in the United States have much poorer-than-average skills, but even the native-born scored a bit below the international norms. White Americans fared better than the multicountry average in literacy, but were about average in the math and technology tests.

Degree Me This

Much is made about the need for a degree to get a job and then the mate to that check means insurmountable debt and a job that may or not compensate you adequately to both pay down debt and of course acquire more in order to boost the economy. It’s the American Way/Dream/Delusion.

We have of course the valley of milk and honey proclaiming that there are not enough skilled employees for the said jobs that require said skills of which they are neither specific nor truthful about but enough about the home where Jobs is just the name of a dead icon.

Today there is an article (below)  about how Colleges need to make themselves more voc than tech apparently.  And ironic that last week there was an editorial about the decline of Humanities in Universities and another one today about that same issue.  Of course women are the fault of that but soon we will be back getting our English majors, teaching until we get married and have babies in our new return to Little House of Mad Men on the Prairie fantasy America.

And yesterday I found this profile of a tech CEO called Jed Yeueh of Delphix, who ironically carries not one but two degrees in Humanities from of course Harvard.  And yet here is admitting that he taught himself programming via Excel.  So much for that needed skill set to get those unfilled jobs we keep hearing about! Maybe it was the Harvard thing that enabled the whole bypassing of STEM education that is apparently so vital for these thousands and thousands of vacant positions.  Don’t say Jobs.. he’s dead you know.

Why companies complain that they have few skilled workers they also apparently have a problem with the ones that do arrive degrees in hand with their what – lack of Humanity vested skills!  What is this – a conundrum, quandary or is it a double negative?  Who knows.. I have a degree in what – the Humanities! And yet I teach for a living.  Oddly teaching Language Arts.. the humanities and what do teach – Grammar, Phonetics and Linguistics. Not stuff the Common Core or the Readers/Writers workshops endorse. Well it was the Ivy League that devised those new standards. Irony on top of irony.

To break rules you need to know them. What you can’t do teach.  Learning is lifelong. There are dozens more proverbial expressions that I could bore one with but in reality we have a disconnect and miscommunication that comes from the inability to actually work collaboratively and constructively on what our wants and needs are.   We have the silly obsession that the Asian education system is somehow superior and want to emulate it.  Talk to someone living and working in those countries and ask them about what the standards of education are and the types of students they are producing. (I have and it is revelatory how negative their impressions are)  It is not imaginative, innovative, creative individuals – they are worker bees. And that is what the land of milk and honey want – worker bees, they have plenty of Queen bees and they want to keep that honey and hive to themselves.

Many corporations back in the day invested in their workers not Wall Street, providing them outstanding supplementary training and education. They encouraged their employees to stay in their jobs and compensated them. Internships were steps into paid positions, now they are simply free labor.   I have said it before and it bears repeating – the Technology Sector famous for their versions 2.0 discovered that they can do with people what the do with their products – dispose and find a better cheaper version.   Saving the world one gigabyte at a time.

What It Takes to Make New College Graduates Employable

By ALINA TUGEND
Published: June 28, 2013

MY older son graduated from high school last week and has started a pleasant job as a summer lifeguard. In four years we expect to attend his college graduation, and we hope the time there leaves him with great experiences, a love of learning and some idea how to get and keep a job.

It’s that last part of the equation that I’m going to focus on. My heart sinks every time I read a news story or opinion piece quoting employers who charge that four-year colleges and universities are failing to provide graduates with the skills they need to become and remain employable. <

Of course, in many ways, this isn’t a new story.

“A four-year liberal arts education doesn’t prepare kids for work and it never has,” said Alec R. Levenson a senior research scientist for the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California.

Mara Swan, the executive vice president of global strategy and talent at Manpower Group, agreed.

“There’s always been a gap between what colleges produce and what employers want,” she said. “But now it’s widening.” That’s because workplaces are more complex and globalized, profit margins are slimmer, companies are leaner and managers expect their workers to get up to speed much faster than in the past.

“Employers are under pressure to do more with less,” Ms. Swan said.

Unemployment rates for those with bachelor’s degrees or higher are still much better — at 3.8 percent in May — than those with only a high school diploma, which was 7.4 percent in May, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nonetheless, a special report by The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media’s Marketplace published in March found that about half of 704 employers who participated in the study said they had trouble finding recent college graduates qualified to fill positions at their company.

But, surprisingly, it wasn’t necessarily specific technical skills that were lacking.

“When it comes to the skills most needed by employers, job candidates are lacking most in written and oral communication skills, adaptability and managing multiple priorities, and making decisions and problem solving,” the report said.

Jaime S. Fall, a vice president at the HR Policy Association, an organization of chief human resources managers from large employers, said these findings backed up what his organization was hearing over and over from employers.

Young employees “are very good at finding information, but not as good at putting that information into context,” Mr. Fall said. “They’re really good at technology, but not at how to take those skills and resolve specific business problems.”

This isn’t a dilemma just in this country, but around the world, Ms. Swan said. A global study conducted last year of interviews with 25,000 employers found that nine out of 10 employees believed that colleges were not fully preparing students for the workplace.

“There were the same problems,” she said. “Problems with collaboration, interpersonal skills, the ability to deal with ambiguity, flexibility and professionalism.”

But it’s easy for the issue to degenerate into finger-pointing.

“If you sat down with a committee of professors, and told them students are not coming out with the skills they need, they would say, ‘you’re smoking something,’ ” Mr. Levenson said. “The trouble is, those skills are applied in a college context, not a workplace context.”

But, he added, “you can’t create a school-based curriculum that can help someone transition to being highly productive on the job in 10 days.”

In other words, the onus shouldn’t just be on universities; employers also need to step up to the plate.

The in-depth training programs and apprenticeships of the past are unlikely to come back, so companies must become more innovative in helping young employees come up to speed, according to a report released in May by Accenture, a management consulting and outsourcing company.

“Rather than simply bemoaning the inability to find employees with the skills required for available jobs, organizations must step up with new and more comprehensive enterprise learning strategies,” Accenture stated in a summary of The Accenture 2013 College Graduate Employment Survey, which queried 1,010 students graduating from college in 2013 and 1,005 who graduated in 2011 and 2012.

The problem, it said, is that most recent college graduates expect employers to provide on-the-ground training, but most of them don’t actually receive it.

“Based on these findings, as well as our own work with hundreds of companies around the world, it is hard to deny the conclusion that many employers have overblown expectations for the skills of new hires — believing falsely that recent college graduates should be able to hit the ground running,” the summary added.

Katherine LaVelle, who leads Accenture’s Talent and Organization group for North America, said the employers they talked to seemed more concerned about the lack of specific technical skills than broad ones like communication. But the overall issue of preparedness remains the same.

“Universities are not in the job of vocational training but they are in the job of evolving,” Ms. LaVelle said. “The magic lies in finding a model that’s appropriate for students to build skills, but palatable and effective for employers as well.”

It would seem that the job internships that college students, and increasingly post-college students, participate in would help prepare students for the working world, but experts say most are too short and not substantial enough. Longer, more in-depth ones at prominent companies are highly competitive.

“They’re incredibly helpful, but they’re not a cure-all,” Mr. Fall said.

There is clearly no one answer, but the most important issue is communication between all sides, said Karin Fischer, a staff writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, who helped write up the survey results.

“To what extent are employers and colleges having a conversation about what they really need?” she asked. “We see this more in the community college arena. Maybe we need more back and forth.”

It’s not that colleges and companies haven’t been trying to figure this out — and with varying success. In 2008, the Boeing Company ranked colleges based on how well their graduates performed within the corporation. The results weren’t made public, but Boeing did share them with colleges.

Richard Stephens, a former senior vice present of human resources and management at Boeing, told The Chronicle that some colleges took the findings seriously and worked with the company to refine their curriculums, while others dismissed them.

Boeing used that information to determine where the aerospace company focused its internship programs and hiring.

But a spokesman for Boeing said there were no plans for another such evaluation, saying it was “difficult to measure individuals in such a big company and difficult to implement over the long term.”

One way the industry is reaching out directly to new entrants in the work force is through a Web site, Jobipedia.org, started by the HR Policy Association. An employee posts a question and recruiters for the companies that participate answer it. One question may elicit several answers from different perspectives.

About 20 major companies — such as Gap, Merck and American Express — participated. And some 50 colleges, including Cornell, Duke University and Georgia Institute of Technology, have made the Web site available to students at their college career centers.

The questions range from career planning to interview issues to on the job concerns. For example, “Is it O.K. to have a drink at a business lunch?” elicited four responses. The consensus: Best to avoid it.

As Mr. Fall said, “colleges can’t be either/or anymore — a trade school or a liberal arts college. We need skilled people with well-rounded backgrounds and the ability to think constructively.”

You hear that, son?

Not the Gap Band

From my friends at WorkBoots.com they send along this interesting infograph that shares my passion, the trades and the lack thereof.

AMERICA’S SKILLS GAP
Some have suggested that the skills gap in America can partially be explained by the growing number of retiring tradespeople and the shrinking number of qualified applicants. WorkBoots.com supports the growth of a skilled workforce, and encourages today’s youth to consider a career working the trades.