Monthly Archives: April 2015

John,

So so glad to hear that you are feeling better!

While agree with everything you said in the your this post, I’d like to extend your metaphor of the blindfolded people bumping the room. You and they found the elephant in the room and describe it from one limited perspective.

Yes, education systems are a mess, but that is but one cause. There are many. Here’s another which helps to, but does not wholly explain, our current employment situation. Business has a tremendous responsibility for the state of affairs – the lack of skilled employees. How did the boomers get trained for manufacturing jobs, construction jobs, and other “manual” labor jobs?

Businesses (and often unions) took responsibility for training workers. Starting in the 80s and continuing to today, the emphasis on corporate profit, just-in-time and lean labor forces, caused otherwise repsonsible businesses (and unions) to stop investing in training and cross training.

Today we hear from 10s of business owners hoping to find skilled labor to replace their retiring workforces. Guess what… no one trained them. And to me the chief responsibility for that falls on the people who profit from having trained labor. Stockholders.

Just another reason, I believe, we find ourselves in a pickle. There is a good solution though. Hire for aptitude and invest in your employees.

Keep getting well. Chuck

Pleased to read that you are on the mend.

“Ridiculed as the refuge for dumb kids and criminals, manual arts, auto shop, home economics and other non-college preparatory classes were virtually extinguished from high school curriculums”[sic] is not universally factual. While the emphasis on college attendance is enormous, the emphasis on STEM oriented programs and the undervaluation of liberal arts is also to blame. Combined with the nonsensical new testing, the result leaves a diminished effectiveness in the new workforce.

Now layer on HR & owner bias against anyone out of work over one year and you have the genesis for the statistics you report in your article.

This emphasis toward STEM and standardized testing has another painful consequence: critical thinking capability is nonexistent in high school graduates. Do you agree this may be a contributing factor in the reduction in 4-year college graduations?

Our regional high school has a thriving poly-tech program. This is a school with an excess of three thousand students. And yes, counselors get bonuses for the number of students who take AP and honors courses, and likely something similar for the number of grads who attend college. But the vocational training program is excellent and very much in demand.

Lastly I believe this bullet was an oversight: “Fueled by student debt, colleges increased their costs at almost triple the rate of inflation.”… isn’t the equation the other way around? The debt is a by-product of the rising costs to attend college.

And what will happen when the college bubble bursts… the current rate of tuition increases and incurred debt levels in many colleges and universities cannot be sustained. When will be start seeing colleges folding? It may not be very far into the future.