job training

Across the pond, the Great Brittan Mail Online tells a familiar tale of financial woes for poor students who ordinarily would be seeking higher education but are priced out of too high tuition costs.

"Students from working-class families are taking a smaller share of places at university after the introduction of £3,000-a-year tuition charges in 2006.

And nearly a quarter of all students are failing to finish the courses they start despite a £1billion crackdown on the university drop-out toll, university league tables showed yesterday."

In Mason County Texas, The Hill Country Home Builders Association (HCHBA) has announced that it will provide scholarships to a number of students seeking careers as a builder or contractor.

"This is the inaugural year that the HCHBA has invested scholarships into local high school graduates that are interested in continuing their education in a Building Trades or Construction related field."

University of Virginia fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Matthew Crawford's new book Shop Class as Soulcraft goes into great detail about the stigma youth face when choosing more hands on occupations over deskjobs that require a masters degree.

Crawford tells his own personal story about being a graduate student and having to take on a job writing summaries for scholarly articles. By the end of his time at the job he was required to write as many as 23 a day. He says that the more he thought about it, the more time it took and the more they didn't follow the formula outlined, the worse his summaries. In the end, it took a masters degree to earn $23,000 a year and perform a job that required him NOT to think.

He currently works as a motorcycle mechanic where he says his critical thinking skills are put to good use for customers who care as much about their motorcycles as they do their children.

Via his New Atlantic piece

"I began working as an electrician’s helper at age fourteen, and started a small electrical contracting business after college, in Santa Barbara. In those years I never ceased to take pleasure in the moment, at the end of a job, when I would flip the switch. “And there was light.” It was an experience of agency and competence. The effects of my work were visible for all to see, so my competence was real for others as well; it had a social currency. The well-founded pride of the tradesman is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

This week Crawford appeared on WAMU's Diane Rehm's Show where he talked about these types of jobs being one of few constants in a struggling economy.

"You can't send your car to Japan to be fixed," he said.

Yet our culture spends a lot of time demanding more from our youth. While Crawford talks about making twice as much as an electrician than he did at the nightmare summary writing job, he notes that many would find it repugnant he "didn't live up to his education," even consider it a waste of time and money. Crawford doesn't see a degree as a necessity for greatness.

His running thesis surrounds our systems of high school education that continue to cut classes that teach practical skills over book knowledge. His example is a heartbreaking year he spent teaching Latin in a high school where he swears kids would have had more of a connection to shop class, and absorbed skills that are just as useful.

When it comes to doctors and lawyers, advanced degrees are probably something you don't want to skip out on. But in a world where college is too far out of reach, we owe youth a bit of honesty about potential if they instead undergo proper training. We also owe them the respect deserved of everyone regardless of their class or the school they attended or jobs they hold.

Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics released information on a 10-year longitudinal study of America's youth. The study tracked the same young people for the first time when they were 12 to 17 years old and for the tenth time when they were 21 to 27 years old.

One of the startling findings from this study is that "[t]hirty-seven percent of high school dropouts and 19 percent of high school graduates not enrolled in college were neither employed nor in training during the October when they were age 21." Another interesting finding is that only eight percent of high school dropouts in this study went on to complete a GED or a graduate from high school by the time they were 20 years of age.

Other findings that are in line with what we know from other data sources:

• Educational attainment and employment are positively correlated; in other words, the more education you complete, the more likely you are to be employed and to work more hours.
• Women are more likely to be enrolled in college than men.

• Blacks and Hispanics are less likely to be enrolled in college than their White counterparts.

The bottom line from this study, in my opinion, is that young people with lower levels of educational attainment are not getting enough job training after schooling and few high school drop outs are returning to school or completing a GED.

There are programs that seek to combine job training and education, which is one solution to improve the employment prospects for low-income youth and those with less education. Workforce Strategies Initiative--a public policy program of The Aspen Institute--is currently working on a demonstration program involving these types of programs. The programs leverage the power of community colleges (which are more accessible and have local ties) to prepare people for a variety careers, especially the medical field. Leveraging the resources of America's community colleges is one way to re-engage under-represented youth by showing them that their community sees value in them and is willing to provide the educational training, as well as other support, to help them succeed in the workforce.

With the Department of Education's budget expected to double in FY2009, ensuring that community colleges can create and continue these types of job training programs will have an immediate effect on local economies.