When I read that 71% of South Korean 18 year-olds are university-bound (and that 100% of South Korean parents want their children to go to university) I was shocked. Where will the future bricklayers, shop assistants, hairdressers, bus drivers, postmen, barmen, chambermaids, street-sweepers,welders, security guards, car-parking attendants, ticket collectors, etc. come from in a country with imploding demographics?
In most advanced economies, there are more graduates than graduate-level jobs. The logical outcome of this situation is graduate unemployment followed by graduates being forced to do work that they consider beneath their potential. The best graduates - those who are demonstrably intelligent and can prove a capacity for hard work - will get the most rewarding jobs. The rest? Well, once you work your way down towards 'average', the job market becomes tougher, before young Spanish, German, British, Japanese or American graduates find that no employer is interested in their qualifications.
And here we are, policy-makers! Where does your nation's youth fit onto this grid? And what policy measures are needed to shunt the average up towards to upper right quartile? And when you get there - then what? A whole lot of over-qualified voters doing jobs that are beneath their potential? Or are you going to export your unemployment (as Poland did from 2004 on)?
Should the state educate more - or less? If more - in what direction? Mediaeval French Poetry? Comparative Cartoon Studies? Or IT, Biotech or Engineering?
Britain has already started rationing education. With annual fees rising to £9,000 a year (47,000 zlotys to Polish parents), potential students are beginning to shun those courses that will not open doors to high-paying jobs. My instinct is, that for an economy, high fees for state universities will lead to better results all round. Those who feel the hurdle is too high (for themselves or their children) will rightly avoid university and settle down to a more suitable job.
In Poland, state universities are still free; the less-gifted who feel (or whose parents feel) that five years at university is a good idea have a wide selection of heavily-advertised private ones to chose from. Britain, by contrast, has one private university, Buckingham. In America, the best universities are private (and very expensive), while the duffers go to state unis. So - no consensus as to how best to educate our youth.
Any thoughts, dear readers?
This time last year:
To the Catch - short story
This time two years ago:
Eternal Warsaw
This time four years ago:
From the family archives
Anyway, here's what I was trying to say - hardly worth all the bother or the email but why waste it.
ReplyDeleteWe have seen for quite some time a large number of very well educated people taking jobs that might be thought to be "beneath them" but this simply demonstrates the fundamental problem here - the disconnect between education and employment.
I feel genuinely sorry for those who do actually have a plan and stick to it only to find the job they planned at the end is not available but I fear this is less than 5% of students. As for the rest, I hope they enjoyed the years they spent at Uni as opposed to getting work experience because they are about to pay for it and it's not going to be easy.
What's wrong with a well educated hairdresser anyway?
- Ian
It has been a truism for quite a while but investing in gaining a skill is the key here. And the fact is that the required skills will change ever more quickly so that in order to stay ahead of the curve societies will need to move to constant on the job education with only a few places at universities. And we really must reinculcate pride in trades and other so called manual labour.
ReplyDeleteThe days of a job for life, both in the sense of a single lifetime employer and a single job profile are long gone.
The EU does not help in any way. For instance for some inexplicable reason the EU has forced relevant graduate entry to the professions. The UK has resisted. Thus A Level entry and non relevant graduates pass the Chartered Accountant exams with higher grades than the "relevant" graduates. Which just goes to prove the old adage that those who can do, and those who can't teach. Soon you will need a degree to bake bread. Which is not to denigrate artisan breadmakers in any way, but why force people to waste three (or in the case of the Continent five years) on pretending to learn. Far better to give potential students a grant to travel the world. Far more eye opening vide the "Grand Tour".
Education is not only about jobs.
ReplyDeleteEducated people are clever consumers, well-informed voters, better parents, even if they are overqualified as workers. They take better decisions on the issues that have impact on the general public.
Hence, every grosz spent on education is a collective investment into the public good with very high long-term returns, even if in individual and short-time terms it is little more but waste.
This is the positive external effect of education, something that the decision makers should take into account.
This is what happens when you start dumbing down exams.
ReplyDeleteOne of my friends helped his nephew with his 'A' Level maths, it turns out that the paper they were using was the same as his paper from his 'O' Levels 20 years earlier.
A group of us were discussing this over a drunken conversation a few years ago and the concensus was that if you took responsibility and did your job properly that would stand out in the workplace more than having a degree.
Then again there is the other side of the coin which is that an awful lot of degree courses are just hopeless in terms of having a career path at the end of them. Perhaps some of these people should go and do engineering which will always enable them to have a job.
About two years ago, I was running one of our HR Policy Groups at work and mentioned the then-new trend in the UK for young people to avoid student debt and go into the world of work after leaving school. PwC, National Rail, Marks and Spencers and other large organisations were offering school leavers management traineeships, paying them to learn. What a difference at 21! No debt, a steady job, savings, a rung or two up the ladder - why study?
ReplyDeleteAnd yet the consensus among Polish HR managers is that people aged 18 are too immature to be of any use in the workplace.
Cultural difference UK-Poland, or snobbism (or are young Poles really less mature than young Brits)?
"In America, the best universities are private (and very expensive), while the duffers go to state unis."
ReplyDeleteYou didn't quite make your point with this sentence. Perhaps you could elaborate? In the meantime, I'll focus on the final clause.
Your idea about State universities is just wrong. A ranking of the top US engineering schools, for example, shows that 5 of the top10 are State schools (on this chart, you can identify public schools by the ones that quote in-state and out-of-state tuition.)
http://tinyurl.com/4zndy89
Andrzej has it right. To expand upon his first paragraph, the skills employers need, especially in technical fields, change quickly. The best employees are those who have "learned to learn" and to think critically. Everything else follows.
ReplyDeleteMy field is engineering. I regularly come across people who excel in engineering project work and who don't have engineering degrees. Depending on the project, you need maybe 50% of people on a project to have hard-core engineering training. For the rest you need planners, budgeters, and people who can negotiate contracts. The people who do these jobs need to be able to learn just enough about engineering to be able to communicate with the hard core engineers in order to be effective.
The point is, if Poland has too many linguistics graduates and not enough programmers (from your 31 Oct 11 post), there are better solutions than waiting for the next batch of computer science graduates. I'll bet many linguistics graduates could be kick-ass programmers. After all, they spent years studying syntax and structure - key concepts in programming. All they would need is a 6-month to 1-year crash course in a particular programming language to be effective entry-level programmers.
Flexible, ad-hoc educational solutions can benefit employers far more than trying to force more marketable graduates by penalizing all students with high tuition burdens.
DC - thanks - I'm evidently wallowing in out-of-date stereotypes - the State unis have pulled themselves up magnificently. And the US is a world-beater (for the time being) - see the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (here)
ReplyDelete