Department of Education Gives False Advertising for Higher Education

Education

by Kitty Testa

The U.S. Department of Education recently issued a press release focusing on the importance of attaining a post-secondary education. It serves as a pretty hefty advertisement for colleges and universities, but it should be labeled as false advertising.

The statistics presented state that college graduates earn 66% more than those with only a high school diploma and that by 2020 two-thirds of jobs will require post-secondary education or training (emphasis mine). This paints a dire picture for the allegedly under-educated and lends support the throngs of people demanding free college. But these statistics are woefully detached from market realities that will not go away just because more people get degrees. The jobs that need to be filled are dictated by the market, which creates the variety of labor demand, and when the labor supply has too many MBAs and not enough plumbers, you get plumbers ordering their $4 frappuccinos from baristas with MBAs.

What’s interesting is the shift in our cultural view of the purpose of universities. Once, these were places of intellectual inquiry, a means of passing humanity’s accumulated knowledge to subsequent generations. Today universities are seen as the training grounds for employment, and little else, thus the focus on long-term financial outcomes is based on level of education. But how did it get this way?

The statistics in the DoE report perfectly illustrate an irrational preference for college graduates in American corporate culture. The vast majority of jobs do not require a college education to execute the tasks and responsibilities associated with the job. This preference for degreed candidates is defended with an equally irrational statement: a college degree proves you can start a project and stick with it. A college degree takes four-to-five years to complete. The average person stays in a job for 4.4 years, and millennials expect to stay in their jobs for less than three years. With millennials tracking to be America’s most educated generation, there is clearly a disconnection between dedication to one’s education and dedication to a company.

In the 1970s and 1980s, relatively few people in the workplace had college degrees, and numerous career paths existed in a variety of fields for those with only a high school education. This began to change in the 1990s with the professionalization of Human Resources. Suddenly it became common for companies to require that all management level employees have a college degree. Several years later the requirement trickled down to nearly all white-collar positions, and now it is trickling down to trades and other blue-collar positions.

People who had once believed themselves to be on a solid career path started hitting the sheepskin ceiling. They could no longer achieve a promotion by merit, and knowledge attained through self-study was often dismissed. A slew of adults over 25 went back to school in the 1990s and beyond to get degrees that didn’t help them do their job one iota better (40% of the undergrad population was over 24 in 2014). Millennials have come of age believing that dark days lay ahead if they do not get a college education.

US Educational Attainment 1940-2011

And the cost of higher education has risen dramatically with the increased demand. Student loan debt is not just a millennial problem.

TotalStudentLoanDebt

It’s interesting to note that one-third of graduates never actually work in the field of their major, but they’re still getting jobs and advancing their careers. I am one of them.

The answer to our employment dilemma is not a government program to provide free college to individuals to further their careers. Such a program will never function as an equalizer. Once college is free, advanced degrees will be the new sheepskin ceiling. The answer is in the private sector; businesses need to stop preferring degreed candidates unless they have a solid reason for that prerequisite. Business needs to see the value of professional certifications based on knowledge, not schooling, and many professional certifications should drop their baccalaureate prerequisite. This would be better for business, and better for individuals who can focus on relevant skills that make them more proficient employees. We are seeing this in the IT industry, but in much of the corporate world, the sheepskin trumps tested knowledge.

Many college courses are offered at no charge online (without credit) from many established universities, placing education literally at the fingertips of anyone inclined to study. We have a whole new way to pass the accumulated knowledge of humanity to the next generation. The world will always need philosophers, historians, physicists and thinkers of all disciplines, and universities should again embrace that mission. Businesses need to re-examine their hiring practices and challenge their irrational preferences. Companies are missing out on potentially great employees, and smart, capable people are trapped behind the counter asking, “Venti or grande?”

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