It wasn’t that long ago when individuals trying to enter many occupational areas didn’t have to have a formal education. Few arbitrarily established educational licensing requirements were mandated by the federal or a state government. If you wanted to be a real estate agent, a hair dresser, a cosmetologist, an attorney or a nurse, you got your training on the job.
Our current educational system requires hundreds to thousands of hours of classroom attendance to meet basic licensing requirements before a student can take a test and then perform what is often a relatively mundane task. Is the new system better than the old? I guess that depends on how you look at it. If you are an employer who doesn’t want to have any involvement with training, and you can shift that responsibility to an educational institution, it’s a great system. If you believe that all education is good, then again I guess that you would say yes. Finally, if you are trying to trying to keep the number of entrants into a field low, you increase the requirements for entry.
It has become over time education as a business, and I have a problem with where it is going. Just because political “representatives” get a law passed that requires 2,000 hours of education in a certain area to become licensed does not necessarily mean that the educational hours required will improved the quality of those who graduate from a program or that the public will be better protected.
Some educational requirements simply create jobs for educators. It is a fact that much of what an individual learns during their required education they will forget.
I don’t have to talk at length about the fact that the educational system is now beginning to leave students upon graduation worse off than when they entered it. When you get your certificate, diploma or degree the first thing that you will hear from many potential employers is that “you are not employable” or “you haven’t learned anything that will be useful to you in the position you have been educated for.”
Educators counter the “unqualified applicant” argument by pointing out that they have taught a student “how to learn.” So at the crux of the educational system is the theory that you may not be taught anything that is useful enough to secure yourself a job, but you will be taught enough to learn.
I always find it interesting that educational requirements often increase arbitrarity over time. This usually happens when there is a concerted effort on the part of some organization to keep out competitors. It’s not that the job that you are trying to get a license for now takes better qualified licensees it’s that those individuals who have licenses want to restrict entry into the business.
The reason that the educational system is now graduating thousands of students who are unemployable is not because the students failed to acquire an understanding of “how to learn.” It’s that they have been graduated into a job market that has been set up to be so exclusive in its design that it fails to give individuals with different majors an opportunity to compete.
When individuals attending vocational schools are more employable than those coming out of liberal arts colleges, something is wrong, and when the cost of an education becomes so high that it yokes students with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, that is also wrong.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I have seen campuses growing over the years, a lot of empire building has been going on, but it appears that relatively little attention has been paid to student costs and student outcomes.
When you think about the fact that schools have no way of monitoring the actual supply and demand for positions its easy to see how massive misalloctions occur. When there is a boom, like the dot come one we saw after the introduction of the Internet back in the early 1990’s, schools graduate many in computer related fields. When dot come jobs evaporated, many students just had educations that were relatively useless.
On the job training was better. When you got done with your training, you generally had a position and you knew exactly what was expected. You didn’t have to take a lot of courses that had no relevance, you oftent didn’t have to acquire a license and you got paid (albiet at a reduced rate) while you were training.
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