How responsible are institutions of higher education for making sure that their graduates are job-ready? That is the question being asked by Joshua Wyner, the Executive Director of Aspen Institute College Excellence Program, in an article for the Huffington Post.

He takes for his departure point the statements made by both President Barack Obama and current GOP frontrunner for the 2016 nomination Senator Marco Rubio that the it is the economic recovery that will be the key to the reversal of the decline of the American middle class. And one way that this economic recovery could be pushed forward is with college programs that do a better job of filling employment gaps in the country’s most forward-looking industries.

Research shows that there are about two million jobs in the United States today going begging because Americans don’t have the skills needed to fill those jobs. If domestic and multinational corporations are to fill those jobs here in the U.S. rather than moving them overseas, two things will need to be done.

There have been nascent efforts to fill that gap at the high school and college level. New York City’s successful P-TECH school, which got a mention during the President’s 2013 State of the Union address, and which teaches its students skills necessary to begin an entry-level job at IBM upon gradation, is one move that’s promising success.

Yet most colleges still continue to run their programs as if the realities of the job markets don’t exist. Few make the effort to liaise with industry representatives to find out what they expect from their potential employees.

Last year, a story on NPR provided a good example of the challenge. There are thousands of computer-related jobs in the high-tech Seattle area that are going unfilled despite the fact that qualified students are clamoring to get into computer science and computer engineering programs at the University of Washington. How is this possible? Because while the University of Washington has an undergraduate program designed to train and place students in this field, that program has not been expanded since 1999 even though the number of high-tech jobs has exploded. Good jobs and eligible students make for what might seem like a perfect match, but there is log jam: Students can’t access the training that they need to be prepared for those jobs.

What is preventing the program expansion at the University of Washington and elsewhere is, of course, money. Funding for public universities has been shrinking on both the state and the federal levels, and schools often can’t afford to hire additional faculty and dedicate additional resources to meet student demand.

To fix the problem, Wyner calls on the federal government to find a way to financially reward schools that make an effort to produce more graduates in shortage fields. But the schools must also be willing to make hard choices like “realigning their own resources” from less job-oriented programs to the ones for whose graduates the local businesses clamor.

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A shortage of technology workers continues to plague the UK, but a new approach that would bring together those in the market for tech talent and the country’s schools could work to close that skills gap. In addition to the IT GCSE curriculum overhaul supported by the coalition government, putting tech companies in touch with students directly could work to inspire more of them to pursue a career in the tech field after their leave school.

Young kids just do not dream about being programmers and engineers when they’re younger. They want to be firefighters and police officers, doctors and ballerinas, because people who employed in those fields are considered heroic and romantic. There’s probably not a lot of romance to be had in a STEM profession, but jobs in technology can be challenging, fascinating, lucrative and put students in a driver’s seat of the country’s economic future.

And who better to deliver that message to students as early as primary school than current IT professionals?

Tamar Newberger, vice president of marketing for virtualisation security company Catbird, said this type of intervention would benefit the entire tech industry.

“It’s just good business because we cannot staff these jobs and there are not enough good people pursuing technology careers,” she told IT Pro.

Richard Nott , the website director for the recruitment job site CSJobs.co.uk, seconds Newberger’s call for more tech firm involvement. As he explains, those who will be entering the profession in a decade are currently in grappling with rudimentary math in primary school. Driving their interest in pursuing a technology career in 10 years is a job that needs to be done by the technology sector today. Increasing the number of students interested in a STEM career will offer an economic boost in the arm not only to the companies hoping to eventually hire them, but also to the students and the country as a whole.

The introduction of a new GCSE ICT syllabus is a step in the right direction, said Adrian Cullen, technical consultant at IT security company Damballa.

This is because the current one fails to equip students with the kind of IT skills the industry is looking for.

“There are still some very bright children out who are interested in IT that go away and figure things out for themselves, but they’d do that anyway, the problem is the syllabus should support all the children and it clearly doesn’t,” he said.

The first crucial step is finding the right teachers. Only about 35% of ICT instructors have actual technology experience or specific training. A majority are just amateurs.

“We have got to have well-trained teachers and well-equipped schools,” said Dave Smith, school improvement advisor of ICT for Havering School Improvement Services.

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Regrets. According to Business Insider, many recent college grads have had a few. And specifically, when considering their chosen school or major.

The results of a recent survey by McKinsey and Chegg – an ed-tech company also running a textbook rental business – which shows that nearly half of those polled wished that they had made different choices upon graduating high school – is likely to add to an increasingly loud debate about whether higher education is ultimately a worthwhile investment.

Among its other troubling findings, the report says that nearly half of college graduates are currently working jobs that don’t require a college degree. Roughly 30% felt that college didn’t adequately prepare them for the job market.

The most alarming conclusion appears to be that a full 41% of graduates from America’s top 100 ranked colleges and universities couldn’t get employment in their field after they graduated. When looking at all colleges and universities around the country, the percentage goes up to nearly half.

Students don’t ask the questions they need to, like how often students graduate in four years, what percentage of students are employed within six months of graduating, and what percentage of students get jobs in their major. They need to be encouraged to do so, and schools need to have those answers.

And schools are evaluated by things like selectivity, not how they help students prepare for the workplace or support their job search.

Students in liberal arts were particularly prone to regrets. They were more likely than their STEM-graduate peers to be under- or unemployed and were deeper in debt, were paid less and were overall less happy with the higher education choices they made.

The findings illuminate the fact that schools are not doing a very good job of filling their students’ needs. Instead of expanding programs that lead to higher paid jobs and more steady employment, it appears that many schools are cutting back due to budget cuts.

As a result, students are not only feeling more regrets about where they enrolled and the major they chose, but are also graduating with higher debt loads and fewer options.

Things are moving in a troubling direction. Instead of expanding curriculums to include the skills students really need now, many institutions, particularly public ones, are cutting back. That means students have to spend longer to graduate and go deeper in debt, without getting an education that’s any better suited to the world we live in. The key to solving it, Rosensweig says, is using technology to break down some of the barriers and habits that have held higher education back and kept it from adapting, to focus more on specific skills, and creating more entrepreneurial students.

 

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Teachers from countries around the world flocked to a recruiting fair held at London’s Hilton Hotel last month to compete for job offers from over 50 international schools. Put together by the firm Search Associates, it is the last fair scheduled for the spring of this year – which means it is the last chance for teachers looking for overseas jobs for next fall to impress potential bosses.

Hundreds of teachers attended interviews over two days hoping for placements in places as diverse as Germany and Bangladesh. Those seeking employment represented an impressive range of home countries too; people came to the fairs to interview from Kenya, Texas and Singapore, among others.

Frida Jodin, a teacher from Sweden, described the process as “weird.” This was her second fair but she’s not quite used to an interview environment that includes the interviewer’s suitcases on the hotel bed — far from the standard setting of a conference room or an office.

In countries like Canada and Scotland, there are more trained teachers than job openings, so there is a natural movement toward growing markets overseas. In cities like Chicago, where there have been large-scale teacher layoffs, mid-career educators are scrambling to get hired.

“People are having to look elsewhere for jobs,” said Andrew Wigford, a former international teacher who started the Teachers International Consultancy in 2005. “However, once they get overseas, many do not want to go back. They find they have a great way of life, they get to move around and develop their career and it’s quite an opportunity to travel the world.”

According to The New York Times, although the pay varies by country, relative to the local cost of living it is close to what a teacher would earn staying at home. And that doesn’t include some additional perks including free education for children and a more high-tech learning environment.

The competition for jobs is intense and growing. David Cope, who headed up Search Associates’ fair this year, attempted to manage expectations when briefing teachers prior to the beginning of the interviewing grind. Most, he warned, would not land employment. However, the networking opportunities offered by fairs like this could lead to jobs in the future.

International school recruitment fairs have been taking place for more than 30 years. “There is a great level of interest in participating in our fairs and for the last few years we were at capacity,” said Maria Lesser, director of membership services for the Council of International Schools. “Fairs still provide an opportunity for that face-to-face interaction, particularly important for teachers new to international teaching.”

“It gives them the chance to see a lot of schools, meet several recruiters in one place and get a feel for what the opportunities and people are like working in international teaching.”

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The Wall Street Journal reports that while going to college remains a profitable proposition in the long run, value is steadily shifting from four-year degrees to programs offered in community colleges. Although it has been the received wisdom that any four-year degree is valuable, new research shows that unilaterally investing in a bachelor’s – without consideration for the merits of the school granting the degree – no longer provides the return on investment it once did.

Choosing a school has become a little easier for students and families now that a number of states publish first-year earnings of graduates from state schools. In some cases, the states publish a breakdown by major as well, and those looking at the data can gain some surprising insights.

For example, in Tennessee, graduates from some community college programs – especially those in technology – can outearn holders of bachelor’s degrees in the very same field.

Take graduates in health professions from Dyersburg State Community College. They not only finish two years earlier than their counterparts at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, but they also earn $5,300 more, on average, in their first year after graduation.

In Virginia, graduates with technical degrees from community colleges make $20,000 more in the first year after college than do graduates in several fields who get bachelor’s degrees. Yet high-school seniors are regularly told that community colleges are for students who can’t hack it on a four-year campus.

And that is without taking cost into account. Considering that community college programs charge a fraction of what a four-year school charges, the difference in value can be immense. In addition, community college graduates enter the workforce two years earlier than their peers who choose to enroll in a four-year school, padding their overall earning advantage.

Earning potential in the first year post-graduation isn’t the only thing to consider when choosing schools. Community colleges also tend to have an advantage when it comes to the amount of student loans graduates carry when they leave. Comparing education choices isn’t a straight-forward proposition, but the U.S. Department of Education recently released two tools to make the job easier for families.

The U.S. Education Department’s College Scorecard website helps you figure out where to get “the most bang for your educational buck” by compiling federal data collected from colleges. Collegerealitycheck.com from the Chronicle of Higher Education allows for quick and easy comparisons between colleges on measures families should weigh during their search. It includes early-career salaries for college graduates from payscale.com, which are self-reported by users of the site.

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A report from the New Hampshire Employment Security paints a cheerier picture for higher education employment than February’s release of the unadjusted Current Employment Statistics. The NHES ran the dataset through its formulas which showed that because the number of jobs prior to 2008 were smaller than was originally reported, the differential between the number of jobs available now and five years ago isn’t as large as previously thought — and there’s a surprising boost in private higher education employment.

Still, prior to the 2008 economic recession, the private sector was producing about 9,300 additional jobs that have been lost as a result of the economic collapse. In addition to private sector job losses, more than 2,500 public sector jobs have also disappeared over this period.

Although the report relays bad news for jobs in sectors like construction, there was an unexpected silver lining in private higher education. According to NHES economist Annette Nielsen, this increasing demand for education workers is the realization that college degrees are becoming vital for future employment, along with the pressure created by the lackluster employment market pushing students to remain in school past the time when they’d hoped to graduate.

For example, those with associate’s degrees might wish to wait out an unwelcome employment climate by continuing to a bachelor’s degree, while those with a four-year degree are using the same kind of thinking to justify enrolling in a graduate program.

There’s also a small demand from people who are using the hiring lull to go back to school to retrain in a different profession that might prove to be more recession-proof.

Health care and Social Assistance is another sector that has grown through the recession, as the baby boomer population reaches retirement age. In addition, and perhaps connected to the previous category, the Leisure and Hospitality sector continues to add jobs, albeit at a slow pace. Finally, as mentioned above, Government jobs are down 2,500 over the five-year period. There is more to this than meets the eye, though. There are 7,300 federal jobs today, 500 fewer than in 2008; there are 13,200 state education jobs in February 2013, up 1,300 since 2008; there are 13,000 (non educational) state jobs, which is down 800 over five years, and local government, which had 63,500 people in 2008, has 61,000 today, as towns and cities struggle to balance budgets.

Higher education contributed to the improving unemployment numbers in one other way. The February 2013 unemployment rate for New Hampshire decreased by .4% to 6.1% thanks in part to colleges and universities reopening for their spring terms, thus boosting employment in businesses that derive some of their income from servicing students who are returning to their campuses.

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Even if the unemployment crisis that followed the 2008 financial collapse appears to be easing, under the surface of more cheerful unemployment numbers the situation continues to be dire – especially for recent college graduates. According to The Wall Street Journal, an increasing number of graduates leave school with tremendous amount of student debt, yet are only able to land low-skill jobs that don’t take advantage of their degrees.

Further bad news is provided courtesy of a recent study that predicts that even when the economy rebounds, the students leaving college right now might not benefit. For those who hoped that this wave of underemployment – skilled workers in jobs that don’t require qualifications beyond a high school degree – was temporary, the report is a splash of cold water.

The paper was published earlier this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research and its authors argue that there will not be a hiring frenzy after this recession as there was after the one in the mid-1990s, especially in the technology sector.

This is in part due to the fact that a lot of the infrastructure required to move to high tech manufacturing or or other high-tech industries is already in place, yet colleges and universities continue to churn out graduates who have the skills needed to perform these kinds of jobs even though there’s no one interested in hiring them.

David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied issues of skills and education, called Mr. Beaudry’s thesis “provocative” but also “speculative.” There is no question, Mr. Autor said, that the wage premium enjoyed by college graduates hasn’t grown as quickly during the 2000s as in earlier decades. But whether that is the result of a glut of degree holders or some other explanation isn’t yet clear.

Meanwhile, there is a stream of stories about college graduates lining up for jobs that high schoolers could capably perform. Brian Hackett, who graduated with a political science degree nearly three years ago, now works as a filing clerk alongside others with bachelor’s, master’s and even law degrees. He explains that this is a situation common to many of his friends who have degrees and skills and nowhere to use them.

How do we square this analysis with frequent complaints from heads of technology companies that they are trying and failing to land qualified workers, and therefore are pushing the federal government to ease immigration restrictions to make up the shortfall?

Mr. Beaudry said it is possible such shortages exist in specific industries. But using Labor Department data, Mr. Beaudry and his coauthors found that demand for college-level occupations—primarily managers, professionals and technical workers—peaked as a share of the workforce in about 2000, just as the dot-com bubble was about to burst, and then began to decline. The supply of such workers, meanwhile, continued to grow through the 2000s. The subsequent housing boom helped mask the problem by creating artificially high demand for workers of all kinds, but only temporarily.

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Women are well represented in Iran’s colleges and universities, but the picture is quite different when it comes to the job market. According to recent studies, of Iranian women who are unemployed nearly half hold higher education degrees. In comparison, only 14% of unemployed Iranian men are college educated.

Unemployment in Iran is getting a closer look both from the country’s government and by agencies outside of it. According to the Statistics Center of Iran, over 2.6 million residents of the country are out work at the moment, with 76% of those falling between the ages of 15 and 29. Although unemployment figures tend to be higher in the summer, this fall the percentage of Iranians without a job was still in excess of 11%.

Some 1 million new jobs have been created in the first half of the current Iranian calendar year, which began on March 20, 2012. During the previous year, the nation’s working population was 25 million, the report added. According to Etemad Persian language daily, the administration had pledged to create 2.5 million jobs in the current (calendar) year. Persons aged 20-24 years are the most unemployed group in Iran with the unemployment rate of 29.8 percent. Just 10 percent of economic activities in Iran are done by women, the Mehr News Agency quoted Tehran chamber of commerce official Mohsen Bahrami Arz-Aqdas as saying.

The discrepancy in employment between the genders has now drawn the attention of Austria’s Southwind Society for Developmental Politics, who are calling on the United Nations to weigh in on the systematic gender discrimination in the country. According to a report compiled by Southwind and other women’s rights activist groups, the condition of women in Iran is at its lowest point since the 1979 revolution. Although women represent 60% of the country’s university applicants, the laws and cultural barriers in place prevent them from taking advantage of their education in the job market.

In recent years, the pace of discrimination quickened with establishment of female-only colleges and universities and exclusion of women from some majors deemed to be unfeminine such as sciences, mathematics and English language.

In some universities, the group said, the segregation ratios were as follows read as follows: Maths and technical 20 per cent, human sciences 30 per cent, arts 34 per cent, foreign languages 25 per cent.  Segregation also reached to university transport systems and queues at the canteens, and some students had been expelled for ‘improper behaviour’ which included talking to male colleagues.  Females are also advised to wear loose clothes of dark colours and avoid make up. The university intelligence also informs parents of any ‘improper behaviour’ in the university dormitories, and as a result female students are regularly harassed and intimidated.

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Although there’s constant talk of teacher shortages and the fact that a position in K-12 education is no longer a guaranteed sinecure, these complaints disguise the fact that since the 1950s, the number of teachers and non-faculty support staff has substantially outpaced the growth in the number of students. According to the data published by The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, while the number of students rose by 96%, the number of teachers and other full-time personnel grew by an astounding 386%.

The information is no less puzzling if the time window is shrunk further. Between 1970 and today, the number of students grew by 8% while the increase in the number of teachers outpaced that by more than 7 times over. Although the disparity has shrunk somewhat since 1992, the trend has by no means reversed. The growth of teaching positions and non-teaching staff is continuing to outpace student growth even today.

Between FY 1992 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students nationwide grew 17 percent while the number of full-time equivalent school employees increased 39 percent, 2.3 times greater than the increase in students over that 18-year period. Among school personnel, teachers’ staffing numbers rose 32 percent while administrators and other staff experienced growth of 46 percent; the growth in the number of administrators and other staff was 2.7 times that of students.

Although many are tempted to blame this disparity on the testing initiatives like the No Child Left Behind act, in reality, the phenomenon well predates the legislation in question. The gap between the rates of student growth and the growth of the number of teachers and administrators actually slowed down since NCLB passed.

The only change that NCLB brought about was a reigning in of the out-of-control growth of administrative non-teaching staff. Prior to passage, the number of administrators hired outpaced the growth of both students and teachers. Since the passage, the rate of hire of teachers and administrators has about equalized.

As a matter of fact, there doesn’t appear to be any meaningful relationship between the number of teachers and administrators a state or a district appears to need and the number of students they’re actually charged with education.

Even when student populations were dropping, public school systems were increasing staffing between 1992 and 2009. Nine states with declining student populations had significant increases in public school personnel—D.C., Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Vermont. For example, Maine experienced an 11 percent decline in students from 1992-2009; however, the number of public school personnel increased by 35 percent. Perhaps more noteworthy during that period is the number of teachers in Maine public schools increased by 3 percent while the number of non-teaching personnel increased by 76 percent. An additional two states with declining student populations—Montana and West Virginia—did not decrease staffing at nearly the same rate as their declines in students.

This issue is important because lack of funding has been chiefly blamed for recent underperformance of America’s schools. However, according to the “School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools” – a report published by The Friedman Foundation – the schools would have been able to achieve substantial savings had they somehow followed the trend set by student numbers when assessing their personnel needs. How much? Well, according to the data in the report, the states could save – in total – about $24 billion had they pegged their staffing needs to student numbers.

Texas would have been able to realize a full quarter of those savings had their schools not increased their teaching and non-teaching numbers at a faster rate than student growth. More than $6.4 billion in savings could have been achieved had the state forgone hiring nearly 160,000 additional employees in excess of growth in student enrollment.

Virginia would have had an extra $29,007 to spend per teacher if it had limited the growth of administrators and other non-teaching staff to its growth in students from FY 1992 to FY 2009. Maine would have had an extra $25,505 per teacher, and the District of Columbia would have had an extra $20,472. Those funds could have been spent on salary increases for teachers or some other worthy purpose.

In an effort at belt tightening, the states could have also taken a closer look at their student/non-teaching-staff ratio which differed widely state-to-state.

For example, whereas Vermont has only 8.8 students for every administrator or other non-teaching employee and Maine has only 9.4 students per non-teaching employee, Rhode Island has 20 students per every administrator or other non-teaching employee. Wyoming has 9.9 students per every non-teaching employee, whereas Idaho has 22.7 students per nonteaching employee. Those differences are much larger than the differences in the employment of teachers.

Still, this employment growth could possibly be justified if it had brought with it an improvement in student outcomes. However, according to the report, this was far from the case. When judged by test scores and high school graduation rates, the country as a whole has not benefited from all these additional teaching and non-teaching jobs. Although some states saw substantial improvement, this was not a trend that was evident nationwide. This fact strongly indicates that the gains in achievement can be attributed to other factors than increase in employment.

Readers should keep in mind the concept of opportunity cost when making determinations for their individual states. One should ask whether the significant resources used to finance employment increases could have been spent better elsewhere. Would those taxpayer funds have gone further via vouchers or taxcredit scholarships, which enable students to attend schools better suited to their needs? Would raises for teachers have been a wiser investment? Perhaps letting taxpayers keep those funds may have been more effective. Those questions need to be asked and analyzed in every state capitol—inside by lawmakers and outside by parents, education reformers, the business community, and others. The burden of proof is now on those who still want to maintain or even increase the dramatically larger staffing levels in public schools.

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Just as some are beginning to ask if selecting a major in college that doesn’t lead directly to a career post graduation might be considered a waste of time, Jeff Selingo, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, is asking the exact opposite question. Career-readiness seems to be a goal that is getting more and more attention, getting mentions from as diverse a group of political personages as President Barack Obama and Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, but Selingo is wondering if it isn’t a waste of the potential that is offered by a four-year degree to view it as simply a job training program.

Selingo points to the recent report published by The New York Times which shows that a college degree is quickly becoming the equivalent of a high school diploma of 50 years ago – a minimum requirement of almost any office job.

Consider the 45-person law firm of Busch, Slipakoff & Schuh here in Atlanta, a place that has seen tremendous growth in the college-educated population. Like other employers across the country, the firm hires only people with a bachelor’s degree, even for jobs that do not require college-level skills.

Something is wrong, writes Selingo, when this is how a $100,000 college diploma is viewed. Nor is it likely to change anytime soon, since the country is disinclined to switch to something like an apprenticeship program to train its paralegals and file clerks.

Indeed, training students seems to keep some traditional colleges in business, as they turn the latest hot career fields into the newest college majors. Colleges, particularly four-year institutions, have marketed their practical academic programs in a way to raise demand for more of them. Since 2000, the overall number of academic programs at colleges and universities has grown by 21 percent, according to figures the U.S. Education Department tracks for various surveys.

The recent growth in the number of college majors mirrors that of the one in the 1990s when nearly 40% of the majors in existence by the end of the decade weren’t listed in any college catalogs when the decade begun.

For better or for worse, students are now looking at college not as an opportunity to broaden their minds but as a stepping-stone to a more remunerative job. Experts – and Selingo – are calling this phenomenon “credential inflation” and it is a trend that is bound to become more expensive to America’s students before it is reversed.

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