{"id":17383,"date":"2016-09-14T14:27:48","date_gmt":"2016-09-14T18:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17383"},"modified":"2016-09-14T16:22:49","modified_gmt":"2016-09-14T20:22:49","slug":"credentials-for-specific-skills-and-their-implication-for-liberal-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17383","title":{"rendered":"credentials for specific skills and their implications for liberal education"},"content":{"rendered":"

Potential employers of young workers tend to value\u00a0degrees (high school and college), courses, majors and grades, and previous jobs. Those are all\u00a0experiences\u00a0<\/em>that a person\u00a0completes, rather than direct evidence of one’s capacity<\/em> to do\u00a0a given task. In a tight market, employers can raise the bar, so that–for example<\/a>–65% of new openings for executive assistants and executive secretaries now require a BA, even though only 19% of the people who now hold such jobs have college degrees.\u00a0This is bad news for the two-thirds of young people who have not<\/em> attained at least a bachelors degree. It’s also a potential loss for employers, who may be missing the people\u00a0who would\u00a0do the best\u00a0work although\u00a0they\u00a0haven’t accumulated the most highly-valued\u00a0experiences. One\u00a0widely promoted\u00a0solution–getting everyone through college–seems both unrealistic and needlessly expensive.<\/p>\n

Why do employers use\u00a0college degrees and other major experiences\u00a0to select employees? I would propose these explanations:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Employers\u00a0are actually\u00a0looking for concrete skills, such as the ability to write a coherent memo or\u00a0schedule a meeting. In the absence of direct measures of such skills, they use college completion as a rough proxy. That is unfortunate because it isn’t a precise measure, it can discriminate on the basis of social class, and it drives colleges and universities\u00a0to advertise\u00a0highly concrete skills as their outcomes even though that distorts their real educational mission.<\/li>\n
  2. Employers\u00a0have a more general theory of “merit,” which may encompass broad literacy and numeracy, self-discipline, social skills, critical thinking, etc.\u00a0Employers may feel, furthermore, that the competition to enter and then complete a selective college is a measure of such merit. They need not believe that merit is innate to use it as a selection criterion. Success in school could\u00a0result from investments in the home,\u00a0community, school, and college, and still be an indicator\u00a0of value for\u00a0an enterprise. The content of the education may be fairly unimportant to the employers; the point is that school\/college is\u00a0a difficult competition, and those who get through it are more\u00a0likely to contribute to their\u00a0enterprise. By the way, if this theory applies, then getting everyone through college would only raise the goalposts; employers would start looking for graduate degrees. The\u00a0idea of\u00a0general “merit,” however, is highly problematic–not only morally, but also\u00a0because completing a fancy college may not<\/em> show that you are well suited to a particular job. Once again, the most truly qualified candidates may be left aside, which is waste of human potential as well as an injustice.<\/li>\n
  3. Employers may\u00a0value\u00a0the goods that liberal education explicitly promises: genuinely critical thinking, reflection on the good life, sensitivity to culture, truth about nature and humankind, etc. This explanation may apply\u00a0in a few workplaces, but I must say I am cynical about it. Most organizations have fixed ends or objectives and are really only interested in critical reflection about\u00a0means (if\u00a0they’re open to criticism at all). But the heart of a liberal education is critical reflection about\u00a0ends: about\u00a0the nature of a good life and a good society. Starting with\u00a0Socrates, some have concluded that if you are seriously critical of ends, then you\u00a0must be independent of\u00a0institutions, although that might\u00a0make you a poor employee in most organizations. In the classic text<\/a>\u00a0that first defined “the liberal arts,” Seneca wrote, “I respect no study, and deem no study good, which results in money-making.”\u00a0To be sure, Seneca was a slave-owning aristocrat who had plenty of money to start with. One can find a compromise between the highest goals of a liberal education and the need to put food on the table. But the two objectives at least seem in tension.<\/li>\n
  4. A variant of the previous\u00a0theory is that employers seek\u00a0a certain kind of cultural capital<\/a> that results from a liberal education. When they choose\u00a0employees from colleges like the ones they attended, it’s not because they prefer\u00a0radical thinkers. It’s because they want to work with people who know and appreciate\u00a0the same\u00a0body of culture. This variant of the\u00a0theory requires less idealistic assumptions than #3, but I still doubt that it applies in most\u00a0organizations (other than small white-collar enterprises).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    To the extent that the first theory applies, it would make sense to measure a diversity of concrete skills, one at a time, and provide portable certificates for individuals\u00a0who can demonstrate them. That would allow people\u00a0who demonstrate\u00a0a given skill to win relevant jobs even though they may not\u00a0be on a path to\u00a0college. It would allow employers to choose more appropriate workers, and perhaps with less invidious bias.\u00a0It would allow colleges that actually teach specific skills to gain credit for doing so. It would\u00a0make space for organizations like my own to certify concrete political and civic skills<\/em>\u00a0that might lead to jobs or leadership roles. At the same time, it would relieve colleges from having to sell\u00a0their bachelors degrees as indicators of concrete skills. Instead, they could offer genuine\u00a0liberal education.<\/p>\n

    I acknowledge the risk. If\u00a0prospective students only care about jobs, or are forced by economic circumstances to put employment first, and if employers only care about concrete job skills, then\u00a0organizations that teach and certify job skills could put the liberal arts (k-16) out of business. But I think that maybe the liberal arts would be better off claiming that they\u00a0enhance\u00a0the soul and the community, instead of living off an inefficiency in the labor market.<\/p>\n

    See also:\u00a0Bourdieu in the college admissions office<\/a>;\u00a0games, digital badges, and alternative assessments in civics<\/a>;\u00a0the controversy over badges<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Potential employers of young workers tend to value\u00a0degrees (high school and college), courses, majors and grades, and previous jobs. Those are all\u00a0experiences\u00a0that a person\u00a0completes, rather than direct evidence of one’s capacity to do\u00a0a given task. In a tight market, employers can raise the bar, so that–for example–65% of new openings for executive assistants and executive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17383"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17399,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17383\/revisions\/17399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}