Pg 72 - "A study conducted by economists at Georgetown University found that from 1973 to 2007, America added sixty-three million jobs, but the jobs requiring a high school diploma or less fell by two million. Prior to about the 1970s these jobs formerly paid a wage that would sustain a family, but wages for these jobs today have flatlined, while jobs in white-collar sectors have seen a soaring increase in the average compensation. Starting around 1970, nearly all of the income gains in the United States have gone to those in the upper 50 percent of income distribution - those preponderantly holding college degrees, working in sectors like finance, law, communications, and technology. Seeing this correlation, more Americans are responding to financial incentives and following the money into economic sectors that offer greater earning potential. One sector is not seeing relatively stable and decent-paying jobs filled - skilled vocations, some of which require a degree and some of which do not"
Charles Murray "Coming Apart"
A degree is a signaling device
Politicians have encouraged enrollment in higher education, either community college, apprenticeship, thereby diminishing the perceived value of K-12
Pg. 75 - argument for greater lifetime earnings
"Finally, and most importantly, the biggest reason an ever-growing number of Americans are applying for college is that by a variety of measures - as alluded to above - workers with college degrees earn more money than those with only high school diplomas. The total lifetime difference in earnings between college-educated persons and those with a high school diploma has been frequently estimated at about $1 million. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the 2011 median salary for a BA holder was $1,053 per week but only $638 for a high school graduate with no college. Similarly, 2011's unemployment rate for college grads was 4.9 percent but 9.4 percent for high school grads with no college"
Pg. 77 - "The first is that society has constituently taken the wrong approach to what type of college education will best serve students economically. We mentioned that the number of jobs requiring some college is expected to increase in the coming years, making some form of college education a prudent choice for most. This education, however, should not be strictly defined as the four-year bachelor's degree. Although society has largely accepted the four-year degree as a one-size-fits-all approach, the labor market has demonstrated a need for positions requiring credentials like certificates, technical training, and associate's degrees that are not being met. One study conducted by Georgetown University found that by 2018, nearly fourteen million jobs will require more than a high school education but less than a bachelor's degree. Similarly, another study done at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education predicted that only one-third of all the jobs expected to be created in the near future will require a bachelor's degree or higher. The study figured that roughly the same amount of jobs, however, will need only a training certificate or an associate's degree. And many of those jobs have a high earnings premium"
Pg. 88 - "The American K-12 system would also do well to look to Germany and promote a secondary education system in which students are guided into the appropriate scholastic or vocational education. Ninety-seven percent of Germans have a high school diploma, but only 33 percent of them go on to college. The best students are placed into academic tracks that will prepare them for traditional undergraduate programs. Those who are average students and primarily interested in education for the economic benefits (and not learning for its own sake - a topic to be discussed later) are directed into high schools that offer hybrid classroom/apprenticeship programs, even for white-collar professions like legal assistants and bank tellers. Students better suited for vocational, blue-collar progressions are placed in vocational high schools. This system serves students by helping to coordinate their abilities with the needs of the labor market"
Pg. 89 - "In similar countries, like Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, between 40 and 70 percent of students are in programs that combine classroom education with vocational training. Moreover, as George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok has written, there is an additional benefit to vocational education. "Instead of isolating teenagers in their own counterculture, apprentice programs introduce teenagers to the adult world and the skills, attitudes, and practices that make for a successful career. Another idea that should be entertained at the K-12 level is teaching trades alongside traditional academic subjects. In one version of an ideal school, for instance, every student would be reading Shakespeare on Monday and doing auto repair on Tuesday"
Pg. 90 - "Having said all this, the most basic level of the K-12 system must simply do more to better educate its students. A college campus today is seen as the place to complete one's education and gain the knowledge necessary for a successful career (even if it actually isn't obtained there). This wasn't the case fifty years ago; employers still hired high school graduates, and the American economy thrived. But high schools then were better. In November 2012, at a forum sponsored by the Aspen Institute and the Atlantic magazine, Microsoft founder Bill Gates commented on the phenomenon that there are many unemployed workers, but employers cannot find qualified people to hire. "Many people want jobs, and there are a lot of open jobs" Gates said. "It is up to the education system to equilibrate that." One organization working to fill the gap between education and the workforce is Project Lead the Way, a rigorous STEM education curriculum program that trains teachers and equips students in STEM subjects so they are prepared for college and the demands of a modern workforce. Many successful PLTW students go on to college to pursue STEM-related degrees, and some even enter the workforce right out of high school"
Do better at teaching math, science, and writing
Pg. 94 - "Also worrisome is that fewer Americans are filling these available STEM jobs in the United States. Nick Schulz of the American Enterprise Institute has written extensively about the importance of human capital (talent, skill, intelligence, education) in an economy's workforce, particularly in STEM fields. He notes that American workers are lagging behind many international countries in human capital, and these emerging countries are sending their skilled workers to do American jobs. Schulz writes that, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, "immigrants accounted for well over 50% of the growth in employment in STEM-related fields between 2003 and 2008. While the US economy values and thrives on immigrant labor, we must do more to cultivate the ranks of American skilled laborers here at home"
The decline of STEM graduates means that America's global economic competitiveness is decreased and many STEM majors in college are on student visas and then take their knowledge back to their home countries
Pg. 95 - "To help raise awareness of which majors pay what, students would be best served by being exposed late in their high school years or early in their college careers to detailed data on each major's employment rate a year after graduation and the average salary for each discipline, perhaps as a condition of a school certifying a student loan. PayScale.com, a career service site for workers and employers, has published a comprehensive list of undergraduate majors sorted by earnings. All but one (economics) of the top twenty majors with the twenty major with the highest mid career salaries are STEM disciplines"
Pg. 142 - "Unfortunately, a high school education is now mostly seen as functionally useless and educationally passé. The poorer-performing students do not learn the skills the employers demand, and the better-performing students are in a hurry to enter college, knowing that employers offering good jobs generally do not entertain the high school diploma as a qualifying credential on its own merit"
K-12 system - students don't have skills to compete in job market
Excerpt from an 1985 high school quiz shows that questions were relevant to the tasks of the day which made them competitive in the modern economy
To be immediately competitive is the purpose of K-12 education
K-12 education needs to improve before higher ed does
Pg. 143 - "Spending on K-12 education has approximately tripled over the past fifty years, and results are getting worse not better. Until K-12 education improves dramatically, there is only so much room for improvement in higher education. The crime here, beyond the squandering of public dollars, is the waste of time we inflict on children. Twelve years of education are compulsory, and many kids have nothing to show for it afterward. In a previous generation they would have been ready for life, a job, and a family. Today college students are ready to exasperate their instructors in remedial English and math classes before they drop out with an average of $23,000 in debt"
Money is being spent on remedial education when it could be spent bettering K-12 education
Pg. 146 - 2011 survey showing graduates accomplished little
Pg. 149 - different approach to teaching the Great Books before the 1960s, the rise of postmodernism
1970s - liberal scholars had a relativistic worldview & reinterpreted texts from a number of vantage points [the postmodern approach], different perspectives of underrepresented identity groups. If they did teach The Great Books, it was in order to develop counter narratives to describe them
Pgs. 163-165 - arguments for why its not true that college grads have higher employment rates long-term
Individuals made bigger bets on college than they could reasonably afford
The BA-for-all view assumes that a student always finishes what he starts
Data indicates the high return on investment for a BA really depends on subject studied and the school attended. It inflates the averages for what the average college graduate's lifetime earnings will be [take out the extremely lucrative professions that require a BA and then look out the average earnings from a college degree]
The unemployment rate for graduates is around 50% and a lot of BA holders are either unemployed or forced to take part-time positions making the ROI less consistent
Even if every single American worker had a degree from a four-year college, there would still be workers earning low incomes. There are a host of factors like poor performance in the workplace, illness, financial mismanagement, bad economy
Christopher Caldwell: "High education is correlated with high incomes in this country, true, but the correlation is based on relative education levels, not absolute ones. Those (our president included) who believe that everyone can receive today's college-level salaries if everyone can be sent to college do not understand how specialization works. They might as well argue that, because kickers score more points than offensive linemen, the best NFL team would have 53 kickers on it"
Pg 168 - redirection of the nation's K-12 curriculum & reinstitution vocational educational for decent-paying jobs & skilled labor jobs
"A reorientation of curriculum with employer demand doesn't just mean shoving as many students as possible into physics classes. This also means providing vocational education that will allow students to obtain decent-paying jobs right after graduation - skills that will benefit a law firm, a hospital, a mechanic's shop, or an airline. In light of the country's growing need for skilled labor jobs, both now and in the future, K-12 institutions should be specially committed to reinstituting the sort of vocational education that has slowly disappeared over the past few decades. We mean things like plumbing, welding, electrical work, and machine shop skills"
Pg 171 - skilled labor jobs remain unfilled & will grow wider because of baby boom retirement
"The prominent criticism of encouraging "hands-on work" is that the global economy has gradually become a service economy, in which traditional blue-collar jobs are in less demand....Hundreds of thousands of skilled labor jobs currently remain unfilled in the United States, with the gap only expected to grow wider because of baby boomer retirement. Outside the United States, a survey done by the powerhouse consulting firm McKinsey and Company predicted that there would be as many as eighty-five million unfilled skilled labor jobs worldwide by 2020. We are not urging workers to take up low-skill, low-wage blue-collar jobs that require no training and have continually shrunk as percentage of the economy since the 1970s. We want more individuals to consider the kind of hands-on, skilled jobs that employers say they need right now and for the future"
Pg. 171 - hybrid vocational education
"Hybrid vocational education, on a smaller scale, would also enrich the students who are in every way qualified for college. As Charles Murray has written, too often "upper middle-class children can graduate from high school isolated from any contact with a world in which people make their living by working their hands and without ever knowing the satisfactions that can come from non-academic forms of excellence"
half of all college graduates in 2010-11 were unemployed or dramatically underemployed
people are putting off or even giving up on their life dreams because of college debt
by year 2019 nearly fourteen million jobs will be available that will require more than a high school diploma but less than a BA
if all of K-12 education in the United States were as good as the best of K-12 education in the United States
America's high school graduates would be better educated than most of today's college graduates
College costs rise and continue to rise above inflation prices because many colleges are greedy, families will pay anting to get their kids into some colleges, the federal government subsidizes these increases
For the argument of lifetime earnings, most of those assets are found in the banks of the graduates of the top 150 universities and colleges. For most college graduates, once subtracting the cost of their college education, the difference between what they will earn and what a similarly talented and motivated high school graduate will earn is much less