Now is a special time in America. The UVA and Michigan grads working in finance flock to the bars in their college colors on crisp fall Saturdays pretending to some solidarity with the young men who do gridiron battle on college's behalf each week. Perhaps more importantly, the spectators, who, unlike the spectated, were forced more or less to attend class as a precondition of collegiate success, can claim solidarity with one another over the weekly toils of their modern-day Spartans, at once revering and celebrating the godlike players for their athletic prowess and exploiting them for the fanfare they generate. It's college football season, baby!
Emerging from the background on occasion at this time of year are the Andy Katzenmoyer stories: tales of college football gods who were drafted to the NFL only to suffer career ending injuries, prompting the fabled 'what the fuck now' moments that come when someone who was enrolled in courses such as 'Golf,' 'AIDS Awareness,' and 'Music' at Ohio State University all of a sudden can't rely on his body to earn him a livable income any longer. The sports pundits had a great laugh about Andy Katzenmoyer's course-load (after which he was barely academically eligible to compete in football), just as they did when reporters discovered that University of Georgia head basketball coach Jim Herrick had enrolled his athletes in a course for credit at UGA called 'Basketball 101,' taught by Herrick himself, whose exams consisted of questions like 'how many points does a 3-point field goal account for in a basketball game?' But this stuff isn't really funny, is it? Should we be laughing at Andy Katzenmoyer, a kid who was told that his only purpose in college was to play football, allowed to slide on everything else, and had is only waking purpose taken away from him in the blink of an eye? What about these Georgia kids enrolled in Basketball 101? Is this the kind of education they deserve? Is basketball all they're good for? And what about the non-athlete students at University of Georgia? Is this what their degree is really worth? How many points does a 3-point field goal account for?
'I see here you're a Georgia grad. Go Bulldogs! But sorry, you need an accredited degree to get a job here.'
It's easy for an educated bear to be snarky about these things, just as it's easy for the sports nuts to have a good laugh about them, and then go back to their frantic coverage of bigtime collegiate sports, as if the guy running a personal training studio in god-knows-where Ohio is just a joke or an aside, nothing to do with the industry that made him. But being snarky isn't really the point.
In its present condition, college football is a bad thing.
The idea of collegiate sports, like a range of other extracurriculars that can build skills and character, and can generally enrich someone's college experience, is a great thing. But the multi-billion dollar industry that is college football is not an extracurricular; so we should stop pretending like that's all it is. While some 'student-athletes' undoubtedly do go to college foremost for an education, and take their *college* responsibilities seriously, it's a widely accepted fact that most bigtime college athletes are on 'scholarship' for football (or basketball) first, and scholarship second. In many cases, these athletes are there for football *only*, and scholarship *never*. Instead of being treated like every other student, they're treated differently, in some ways advantageously, in others disastrously.
Proponents of the current system say bigtime college athletes are given tremendous opportunities that others might not have, like a free college education, for example. They say many of these kids are first-generation college students, and/or come from difficult personal backgrounds. They're usually right. And the idea of giving a disadvantaged, first-generation college student a free education is a fantastic one. Except that this isn't what really happens. There is no education. There is only football.
Proponents of the current system say that far from being exploited, these kids are treated like campus and hometown gods. They live like local celebrities, and in some cases national and international celebrities. They get all the advantages in the world, while Joe Average majoring in math and playing the tuba in the pep band gets nothing of the sort. Again, they're right. Except that the respect and dignity with which these players are treated is wholly contingent upon their athletic success; it rarely encourages strong performance in the classroom; and it rarely lasts beyond college for those who don't go on to play professional sports. Sure, there are success stories, too. The NCAA makes a point in its advertisements to find successful former student-athletes who 'went pro' in something other than sports; but what about the majority at a range of universities in innumerable bigtime sports programs who fail to even graduate?
College football also largely fails to benefit the university that houses the program, and in many cases actually harms the university. After all, it's the university that enables the college football industry to have athletes who generate billions of dollars in merchandise, TV contract, and ticket-sales revenue *work for free*. In fact, it's the governing body of collegiate sports, the NCAA, which specifically places strict limitations on the earning potential of college athletes, making sure they can't legally cash in on their talents and abilities. Sorry Reggie. And where does all the revenue go, if not to the athletes? Well, in many cases college coaches make more than the president of the university. In others state-of-the-art spectator stadiums and company boxes are installed for local supporters and alumni to watch the games luxuriously. In others the athletes themselves are flown from coast to coast for competitions and given professional-caliber training facilities, not so that they can be the best college students they can be, but so they can be the best college football players. Where does the money *not* go? It does *not* go toward hiring top faculty and building better teaching facilities. Nor toward research grants or scholarships for non-football-playing, academic 'stars.' Nor toward libraries or campus-wide WiFi or even nicer dormitories. It usually stays in athletic-department coffers to be spent on the primary expenses of the athletic department: the football and basketball teams.
In this scenario, the bigtime college football industry needs the university to furnish it with a default loyal fanbase and a team full of super-talented athletes who generate massive amounts of money *for free*; yet two or three assistant football coaches will undoubtedly make higher salaries than the most accomplished professor of classics or engineering at a given university, and the academic side (ha!) of the university will be looked upon by coaches and athletic department personnel as a mere nuisance that detracts from their mission of providing the wider world with a great football team.
Here's what needs to be done about this mess:
If a college football program surpasses a set revenue limit, it should be forced to choose between three options. The revenue limit would be like an eligibility clause of the sort imposed on the athletes for their non-acceptance of compensation for their efforts. Options:
A) Forfeit all profit to the university, whose panel of faculty and administrators will decide how much the football team should get, with the vast majority of revenue going back into the university and earmarked specifically for educational pursuits foremost, and then infrastructural improvements secondarily. Adhere to university demands that student-athletes actually be students first. And let these demands be properly enforced.
B) Scale back the program and its assets such that it does not surpass the set revenue limit in the following year.
C) Break off from the university altogether, at which point the program has to fund itself completely, procure its own facilities, and find its own athletes willing to play either for free or for whatever the program can offer them. Athletes will have to choose whether to remain enrolled at the university and not play for the disaffiliated team or to forfeit their place at the university to remain a member of the team. Those who choose to stay on at the university and leave the team would retain their scholarships.
Then, without the university propping up and legitimizing the industry that hangs upon it like a parasite, we would perhaps see how many athletes are willing to work for free, and how many programs are actually serious about this whole student-athlete thing.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Ailing America: Race, Ethnicity, and American Identity
Philip Roth's The Counterlife features a type of conflict that, however prominent in today's geopolitics, never really takes on in its distilled form the tabloid luster of certain Americans' little wars with Islam in certain parts of Manhattan. One of Roth's characters is an ethnically Jewish, non-religious American dentist from New Jersey who decides at midlife to leave his family and move to a desert settlement in Israel to take up the cause of militant Zionism. The conflict that emerges between Roth's born-again Zionist and his older brother, also American-born and non-religious, and very happy to stay that way, is profound: for the Zionist brother, it is impossible to be an authentic Jew in America, or anywhere else outside of Israel; a diaspora Jew is no Jew at all. For the older brother, the battle for Jewish consciousness and Jewish identity can be just as real in America as it is for the Zionist in war-torn Israel; and the preferred victor in both regards is the tolerant, pluralist, nonviolent American Jew, rather than the Zionist Jew who understands the very core of Jewishness as as a bloody struggle against Arabs and other Gentile forms for a specifically Jewish state. At the heart of such a conflict is the question of whether American pluralism can adequately protect historically persecuted groups like the Jews, the question of whether a tolerant and pluralist society is really possible in a balkanized and conflict-ridden world. The question can be put more succinctly: is collective identity possible?
To pretend that America's ongoing conflict with militant Islam--and the ways in which such a conflict seeps into our personal and political dealings with non-militant Islam--has nothing to do with America's geopolitical relationship with Israel, and bears no analogical relationship to militant Zionism, is a seeming impossibility. Yet this is what we do, what our politicians do, what our media do, day after day. Make no mistake about it, however: the battle that rages in the Middle East between militant Arabs and militant Jews--a battle whose residue seeps into the personal and political dealings with non-militant Arabs and non-militant Jews in the Middle East--has everything to do with the interest of Islamic militants in the destruction of America, the American wars in the Middle East, and, in no small way, the series of racial and ethnic conflicts in America that are tearing at America from all ends. Here in America, as there in the Middle East, it is pointless and outright bigoted to blame the Arabs or the Jews. If you seek a culprit for all of this material and symbolic destruction and misery, that culprit lies somewhere along the fault line of this great conflict between collective and singular identity.
For the most part, Americans may not be throwing stones from tenement buildings at each others' cars, or policing the Mason-Dixon line with loaded assault rifles. There is no missile mounted in Tempe and pre-programed for Guadalajara, and there isn't likely to be one. But two things inflame this American struggle between collective and singular identity, and have been doing so for a long time now.
From the American left we have a crude, racialized brand of identity politics that virtually ignores ethnic distinctions and places the most prominent American races (white, Hispanic, black, Asian) in opposition to one another (and to the exclusion of all others). It then places 'whites' and 'minorities' in opposition to one another. As a consequence, the meaningful ethnic values and experiences of all Americans are generally subordinated to vague racial categories that are over-vulnerable to crude stereotypical definition and racial in-fighting. While these racial categories afford high levels of solidarity and political agency in some cases, in others they force people to sacrifice important aspects of their ethnic cultural background and upbringing in exchange for political visibility.
Though 'white' political visibility is justifiably less important than minority political visibilities because of the historical, and in many senses enduring, privileges of those Americans constituted as a 'white' majority, 'whiteness' is not immune from identity crisis under such a system. While 'white' identity is largely conceived of as contemporary Anglo-Protestant identity (see the bestselling 'Stuff White People Like,' based on the blog), first-, second- and third-generation 'white' Americans hailing from the massive waves of Irish, Italian, Polish, German, etc. immigrants to America in the 20th century are no more comfortable being thought of as 'the same' as would be a Korean-American presumed Japanese or an Afro-Caribbean American presumed Sudanese. As we've seen recently, a number of fearful, often under-educated 'white' Americans have lashed out against 'Muslims,' 'foreigners,' 'Mexicans,' 'illegal aliens,' 'anchor babies,' etc. in racially charged ways, prompting media commentators to consider the possibility that this tide of fear and aggression has something to do with the election of a 'black' president, a symbol of 'nonwhite' power during a time in which American racial and ethnic demographics are shifting. If there is anything to such a theory, it's quite possible that those 'whites' who are either flatly bigoted or simply ill-equipped to make sense of pluralist values and to understand racial, ethnic, and religious difference are feeling particularly embattled about their constitution as ethnically mislabled or non-labeled, blank, blanco, and are adopting a particular (and particularly xenophobic) 'American' identity in opposition to the racialized minority. To put it simply, many 'white' Americans don't know what they hell they are or are supposed to be within this prevailing system of racializing Americans, so are deciding that to be white is to be American, to be American is to be white. Now this twisted indignation wells up in anti-historical, sentimentalist rants about the 'loss of America,' the 'end of our country,' the horror of 'Obama's America,' held in opposition to 'my America,' 'my ['white'] America.' 'I'll take my guns, money, religion, and freedom, and you can keep the 'change.''
Now we begin to understand the challenge to American pluralism launched from the American right: American history is revised such that 'America' has always been a particular thing not entirely different from the Zionist Jewish utopia...only the Protestant Christian version. 'American' values therefore proceed from a narrow set of Anglo-Protestant ethnic values. An 'American' is not a Muslim or a Jew or a homosexual or even a Catholic. 'American' governance is based on the pull-yourself-up-by-the-boot-straps Protestant ethic, hence social welfare programs are 'un-American.' 'American' governments are to be as small as possible, but may become large and sprawling to defend the 'American' interest abroad in military conflict. 'America' is a nation under [Protestant] God; and because God gave 'Americans' animals to eat and oil to burn, concerning oneself with the rights of animals that don't bark or meow or the reduction of un-clean energy use for the sake of the environment and/or the climate are also 'un-American.' This is a crude picture, yes. But each of these positions, typically taken by the American right, center on a distinct sense of 'Americanness,' a very particular understanding of what America is. And PMB didn't paint this picture; he merely copied it.
The historical record of America proves otherwise, however. As PMB has written elsewhere, the success of America stems primarily from its pluralist tradition, or its remarkable history of accepting a plurality of types into the American fold. Certainly such acceptance hasn't come at a cost, or gone over without serious periods of difficulty, exploitation, and violence. After Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants arrived, before they were all considered 'white,' they had their bloody battles and their ghetto mentalities, but eventually they learned to get along, to think of each other as equally American. After the Alien and Sedition Acts, the abject practice of slavery, Japanese internment, and the McCarthy-era inquisitions, Americans have chosen liberal democracy over theocracy, openness over insularity, pluralism over zealotry. Today, one hopes, Americans will choose Mosques in Manhattan over bigotry and fear, and ethnic difference over racial conflict. To do so will be to prolong a great tradition that stands as proof of the ability of collective identity to function with and incorporate a multitude of singular, overlapping, not unchanging or uncomplicated identities shaded and flourishing under its expansive wingspan. Roth's Zionist character ultimately has it wrong: he can't see a path to his ethnic self-realization within a pluralist society, so he chooses an exclusionary society, a society that understands difference as a war imperative rather than an opportunity for strengthening and growth.
To pretend that America's ongoing conflict with militant Islam--and the ways in which such a conflict seeps into our personal and political dealings with non-militant Islam--has nothing to do with America's geopolitical relationship with Israel, and bears no analogical relationship to militant Zionism, is a seeming impossibility. Yet this is what we do, what our politicians do, what our media do, day after day. Make no mistake about it, however: the battle that rages in the Middle East between militant Arabs and militant Jews--a battle whose residue seeps into the personal and political dealings with non-militant Arabs and non-militant Jews in the Middle East--has everything to do with the interest of Islamic militants in the destruction of America, the American wars in the Middle East, and, in no small way, the series of racial and ethnic conflicts in America that are tearing at America from all ends. Here in America, as there in the Middle East, it is pointless and outright bigoted to blame the Arabs or the Jews. If you seek a culprit for all of this material and symbolic destruction and misery, that culprit lies somewhere along the fault line of this great conflict between collective and singular identity.
For the most part, Americans may not be throwing stones from tenement buildings at each others' cars, or policing the Mason-Dixon line with loaded assault rifles. There is no missile mounted in Tempe and pre-programed for Guadalajara, and there isn't likely to be one. But two things inflame this American struggle between collective and singular identity, and have been doing so for a long time now.
From the American left we have a crude, racialized brand of identity politics that virtually ignores ethnic distinctions and places the most prominent American races (white, Hispanic, black, Asian) in opposition to one another (and to the exclusion of all others). It then places 'whites' and 'minorities' in opposition to one another. As a consequence, the meaningful ethnic values and experiences of all Americans are generally subordinated to vague racial categories that are over-vulnerable to crude stereotypical definition and racial in-fighting. While these racial categories afford high levels of solidarity and political agency in some cases, in others they force people to sacrifice important aspects of their ethnic cultural background and upbringing in exchange for political visibility.
Though 'white' political visibility is justifiably less important than minority political visibilities because of the historical, and in many senses enduring, privileges of those Americans constituted as a 'white' majority, 'whiteness' is not immune from identity crisis under such a system. While 'white' identity is largely conceived of as contemporary Anglo-Protestant identity (see the bestselling 'Stuff White People Like,' based on the blog), first-, second- and third-generation 'white' Americans hailing from the massive waves of Irish, Italian, Polish, German, etc. immigrants to America in the 20th century are no more comfortable being thought of as 'the same' as would be a Korean-American presumed Japanese or an Afro-Caribbean American presumed Sudanese. As we've seen recently, a number of fearful, often under-educated 'white' Americans have lashed out against 'Muslims,' 'foreigners,' 'Mexicans,' 'illegal aliens,' 'anchor babies,' etc. in racially charged ways, prompting media commentators to consider the possibility that this tide of fear and aggression has something to do with the election of a 'black' president, a symbol of 'nonwhite' power during a time in which American racial and ethnic demographics are shifting. If there is anything to such a theory, it's quite possible that those 'whites' who are either flatly bigoted or simply ill-equipped to make sense of pluralist values and to understand racial, ethnic, and religious difference are feeling particularly embattled about their constitution as ethnically mislabled or non-labeled, blank, blanco, and are adopting a particular (and particularly xenophobic) 'American' identity in opposition to the racialized minority. To put it simply, many 'white' Americans don't know what they hell they are or are supposed to be within this prevailing system of racializing Americans, so are deciding that to be white is to be American, to be American is to be white. Now this twisted indignation wells up in anti-historical, sentimentalist rants about the 'loss of America,' the 'end of our country,' the horror of 'Obama's America,' held in opposition to 'my America,' 'my ['white'] America.' 'I'll take my guns, money, religion, and freedom, and you can keep the 'change.''
Now we begin to understand the challenge to American pluralism launched from the American right: American history is revised such that 'America' has always been a particular thing not entirely different from the Zionist Jewish utopia...only the Protestant Christian version. 'American' values therefore proceed from a narrow set of Anglo-Protestant ethnic values. An 'American' is not a Muslim or a Jew or a homosexual or even a Catholic. 'American' governance is based on the pull-yourself-up-by-the-boot-straps Protestant ethic, hence social welfare programs are 'un-American.' 'American' governments are to be as small as possible, but may become large and sprawling to defend the 'American' interest abroad in military conflict. 'America' is a nation under [Protestant] God; and because God gave 'Americans' animals to eat and oil to burn, concerning oneself with the rights of animals that don't bark or meow or the reduction of un-clean energy use for the sake of the environment and/or the climate are also 'un-American.' This is a crude picture, yes. But each of these positions, typically taken by the American right, center on a distinct sense of 'Americanness,' a very particular understanding of what America is. And PMB didn't paint this picture; he merely copied it.
The historical record of America proves otherwise, however. As PMB has written elsewhere, the success of America stems primarily from its pluralist tradition, or its remarkable history of accepting a plurality of types into the American fold. Certainly such acceptance hasn't come at a cost, or gone over without serious periods of difficulty, exploitation, and violence. After Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants arrived, before they were all considered 'white,' they had their bloody battles and their ghetto mentalities, but eventually they learned to get along, to think of each other as equally American. After the Alien and Sedition Acts, the abject practice of slavery, Japanese internment, and the McCarthy-era inquisitions, Americans have chosen liberal democracy over theocracy, openness over insularity, pluralism over zealotry. Today, one hopes, Americans will choose Mosques in Manhattan over bigotry and fear, and ethnic difference over racial conflict. To do so will be to prolong a great tradition that stands as proof of the ability of collective identity to function with and incorporate a multitude of singular, overlapping, not unchanging or uncomplicated identities shaded and flourishing under its expansive wingspan. Roth's Zionist character ultimately has it wrong: he can't see a path to his ethnic self-realization within a pluralist society, so he chooses an exclusionary society, a society that understands difference as a war imperative rather than an opportunity for strengthening and growth.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Lawyers and Carpenters
Camille Paglia had this to say about 'the defining idea of the coming decade' in higher education: re-valorize the trades! PMB hopes that this idea does flourish in the years to come, but for reasons slightly different than Paglia's.
For Paglia and many others, higher education should be devoted to vocational training and preparation first and foremost. They argue that since nowadays jobs are no longer guaranteed (as though they ever were) to newly minted college graduates, since the marketplace is globalized and hypercompetitive, and since the price tag of a college education is becoming almost preventatively steep, colleges and universities need to rethink the grandiose 'liberal arts' model and get more serious about preparing students with 'job skills' to make them more competitive and employable. This is the kind of reasoning that underlies Paglia's call for the partnering of liberal arts colleges and research universities with vocational-technical institutions; the call, in other words, to re-valorize the trade vocations.
Paglia and others rightly identify a problem--the increasing difficulty college graduates face in finding gainful employment--but seem to miss entirely the causal roots of this predicament. Similarly, while encouraging young people to consider trade vocations is an excellent solution, it's only a partial solution.
The heart of the problem is not that colleges and universities fail to prepare graduates for the job market or 'the real world,' or fail to impart the necessary skills, experiences, and modes of acculturation for young job-seekers. As PMB has written elsewhere, anyone who's ever worked even a highly competitive corporate job understands that actually very few transferable skills (and very basic ones at that) are required to succeed in these kinds of jobs. In terms of 'skills,' the average college graduate is overprepared, not underprepared, for most jobs that appear on the job-seeking radar of a college graduate.
The heart of the problem, rather, is that, much like the housing market, the higher education market is experiencing a bubble that can't be sustained without significant changes to the way business is done in higher education. Much like the way public policy and popular opinion pushed people into buying homes that they couldn't afford by giving the impression that home ownership is a necessity and an unconditional public good, we have too many students pursuing a specific kind of higher education, one-size-fits-all, for which they are underprepared, undermotivated, and in many cases under-competent. The far-and-away most influential reason for this crippling problem is the idea, sold to millions like a laced methamphetamine, that the purpose of a college education is to get you a better job. In a roundabout way, then, it is precisely the vocationalization of higher education--the get-you-a-job focus--that is responsible for the failure of a college education to help graduates secure jobs. And the more we emphasize 'job skills' and vocational aims in higher education, as we do now, the worse the situation will get.
A strong solution to this problem is to use vocational aims to de-emphasize vocational aims. In other words, provide room in higher education for overtly vocational pursuits in order to take unwarranted and counterproductive pressure off of academic disciplines to supplant primary content with nondescript 'job skills training.'
Because deflating the higher education bubble means doing a better job of matching the skills and interests of young people with the appropriate avenues to develop those skills and pursue those interests (as opposed to shuttling everyone into a traditional 4-year college with a primarily academic core curriculum under the impression that no college degree = no fulfilling job), we should, as Paglia suggests in a light way, try partnering vocational programs with academic programs at universities. This could give students who have no interest in (or aptitude for) academic pursuits the option to enroll after high school in an apprentice-style vocational trade program (carpentry, plumbing, electrician, computers, etc.) without wholly abandoning ties to an academic university should the student want to take distributive courses in academic disciplines along the way, or decide later to transfer into academia altogether. In fact, the possibility of a joint program with a core academic curriculum (humanities, civics, finance and economics) and trade certification would be exciting. Likewise, joint programs could provide options for academic-track students to learn trade skills that could end up launching a lucrative and fulfilling career in trade, rather than the kind of generalized 'office job' that millennial seem to be taking and leaving and taking and leaving and taking and leaving ad infinitum. Rather than holding the two (academic and trade) paths separate, selling the 'academic' path to a majority middle class as the way to avoid 'undesirable' trade careers, the two general sets of skills and pursuits should live much closer together. Trade students should have access to the civic benefits of higher education, just as the countless graduates of four-year colleges and universities who develop during college no real interest in becoming lawyers, doctors, professors, or any other profession for which an academic background is essential, shouldn't have to file into nondescript corporate 'white-collar' jobs after graduation, tens of thousands of dollars in education debt, just because these are the only jobs we seem to deem acceptable for college graduates. Such a system would also reduce the absurd pressures to vocationalize foisted upon academic disciplines in the sciences and humanities for which vocational training is really (and ought to be) secondary to subject matter.
PMB's radical proposal, first wave: rage against the propagandists who suggest that literally everyone belongs in an academic, four-year institution of higher education, a suggestion that implicitly undervalues the trade professions. Take the vocational pressure off of academic disciplines that are not and were never concerned with 'getting you a job' by fighting the political battle within your departments and universities. It won't happen any other way.
PMB's radical proposal, second wave: restructure underperforming and essentially non-competitive universities to include something like a College of Business and Trade, a College of Engineering, and a College of Humanities and Sciences (in many cases all this would mean is integrating the trades). Give the programs more flexibility, in curricula and in tuition fees. Let the admissions standards vary within university colleges. Let there be selective liberal arts colleges structured more or less as they are now (types like Amherst, Bucknell, Colgate, Davidson, Holy Cross, etc.), but partner them with vocational institutions. Do the same with elite universities like Harvard, Stanford, etc. If the best universities aren't broken or bankrupt, they don't need to be fixed; but students of all types could still benefit from having trade ties.
It won't be as simple as it's written here; but it's clear that we need to stop pretending that the unrigorous force-feeding of 'job skills' to students who don't even go to class is all of a sudden going to produce more jobs, or more qualified people to fill them.
For Paglia and many others, higher education should be devoted to vocational training and preparation first and foremost. They argue that since nowadays jobs are no longer guaranteed (as though they ever were) to newly minted college graduates, since the marketplace is globalized and hypercompetitive, and since the price tag of a college education is becoming almost preventatively steep, colleges and universities need to rethink the grandiose 'liberal arts' model and get more serious about preparing students with 'job skills' to make them more competitive and employable. This is the kind of reasoning that underlies Paglia's call for the partnering of liberal arts colleges and research universities with vocational-technical institutions; the call, in other words, to re-valorize the trade vocations.
Paglia and others rightly identify a problem--the increasing difficulty college graduates face in finding gainful employment--but seem to miss entirely the causal roots of this predicament. Similarly, while encouraging young people to consider trade vocations is an excellent solution, it's only a partial solution.
The heart of the problem is not that colleges and universities fail to prepare graduates for the job market or 'the real world,' or fail to impart the necessary skills, experiences, and modes of acculturation for young job-seekers. As PMB has written elsewhere, anyone who's ever worked even a highly competitive corporate job understands that actually very few transferable skills (and very basic ones at that) are required to succeed in these kinds of jobs. In terms of 'skills,' the average college graduate is overprepared, not underprepared, for most jobs that appear on the job-seeking radar of a college graduate.
The heart of the problem, rather, is that, much like the housing market, the higher education market is experiencing a bubble that can't be sustained without significant changes to the way business is done in higher education. Much like the way public policy and popular opinion pushed people into buying homes that they couldn't afford by giving the impression that home ownership is a necessity and an unconditional public good, we have too many students pursuing a specific kind of higher education, one-size-fits-all, for which they are underprepared, undermotivated, and in many cases under-competent. The far-and-away most influential reason for this crippling problem is the idea, sold to millions like a laced methamphetamine, that the purpose of a college education is to get you a better job. In a roundabout way, then, it is precisely the vocationalization of higher education--the get-you-a-job focus--that is responsible for the failure of a college education to help graduates secure jobs. And the more we emphasize 'job skills' and vocational aims in higher education, as we do now, the worse the situation will get.
A strong solution to this problem is to use vocational aims to de-emphasize vocational aims. In other words, provide room in higher education for overtly vocational pursuits in order to take unwarranted and counterproductive pressure off of academic disciplines to supplant primary content with nondescript 'job skills training.'
Because deflating the higher education bubble means doing a better job of matching the skills and interests of young people with the appropriate avenues to develop those skills and pursue those interests (as opposed to shuttling everyone into a traditional 4-year college with a primarily academic core curriculum under the impression that no college degree = no fulfilling job), we should, as Paglia suggests in a light way, try partnering vocational programs with academic programs at universities. This could give students who have no interest in (or aptitude for) academic pursuits the option to enroll after high school in an apprentice-style vocational trade program (carpentry, plumbing, electrician, computers, etc.) without wholly abandoning ties to an academic university should the student want to take distributive courses in academic disciplines along the way, or decide later to transfer into academia altogether. In fact, the possibility of a joint program with a core academic curriculum (humanities, civics, finance and economics) and trade certification would be exciting. Likewise, joint programs could provide options for academic-track students to learn trade skills that could end up launching a lucrative and fulfilling career in trade, rather than the kind of generalized 'office job' that millennial seem to be taking and leaving and taking and leaving and taking and leaving ad infinitum. Rather than holding the two (academic and trade) paths separate, selling the 'academic' path to a majority middle class as the way to avoid 'undesirable' trade careers, the two general sets of skills and pursuits should live much closer together. Trade students should have access to the civic benefits of higher education, just as the countless graduates of four-year colleges and universities who develop during college no real interest in becoming lawyers, doctors, professors, or any other profession for which an academic background is essential, shouldn't have to file into nondescript corporate 'white-collar' jobs after graduation, tens of thousands of dollars in education debt, just because these are the only jobs we seem to deem acceptable for college graduates. Such a system would also reduce the absurd pressures to vocationalize foisted upon academic disciplines in the sciences and humanities for which vocational training is really (and ought to be) secondary to subject matter.
PMB's radical proposal, first wave: rage against the propagandists who suggest that literally everyone belongs in an academic, four-year institution of higher education, a suggestion that implicitly undervalues the trade professions. Take the vocational pressure off of academic disciplines that are not and were never concerned with 'getting you a job' by fighting the political battle within your departments and universities. It won't happen any other way.
PMB's radical proposal, second wave: restructure underperforming and essentially non-competitive universities to include something like a College of Business and Trade, a College of Engineering, and a College of Humanities and Sciences (in many cases all this would mean is integrating the trades). Give the programs more flexibility, in curricula and in tuition fees. Let the admissions standards vary within university colleges. Let there be selective liberal arts colleges structured more or less as they are now (types like Amherst, Bucknell, Colgate, Davidson, Holy Cross, etc.), but partner them with vocational institutions. Do the same with elite universities like Harvard, Stanford, etc. If the best universities aren't broken or bankrupt, they don't need to be fixed; but students of all types could still benefit from having trade ties.
It won't be as simple as it's written here; but it's clear that we need to stop pretending that the unrigorous force-feeding of 'job skills' to students who don't even go to class is all of a sudden going to produce more jobs, or more qualified people to fill them.
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