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.
