The debate about who should go to college has been with us for a while and has
taken a new turn over the last year or so. Recent surveys suggest that support
for higher education among conservatives has dropped significantly, and one
reason is doubt about the economic benefits of a college degree. Donald Trump
and Betsy DeVos praise Career and Technical Education (CTE), yet the Trump
budget cuts funding for CTE. And as I wrote in my posts for March 21 and Sept.27, my worry is that whatever support the Trump administration does lend to CTE
will likely champion occupational education that is narrowly focused on
specific skills for currently available jobs, rather than providing the kind of
broader education that would make students eligible for those jobs and for
other employment as well. (An international study recently reported in The
Atlantic [June 6, 2017] supports my concern.)
The
body of the post that follows was originally published in Teacher’s College Record
online on Sept. 20, 2010 and was recast as a chapter in Back to School.
I print it here, for it seems especially relevant today, given the conservative
skepticism about the benefits of college and the rhetorical support (if not the
dollars) for CTE. The question of who should go to college is a complex one,
embedded in a history of unequal access and involving a number of
psychological, social, and economic issues. It may not even be the right
question to ask. When it is asked, though, the answer is typically arrived at
through an economic calculus alone – a reductive move on both the policy and
personal level.
***
When I was in high
school in the early 1960s, the curriculum was split into three tracks: an
academic or college preparatory track, a general education track, and a
vocational track. Upon entrance, students were placed in one of them based on
their previous academic records or a measure of ability, typically an I.Q.
score. The curriculum directed us toward a four-year college or university, possibly
a community college, or toward service or low-level managerial careers,
or into blue-collar work. The
curriculum also contributed powerfully to our school’s social order. The
college-bound were in student government, edited the newspaper and the annual,
at year’s end had a thick list of activities under their class photographs. I
swear, looking back on it all, the college prep crowd walked around campus with
an air of promise.
Since the
mid-twentieth century, sociological and educational studies were documenting
the bias at work in the way students got placed in these tracks, for example
that working-class and racial and ethnic minority students with records of
achievement comparable to their advantaged peers were more frequently being
placed in the general ed or vocational tracks. And there was the more general
concern that this way of educationally stratifying young people was simply
un-democratic. John Dewey called it “social predestination.”
A remarkable amount
of effort by educators, policy makers, advocacy groups, and parents has
resulted over the last few decades in a dismantling of formal tracking. Though
patterns of inequality still exist in the courses students take –
vocational courses are overpopulated by poorer kids – we have in our time
witnessed the emergence of a belief that college is a possibility for everyone.
Today, however, we are also witnessing the rise of a strong counter-voice,
skeptical about the individual and societal value of channeling all young
people into post-secondary education.
The
skeptics are a diverse group. Many are economists who point to trends in the
labor market that reveal a number of good and growing jobs that require some
post-secondary occupational training but not a four-year – or even two-year –
degree. Some are educators (including, but not limited to, Career and Technical
Education interest groups) who emphasize the variability of students’ interests
and aptitudes, not all of which find fulfillment in the college curriculum. And
some are social commentators who blend the economic and educational argument
with reflection on the value of direct contact with the physical world,
something increasingly remote in our information age. Though these skeptics
come from a range of ideological backgrounds, they share a concern that in
pushing post-secondary education for everyone, we perpetuate a myth that
personal fulfillment and economic security can be had only by pursuing a
college degree.
This
debate is an important one and is of interest to me because of my own history
but more so because it directly affects the kinds of students I’ve been
concerned with my entire professional life: Those who come from
less-than-privileged backgrounds and aren’t on the fast track to college. It
also catches my attention because a book of mine, The Mind at Work, is sometimes
used in the argument against college-for-all.
The Mind at Work is the result of a study of the cognitive demands of physical work, waitressing
and styling hair to carpentry and welding. Our society makes sharp and weighty
distinctions – distinctions embodied in curricular tracking – between white
collar and blue collar occupations, between brain work and hand work. But what
I demonstrate is the degree to which physical work involves the development of
a knowledge base, the application of concept and abstraction, problem solving
and troubleshooting, aesthetic consideration and reflection. Hand and brain are
cognitively connected.
From
these findings I raise questions about our standard definitions of
intelligence, the social class biases in those definitions, and their negative
effects on education, the organization of work, and our nation’s political and
social dynamics.
Those who use The Mind at Work to champion some type of
occupational education over
Let me begin by acknowledging current labor-market realities, for many low-income sstudents
are in immediate financial need. These students can commit to any form of post-
secondary education only if it leads to a decent wage and benefits.
Furthermore, the record of post-secondary success is not a good one. Many
students leave college without a certificate or degree that can help them in
the job market, and, in many cases, they incur significant debt. There are good
jobs out there that require training but not a two- or four-year degree, jobs
that are relatively secure in a fluid global economy. The plumber’s and the
chef’s work cannot be outsourced.
It
is also true – and anyone who teaches and, for that fact, any parent knows it –
that some young people are just not drawn to the kinds of activities that
comprise the typical
academic
course of study, no matter how well executed. In a community college fashion
program I’ve been studying, I see students with average to poor high school
records deeply involved in their work, learning techniques and design
principles, solving problems, building a knowledge base. Yet they resist, often
with strong emotion, anything smacking of the traditional classroom, including
the very structure of the classroom itself. This resistance holds even when the
subject (textiles, history of fashion) relates to their interests.
The
college-for-all vs. occupational training debate is typically focused on
structural features of the K-12 curriculum and on economic outcomes with little
attention paid to the intellectual and emotional lives of the young people
involved: their interests, what has meaning for them, what they want to do with
their lives. A beginning student in a welding program gave
succinct
expression to all this: “I love welding. This is the first time school has
meant anything to me.”
The
problem is that historically the vocational curriculum itself has not
adequately honored the rich intellectual content of work. As the authors of an
overview of high school Voc Ed from the National Center for Research in
Vocational Education put it: vocational education “emphasized job-specific
skills to the almost complete exclusion of theoretical content.” And the
general education courses – English, history, mathematics – that vocational
students took were typically dumbed-down and unimaginative. Reforms over the
past few decades have gone some way toward changing this state of affairs, but
the overall results have been uneven.
The
huge question then is this: Is a particular vocationally oriented program built
on the cognitive content of work and does it provide a strong education in the
literacy and mathematics, the history and economics, the science and ethics
that can emerge from the world of work? Few of the economists I’ve read who
advocate an expansion of Career and Technical Education address the educational (versus job training)
aspects of their proposals.
I want to return to the skeptics' concern about the mixed record of student success in
post- secondary education. Do we really want to urge more students into a
system that on average graduates about 50-60% of those who enter it? But
the skeptics' seems to fault students more than the colleges they attend and
affords no other option but to redirect students who aren’t thriving into
job-training programs.
We
need to be careful about painting this broad group of students with a single
brush stroke. Some are strongly motivated but because of poor education, family
disruption, residential mobility, or a host of reasons are not academically
prepared. The question is what kind of course work and services does the
college have to help them. (And it should be noted that many vocational
programs recommended by the skeptics would require the same level of academic
remediation.) Some students are unsure about their future, are experimenting –
and in my experience, it’s not easy to determine in advance who will find their
way. We also know that a significant number of students leave college
temporarily or permanently for non-academic reasons: finances, childcare, job
loss. Some of these cases could be addressed with financial aid or
other resources and social services. So while I take the skeptics’ point about
the poor record of student success and agree that college is not for everyone
and that a fulfilling life can be had without it, it is a simplistic solution
to funnel everyone who is not thriving into a vocational program.
Such
a solution also smacks of injustice. Right at the point in our society when
college is being encouraged for a wide sweep of the population, we have the
emergence of a restrictive counterforce that is seen by some as an attempt to
protect privilege, or, at the least, as an ignorance of social history.
Research by sociologists Jennie Brand and Yu Xie demonstrates that those least
likely to attend college because of social class position – and thus, on
average, have a less privileged education – are the ones who gain the most
economically from a college degree. For such populations, going to college can
also provide a measure of social and cultural capital. There is a long history
of exclusion that has to be addressed before countering broad access to higher
education.
All
the above raises the basic question: What is the purpose of education? Both the
college-for-all advocates and the skeptics justify their positions on economic
grounds, but another element in the college-for-all argument is that in
addition to enhancing economic mobility, going to college has important intellectual,
cultural, and civic benefits as well. These different perspectives on the
purpose of college play into – and are shaped by – a long standing tension in
American higher education: a conflict between the goal of cultivating
intellectual growth and liberal culture versus the goal of preparing students
for occupation and practical life. I treat this issue more fully in other
chapters in this book, but let me say here that I think this tension – like the
divide between the academic and vocational – restricts the conversation we should
be having. How can we enhance the liberal studies possibilities in a vocational
curriculum and enliven and broaden the academic course of study through
engagement with the world
beyond
the classroom?
A
third option between college or work has emerged in the last few years: Linked
Learning, which is also known by its former name, Multiple Pathways. There are
various incarnations of Linked Learning, but a common one is a relatively small
school that is theme- based and offers a strong academic curriculum for all
students; the students then have options to branch off toward a career, or an
occupational certificate, or a two- or four-year degree.
It
is important to remember here that goals, expectations, and what students
imagine for themselves are deeply affected by information and experience. For a
pathways approach to be effective, students will need a lot of information
about college and careers and multiple opportunities to visit colleges and
potential work sites: hospitals, courts, and laboratories. The
differences
in cultural and social capital between my UCLA students and the students I know
at inner-city community colleges are profound and widening as inequality widens
in our country. Pathways advocates will have to confront this inequality head
on, for it is as important as the construction of curriculum.
The
college-for-all advocates would applaud the emphasis on a strong academic core
but worry that this system could devolve into a new form of tracking. And the
college-for-all skeptics, I suspect, would applaud the presence of a vocational
pathway, though worry that anti- vocational biases would still stigmatize the
option. These are legitimate concerns, and many advocates of the Linked Learning
approach acknowledge them. The advocates also admit the significant challenges
facing such a reform: from faculty development and curriculum design to the
ancillary academic and social services needed to provide a quality pre-pathways
education
for
all students. Still, this is a promising alternative, and some schools are
demonstrating success with it.
Though
this college versus work debate can slip into a reductive either/or polemic, I
think that it does raise to awareness a number of important issues, ones not
only central to education
but
also to the economy, to the meaning of work, and to democratic life. There is
the sky- rocketing cost of college and the poor record of retention and
graduation in higher education. There is the disconnect between the current
labor market and the politically popular rhetoric of “educating our way into
the new economy.” And there is the significant commitment of financial and
human resources that will be needed to make college-for-all a reality.
On
a broader scale there is the purpose of education in a free society. There is
the issue of the variability of human interests and talents and the class-based
bias toward entire categories of knowledge and activity – a bias
institutionalized in the structure of the American high school. There is, then,
the need to rethink the academic-vocational divide itself and its
post-secondary cousin, the liberal ideal versus the vocational mission of the
college. And finally we need to keep in mind that the college-for-all versus
work debate takes place within a history of inequality and that the resolution
of the debate will involve not only educational and economic issues but civic
and moral ones as well.
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