I agree with @dl324 assessment on the employment statistics.

Speaking of silly opinions, Bill Gates once said "why would anybody need more than 640k of ram."

I asked a similar question long before I ever new of this Gates fella. When I was 17 or 18 (1982/83 time frame) my school got some new Apple IIe computers that had 64 kB of RAM. Everything I had known about up to that point had 4 kB of RAM, so I remember being amazed and speculating, "What could anyone ever do that could possibly need 64 kB of RAM?!"

I would think that the job placement rate would be a larger seller than graduation rates. I did check and MIT did publish both graduation rate and employment rate.

Many schools, even big state universities, only talk about retention rates and graduation rates. On the one hand, it's something that is a LOT easier to track than employment rates. But I also suspect that many schools know that they would not like to have to admit to the numbers, particularly on an overall institution rate. How many communication, English, political science, ethnic studies, psychology, or antropology majors are working in their field a year after graduation.

Many years ago I was waiting outside the President's office at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) hoping to talk to him (I had worked for him as an undergrad lab assistant and we liked to touch base every few years) and I was looking at the bulletin board where they had posted the ratings from the Colorado Commission on Higher Education (CCHE) of all the public four-year universities in Colorado and they had all the normal things like retention rates and graduation rates and there was nothing related to whether the piece of paper they got actually led to any measure of success after graduation. But it immediately caught my eye that CSM wasn't listed or even mentioned anywhere in the article. Now, it is not uncommon for Joe-public to think that CSM is a private school, but surely CCHE was aware that it is, in fact, a public state university. The head of the office came out and I asked him about that and he explained that the reason was that CSM was included in the article is that CCHE uses a completely different set of metrics for Mines that includes such things as the fraction of students that graduate that are working in the major field one year after graduation and also the ratio student loan debt to salary at various time spans after graduation. He said that those are published separately specifically so that people don't start asking why none of the other institutions don't have to collect and publish similar numbers.

That has since become a crude metric by which I quickly judge in which tier to place a school. I've found that most of the schools that would be on nearly anyone's list of high quality institutions track and report that kind of data while few others do.

 

Job placement may be that way in every field. My wife has a master's degree in education; and she sells tax accounting software.

And that might well be a case in point. Did that masters degree further her career? What was the return on investment? Those are separate questions from whether getting the degree was worth the cost in her judgement independent of whether it led to an education-related career. There are certainly students that go to college with no intention of seeking employment in their major and the fraction of students that fall into that category are quite different from one major to another. But since, ostensibly, most students are making the time and cost investment in their education to pursue a career that would not otherwise be a realistic option for most of them, then we should try to publish the best metrics that we can related to that point.

One thing I've often suggested is that financial aid, particularly student loan caps, be tied to that metric. If you have a program that costs $120,000 to graduate from, only 25% of your students actually graduate, only 30% of graduates find work in that field, and the average income after five years for those that do graduate and find work in the field is $40,000, then should we really be exposing the taxpayers to the resulting enormously high loan-default rate that students in that program represent? Not to mention whether we are doing the students thinking about entering that program any favors by making it no more painful than signing on a dotted line for their loans to enter such a program.

Not only would tying financial aid limits to a program's demonstrated ability to actually further the careers of their graduates help (force) prospective students into taking things like this into account, but it would also provide a feedback mechanism to the schools to make their programs serve the long-term success of their students as compared to just inflating the grades and passing them through so that they get the paper so that the retention and graduation rates are artificially high and impressive.

 

Whether or not my wife's masters degree furthered her career falls into the category of "depends on how you look at it." Although she's not using it to work in the education field, I'm pretty sure that it didn't hurt when she interviewed for her current job. The other thing that goes along with that is that she probably makes twice as much in sales then she ever would as a teacher.

One thing that I think is sad is that it seems like employers care more about a piece of paper anymore than a person's actual ability to perform the job they're hired for. There's a lot of assumptions held by employers that are tied to a degree. There is an assumption that because you have a piece of paper, you can do the job. There's also the assumption that the lack of a piece of paper means that you can't. Sounds unfair to me and it is, but I do understand that's just how the world works.

Even though I realize that most people who have a degree in a certain field most likely CAN do the job that they went to school for, I can give two examples of where this theory didn't work so well.

I spent the better part of the last thirty years working in restaurants. I never went to school for it and never got a culinary degree. However, my experience had, on several occasions, put me in a management position. Yet, there were a few places that I worked where I was only allowed by the owners to hire people with a culinary degrees. Now don't get me wrong, some the people that I hired were fantastic. Unfortunately, the majority of them couldn't cook!

Another example is my father. He was basically pushed into early retirement so that his company could hire some fresh college graduates.
My dad went on a trade right out of high school that was paid for by a company that expected him to come back and work for them after completion, which he did. Move ahead 40 years and now my father is expected to train the people in line to take his job. According to him, they were fine when it came to theories and product specs, but take them into the shop and they didn't even know where the parts they were selling were even supposed to go on a machine. Let alone run a machine.

I guess the moral of the story is that the system is always going to have its flaws, and experience alone will no longer be worth the paper it is not printed on.

 

Move ahead 40 years and now my father is expected to train the people in line to take his job. According to him, they were fine when it came to theories and product specs, but take them into the shop and they didn't even know where the parts they were selling were even supposed to go on a machine. Let alone run a machine.

Hence the quote ... "looks good on paper."

I've seen and heard the same with respect to "qualified" people coming into a billet at a unit. Great evaluations, but they were willing to learn how to use a screwdriver.

I got to the point that I'd take someone with a bad set of evaluations and no experience for the billet to mold them into something productive that person could be proud of.

Did your wife work in her chosen field within the first six years of graduating?

 

I guess the moral of the story is that the system is always going to have its flaws, and experience alone will no longer be worth the paper it is not printed on.

This is very much a tangled mess and I think that's pretty true around the world -- I don't really have a feel for whether it's better or worse here.

For a long time, many engineers "came up through the ranks" and got engineering degrees after having worked in the field in non-engineering capacities for a long time. This was true of most fields.

At some point (I don't know when, but post-WWII might be a logical candidate) you started seeing more of the straight-to-college track (what we NOW call "traditional"). For quite some time engineers coming out of most programs were expected to have solid hands-on practical skills because that is what most engineers at the time had and because most of the people that taught engineering were, or had been, practicing engineers for most of their career. But over time there evolved this elitist attitude in engineering education that was all summed up in a catch phrase you still hear quite frequently -- "We are educating engineers, not training technicians." This can be interpreted a number of ways. When I first heard it I interpreted it to mean that engineers are expected to be educated to a much deeper level of knowledge regarding the fundamentals and the how and why something works above and beyond the more practical-oriented level of skill and knowledge associated with a "technician". I always thought of an engineer as a technician taken to a higher level -- superset of a technician, not an altogether different critter. But as I started teaching in graduate school I realized that my view was NOT the common view and that many in engineering education adamantly believed that they are completely different critters and engineers have no need of being able to do anything that a "technician" can do because that is beneath them. After shaking my head in dismay, I started looking and observing more closely and realized that this attitude seemed to stem from the fact that most of the educators lacked any sort of practical knowledge or skill, and so to admit that such knowledge or skills have value would be to admit that they had a glaring deficiency (which I think, deep down, they really did know and were ashamed of, but dismissing the value was their chosen defense mechanism). Paying even closer attention, I realized that many engineering faculty as well as many of the people that write engineering textbooks, have little or even no practical experience at all -- they have never worked in industry and they have never designed anything (which is the BIG thing that I thought distinguished an "engineer" from others); they went straight from their undergraduate to their PhD to becoming a faculty member. I've talked to several whose only hands on experience with electronics were two or three undergraduate lab courses.

The end result is that many attempts to impart practical, hands-on skills in many engineering programs are met with pretty fierce resistance -- after all, they have never needed to solder anything, or read the color bands on a resistor, or consider the type of capacitor being used, or take lead wire resistance into account, or actually vent the thousand watts of power that the transistor in their example one watt output amplifier dissipates on paper, so clearly it is of no value to today's engineering students. Plus, it's not just the teachers. We get resistance from the students when we try to teach practical skills and I have heard, more than once, the comment, "Why should I have to learn this stuff? Once I graduate I'll have technicians to do that for me."

Personally, I would be perfectly fine with an engineering program that had as an entrance requirement that you had to be a certified technician with two years work experience. My ideal approach, however, would be to create an industry-academia partnership in which all students in a program work as technicians for a company in parallel and their industry experience and academic experience are coordinated and interrelated.

 

Hence the quote ... "looks good on paper."

I've seen and heard the same with respect to "qualified" people coming into a billet at a unit. Great evaluations, but they were willing to learn how to use a screwdriver.

I got to the point that I'd take someone with a bad set of evaluations and no experience for the billet to mold them into something productive that person could be proud of.

Did your wife work in her chosen field within the first six years of graduating?

No. Actually, her student teaching experience was so bad that she decided the only way she could teach would be at the college level. One of the main reasons for this was that most of the kids really didn't want to learn. And they complained, first when they actually had to do work, and second when they weren't simply given an "A" on anything and everything they turned in. From what it sounds, some of the teachers catered to this. Makes me shake my head and grit my teeth for what's to come.

 

@WBahn I heard that training vs education argument many times when addressing the training needs of officers.

I've observed in a laboratory environment, the engineer would have a setup with zero respect for loading the equipment. I realized that is where the cadets get that idea it was OK. Nothing like paralleling multiple 50 ohm loads from one 50 ohm source. So when the cadet is the engineer on a project ... no problem, load that baby up.

 

@drwrabella73 I like and unlike your post. The future causes the unlike. The education problem is going to take a group of strong willed people to change that culture.

I'll assume her student teaching assignment was in a public k-12 environment.

 

@drwrabella73 I like and unlike your post. The future causes the unlike. The education problem is going to take a group of strong willed people to change that culture.

I'll assume her student teaching assignment was in a public k-12 environment.

Yes, sophomore English in a Toledo public school. I agree that it will take a lot of work for anything to change, or it will just have to get so bad that everyone gets sick of the situation and does something about it. Ultimately, the change has to start at home. We've let this generation of kids be raised by television and the internet instead of by the parents. Unfortunately, those aforementioned parents are mostly people from my generation(or younger). I hope to do better with my kids and I try to do as much as I can with them instead of plopping them in front of the TV.

 

No. Actually, her student teaching experience was so bad that she decided the only way she could teach would be at the college level. One of the main reasons for this was that most of the kids really didn't want to learn. And they complained, first when they actually had to do work, and second when they weren't simply given an "A" on anything and everything they turned in. From what it sounds, some of the teachers catered to this. Makes me shake my head and grit my teeth for what's to come.

Yep. We (and many other "developed" countries -- we're not alone) have definitely fostered an entitlement mentality in the upcoming generations (which is most certainly NOT to say that everyone in those generations is that way) that is already coming home to roost and that will only get worse.

 

@drwrabella73 I like and unlike your post. The future causes the unlike. The education problem is going to take a group of strong willed people to change that culture.

I'll assume her student teaching assignment was in a public k-12 environment.

I think it's more bleek than that -- it requires that those strong-willed people be in positions that can actually force change to happen and those tend to be the very same positions filled by people invested in the present culture (as often as not because they honestly believe that it is the right position based on all of their experiences in a pure academic environment).

The most realistic vector for change, I believe, is going to come from one of two fronts. First, employers are going to demand change or else they will simply stop hiring from those colleges that don't produce AND they have to make that publicly and loudly known. Unfortunately, employers don't see themselves as being in the business of forcing higher education to become accountable, they are merely trying to hire suitable employees and if that means hiring foreign engineers, so be it. Second, groups of students/alumni are going to have to file massive class-action lawsuits against colleges for fraud (which has happened to some degree in the for-profit sector, but it is going to have to happen frequently in the public/non-profit sector to have any effect). The problem here is that the students are far from blameless in their failure to get an education -- college is the only place I can think of were the customers go out of their way to get as little for their money as they can.

 

Yep. We (and many other "developed" countries -- we're not alone) have definitely fostered an entitlement mentality in the upcoming generations (which is most certainly NOT to say that everyone in those generations is that way) that is already coming home to roost and that will only get worse.

The so called "entitlement mentality" is deeply rooted in "pay for play politics" where groups of people (and businesses) buy their way to economic success instead of working for anything.

A family relative was a lobbyist for a California government employees union and 90% of the bills passed by the legislature were sponsored by special interests - that is they gave $$$ to the politicians in return for a yes vote on some bill in their favor. So you can't blame people for expecting something for nothing when it's the norm in government and business.

I've done a lot of research on the so called tech boom in the S.F. Bay Area and California and I can tell you the whole damn economy is being fueled by government money of some sort. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, Tesla, Uber, Lyft, etc. are all getting a lot of their venture capital from the government and the stock market is also being pumped up by all the fiat currency.

 

Must you always turn discussions to Bay Area politics?

 

Must you always turn discussions to Bay Area politics?

My point was that Bay Area politics is an excellent case of "Leading By Example" and with so much corruption in the corporate elitists, it's no wonder that ordinary people don't have any scruples either.