{"id":4073,"date":"2018-03-22T22:52:16","date_gmt":"2018-03-23T06:52:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stanford.edu\/group\/sdgc\/cgi-bin\/ycisl\/?p=4073"},"modified":"2018-03-23T22:41:57","modified_gmt":"2018-03-24T06:41:57","slug":"wsj-more-companies-teach-workers-what-colleges-dont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ycisl.su.domains\/?p=4073","title":{"rendered":"WSJ: More Companies Teach Workers What Colleges Don\u2019t"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Slide1\"There was an online WSJ article today (March, 22, 2018) titled “More Companies Teach Workers What Colleges Don\u2019t” by Douglas Belkin (https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/more-companies-teach-workers-what-colleges-dont-1521727200) which told about several companies which have training programs for new employees. These training programs don’t seem like anything new and the complaints by employers that colleges are not preparing graduates as perfect fits for their companies reflects usual me-me-me thinking.<\/p>\n

What is different now though is how employers are having to take their pick from more college graduates (because government is pushing more students into college programs)\u00a0who have gone through the 4-year memorization mill (that’s what undergraduate education is about). There are several problems with this development.<\/p>\n

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  1. ISSUE OF MASS BALANCE. More college graduates means fewer pre-college candidates. There just are fewer prospective employees that have not been conditioned by colleges to memorize (of course, high schools seem to be picking up that slack).\u00a0The pool of pre-college candidates\u00a0that do not go to college contains many who struggled with the “memorization” challenges of secondary education and possess the critical “out-of-box” thinking that employers today desire.<\/li>\n
  2. ISSUE OF GROWING NUMBER OF COLLEGE GRADUATES WHO ARE AVERAGE OR BELOW AVERAGE AMONG PEERS. More students in college inflates the quality bell curve of college graduates. The main benefit of putting more students into tertiary education is increasing the number seeking advanced studies and doctoral research. Competitive employers are usually interested in the top decile of graduates from the top\u00a0few percentile of colleges, so there is a slight benefit there.\u00a0However, there will be a\u00a0more noticeable\u00a0increase in\u00a0the lower quartiles of the distribution; that is, more average and below average students for whom further higher education is not an option. This is the candidate pool that has grown for most employers to select from, and where we find a magnified mis-match.<\/li>\n
  3. ISSUE OF NEED FOR REMEDIAL COURSEWORK IN EARLY COLLEGE. Pushing more students into college prep and extending education for many to an additional 4 years has lowered the quality of students\u00a0entering college. This is because secondary education can now rely more on colleges providing remedial\u00a0courses, especially in writing, as part of an undergraduate degree program. Further, college prep has led to high schools struggling to cope with being a high school (reality) yet simulating a college education (virtuality). So the quality shift is across the whole applicant pool and not just the tail end.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    It is therefore not a surprise that employers will place less weight on a college degree (hopefully, where the college degree is from also does not matter as much) and focus on skills uncovered in interviews,\u00a0initial hiring periods and other opportunities to observe performance. Employers could probably use a new kind of assessment: one which evaluates problem-solving and collaboration aptitude before college. This could be used to identify and select candidates for in-house training programs (as an alternative to college) as well as a progress measure of whether workplace aptitude grew stronger in college (you really can’t tell from a college transcript). There are some employers who apply such a tool during their hiring process and I’ve seen effective results. But the idea is to make such an assessment as universal as existing college entrance exams.<\/p>\n

    In the YCISL program, we emphasize skills as tools to leverage knowledge.\u00a0Our task is to bring awareness and attention to these skills so that students can educate themselves in this framework. We also believe that problem-solving and collaboration aptitude should be assessed at the beginning and end of each year in secondary education. This is to give the teacher a clearer view of individual skill levels as well as progress patterns. Without such information, we have the one-size-fits-all that\u00a0ails our systems of education today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    There was an online WSJ article today (March, 22, 2018) titled “More Companies Teach Workers What Colleges Don\u2019t” by Douglas Belkin (https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/more-companies-teach-workers-what-colleges-dont-1521727200) which told about several companies which have training programs for new employees. These training programs don’t seem like anything new and the complaints by employers that colleges are not preparing graduates as perfect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ycisl.su.domains\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ycisl.su.domains\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ycisl.su.domains\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ycisl.su.domains\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ycisl.su.domains\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4073"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ycisl.su.domains\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4091,"href":"https:\/\/ycisl.su.domains\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4073\/revisions\/4091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ycisl.su.domains\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ycisl.su.domains\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ycisl.su.domains\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}