A few days ago I saw this article on the The Capital Times website.  It quotes and links to this article at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

It got me thinking.  I would answer the question “Are too many students going to college?” with a yes.  I base my answer partly for reasons quoted in the article such as,

Charles Murray, a political scientist and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says: “It has been empirically demonstrated that doing well (B average or better) in a traditional college major in the arts and sciences requires levels of linguistic and logical/mathematical ability that only 10 to 15 percent of the nation’s youth possess. That doesn’t mean that only 10 to 15 percent should get more than a high-school education. It does mean that the four-year residential program leading to a B.A. is the wrong model for a large majority of young people.”

and

Richard K. Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and professor of economics at Ohio University, answers: “A large subset of our population should not go to college, or at least not at public expense. The number of new jobs requiring a college degree is now less than the number of young adults graduating from universities, so more and more graduates are filling jobs for which they are academically overqualified.”

The second part really resonates with me, not because I’m personally academically overqualified.  I only went to college for a semester.  But because I’ve seen so many other people who HAVE degrees doing the same job, or even a lower level job than I was doing.

For a number of years I was an assistant manager at Walmart.  I was promoted internally so I didn’t need a degree, but for outside hires one of the requirements was at least a Bachelors degree.  It kind of makes one wonder, if I could do the job without the degree, why is it a requirement?  I worked with a variety of peers with and without degrees.  I can not remember a significant difference in performance between the two groups.  Any difference in performance is much more based on the person, rather than if they did, or did not, have a degree.  I can also recall a number of people who worked below me who had degrees.  In a few cases as high as Doctorates, though from foreign countries.

Our Education system is Broken

Do you know how long it takes to master a skill?  Any skill?  10,000 hours.  People who study human achievement have found that regardless of the skill, be it golf, basketball, cello, software programming, anything, it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to get good at it.  Malcolm Gladwell talks about this at length in his book Outliers.

How long are we in school?  For the vast majority of us it’s somewhere between 13 and 17 years.  Lets say we average 7 hours of instruction per day, 5 days a week, 4 weeks a month for 9 months a year.  That’s 1,260 hours a year, and between 16380 and 21420 hours for most of us.

So what do we have our students practicing?  What skill are they spending over 20,000 hours on?  How to take tests.  Seriously that’s what we’re training people to do.  Go on think back to your time in school, what did you spend most of your time on?  Learning facts so you could be tested on them later.  Granted you probably learned a few things along the way.  And some of the skills necessary to take tests are helpful, such as reading and basic math.  But the vast majority of time is spent in some way on tests.  In many ways it’s even worse now with all the emphasis placed on standardized tests for such things as the No Child Left Behind act.  And in college?  All the emphasis placed on the “FINAL EXAM”.

And then we drop these students into the workforce.  And what do they do?  Well, they don’t take tests.  In my 13 years of work, I’ve taken one test that mattered.  Out of almost 5,000 days, only .0003% have had a test that could influence my employment.  (If you’re curious it was a test for Food Service Certification that all assistant managers had to pass.)

So how do we fix it?

I think we need to start specialization earlier.  I think most people have the necessary skills to be a basic functioning member of society after the first 10,000 hours of school, which is roughly the end of Eighth grade.  (Anyone else find it interesting that Eighth grade was the limit of education for the majority of our past?)  At this point everyone should choose their path.  10-15% should go on to pursue those advanced degrees:  Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers.  Maybe another 50-60% would get specialized technical training for a specific job:  Firefighters, Plumbers, CNA’s.  The remaining would get basic job skill training, we’re still gonna need cashiers, janitors, fry cooks.

Some of you might ask “How is that different than what we’re doing now?”  Of course I’m gonna tell you.  By starting the specializations after Eighth grade and carrying them through age 22, we’re giving 10,080 hours in instruction in the field that they’ve chosen.  When they finish they’ll already be good at what they’re doing.  Contrast that with the typical current high school graduate that has no specialized training.  And while those with a Bachelors degree have an additional 5000 hours of instruction, at most only half of that time is specific to the degree they’ve received.  For many students the first two years of college are prerequisites that have nothing, or very little to do with their field of study.

So there’s my plan.  It’s radical so I don’t think any politician would endorse it.  And I doubt the current education establishment will like it.  Some people will see similarities to communist countries, in that children will be chosen young for specific jobs.  Some may call it undemocratic and anti-American because only some people will get the highest paying jobs.  But you know what?  People aren’t equal.  Some people ARE better at certain things than others.  People should do what they are good at.  As long as everyone has the Opportunity to find out what they are good at, America works.