College Education ≠ Job Guarantee

Please don't be thrown off by the title of the post. I'm certainly not advocating that people don't go to college. I'm not suggesting that colleges are universally doing a lousy job at equipping people for the global job market and that people should simply go to a trade school. In fact, there's clear data about the effects of the current economic downturn, and it's skewered significantly negatively against those without college degrees. If you want to make yourself more marketable, a college degree is a must, definitely in light of the continuing trend of decline in manufacturing jobs in the United States.

My point is that I find it interesting that there is a sense of contractual obligation, at least by some, in terms of how a college secures a job for an individual who has paid large sums of tuition and has been given a degree by that given school. Take, for example, the recent case of a recent graduate of Monroe College who sued her alma mater for failing to assist her in job placement.

The recent graduate, Trina Thompson, is alleging that Monroe's "Office of Career Advancement did not help me with a full-time job placement. I am also suing them because of the stress I have been going through." I find this lawsuit a little ridiculous. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that no assurances of employment are made upon enrolling in a college. A college is tasked with providing a good-faith effort in teaching skills which will make a student more employable, and also provides non-obligatory services, such as job placement, to support finding a job post-graduation. But to imply the job placement is guaranteed is ridiculous - no college can completely guard against a terrible job economy or an applicant's terrible interviewing skills or bad breath. If there's any college that provides that post-graduation job guarantee, it deserves to be sued.

Frivolous lawsuit aside, I do wonder if universities are providing the skills necessary to compete in an increasingly competitive global economy, where American workers can no longer be entitled to get paid multiple times what a similarly skilled worker can do elsewhere in the world (a point made in Robyn Meredith's excellent book on the Indian and Chinese economies, "The Elephant and the Dragon").

One point of view is that we should better synchronize, even regulate, university degree majors and concentrations with job demand, something which is done in Europe with a handful of fields. Or as an example, the government should accredit a limited number of degree slots in a particular field to limit an overabundance, in let's say, IT managers, in light of plummeting demand for that resource - leading to less unemployed people holding degrees not in demand. Of course, projecting the future job market is difficult and many cringe at the thought of bigger government bureaucracy.

Some argue that we should go to more of the "trade school" route, where theoretical subjects and courses in the liberal arts are eschewed in favor of practical "hands on" skill learning - even to the degree to making the co-op or educational internships a core part of the curriculum. The point here is to avoid researchers for major pharmaceutical companies learning classroom chemistry which they don't use (see previous post), replacing it with lab work.

There's probably a balance. As some of my friends would say, it's one things to do things right. It's equally or more important to make sure that people do the right things, and do things rightly - this is where classical education and the liberal arts show their strength.