Links for 7/6/10

Joanne Jacobs

“Green jobs” have been oversold, according to a Workforce Strategy Center report, “Building Effective Green Energy Programs at Community Colleges.” In the long run, the green economy will emerge. Right now, “the jobs aren’t there,”…

colleges are trying to create career paths without knowing what jobs entry-level workers might do or what skills they might need…

Zac Bissonnette

There's certainly a distinction between for-profits and non-profits -- but it hardly seems like one that the non-profits can use to claim some sort of moral high ground. It's time for the media to lay off the greedy capitalists who are exploiting 7% of college students and take a long, hard look at the greedy bureaucracies that are exploiting the other 93%...

Sridhar

Our company in India always faced trouble recruiting, because most college graduates, particularly from well-known colleges, would prefer big-brand-name firms. Simply out of sheer necessity, we started to disregard the kind of college a person graduated from, and the grades they obtained. In India, that task was made even easier, because much of the Indian industry is boringly conventional, and job advertisements that specify things like "Must have a minimum of 80% average in college" are fairly common (so if you got only 79%, don't bother to apply). As a result, we get a lot of the arbitrarily-cut-off category applicants. What we found over time was that there is a lot of really good talent in that pool, which the industry had overlooked. Based on a few years of observation, we noticed that there was little or no correlation between academic performance, as measured by grades & the type of college a person attended, and their real on-the-job performance. That was a genuine surprise, particularly for me, as I grew up thinking grades really mattered…

Robert D. Atkinson

Higher ed is failing almost as much as K-12...

Let me suggest a more fundamental reason. Colleges are focused on teaching kids content, not on teaching them skills, and too many students are focused on passing the multitude of tests in the multitude of classes they take, rather than really learning...

Most colleges aren't interested in teaching these skills for the simple reason that most faculty aren't interested in teaching these skills. The vast majority of faculty go into academia, not because they like teaching, but because they like their academic subject (Why else would the spend 6 years or longer getting a doctorate in it?). They don't want to teach logic, debate, writing, research, or any of other myriad skills. They want to teach the subject of their passion...

The result is that too many graduates have grown in knowledge on various subjects but not developed practical skills...