<p>Robert</a> Reich: The Commencement Address That Won't Be Given</p>
<p>Yes, it may be true, but graduation should be a time of hope, with a healthy dose of realism. Do officiants performing a wedding say “This union only has a 50% chance of lasting?” </p>
<p>And, there’s this:</p>
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<p>That’s an abysmally low bar, is it not? By the same logic, those who eat nothing but junk food are still healthier than those who are starving to death.</p>
<p>Sorry, I don’t understand your point. I would hardly equate not going to college as starving oneself. College is a choice, and oftentimes that choice leads to a greater chance at success careerwise. </p>
<p>It is NOT a guarantee of future success. It does not even guarantee one will be more employable than those who <a href=“shockingly”>i</a>* have not attended college. If one is looking for job security, maybe a trade school would be better choice. (ie plumbing, electrician)</p>
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<p>The point is that, rather than simply the choice between junk food vs. starvation, why isn’t the third choice of healthy food available? Similarly, why must the only two choices be between graduating from college yet enduring poor job prospects (compounded with student debt) vs. not graduating and enduring even worse job prospects? Why isn’t the third choice of having strong job prospects available? </p>
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<p>And why not? Wasn’t the implied social contract that we made with the nation’s youths for the last generation that if they stayed in school, studied hard, got good grades, and went to (and graduated) from college, that they would secure their futures in the white-collar middle-class. </p>
<p>Indeed, I myself can recall the countless times that I heard teachers and parents effectively threaten recalcitrant kids with the karmic punishment that if they refuse to study and refuse to behave in the classroom, then they’ll be relegated to nothing better than dirty, manual labor jobs for the rest of their lives. Surely plenty of other people here have heard the same from their teachers or parents. On the other hand, nobody ever threatens misbehaving kids by telling them that they’ll be forced to go to college. We in society have therefore made manual labor jobs - including the plumbing and electrician jobs that you recommended - [socially</a> shameful](<a href=“http://weknowmemes.com/2011/11/conversation-with-the-therapist-today/]socially”>http://weknowmemes.com/2011/11/conversation-with-the-therapist-today/). </p>
<p>Now to be clear, I don’t believe that manual labor jobs are embarrassing in the least. But I fully recognize that society has deemed them to be so. I don’t know about your high school, but certainly in mine, those kids who wanted to take shop classes and other vocational courses were derided as the ‘stupid’ kids with no future, whereas the ‘honors-classes’ kids were embraced as the ‘model’ students that the school would tout during parent-teacher conferences. Indeed, every graduation day, the local newspaper would proudly trumpet the (usually elite) colleges that the top seniors were heading for. Nobody ever published an article about the shop-class kids. </p>
<p>So if you say that college is not a guarantee of future success, or even a guarantee of greater employability, well, that’s an abrogation of the implicit social contract that we had made with kids to compel them to stay in school, study hard, and get good grades in the first place. Let’s face it - many of them did indeed stay in school and study hard precisely because they wanted reasonably paying jobs that society would not consider to be socially shameful. And the reason that they thought that strategy would work is because we in society have been telling them that it would work. Over and over again.</p>
<p>^Our local area vocational high school has a welding program. One of the administrators told me a couple weeks ago that employers are competing vigorously to hire this year’s grads.</p>
<p>Until society as a whole deems that being a star in your high school shop class is as socially prestigious as winning admission to Harvard, then our nation’s youths are going to continue to believe that the path to success is through top performance in the standard college-prep track.</p>
<p>Yet Harvard wields a $32 billion endowment with which to market its brand. Its peer schools are likewise rich. I doubt that any trade school will ever be able to match that sort of marketing might.</p>
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<p>Maybe where you live. Where I live, a large percentage of kids have no desire to go to a four-year college. They’re perfectly happy with trade school, nursing school, or enlisting in the military. An organization I’m a member of, every year gives a small scholarship for trade school to a graduating senior from our local HS. This year, of a class of 28 graduates, we had 9 applicants. We’re giving it to the class salutatorian - who’s enrolling in a program to become a dental assistant.</p>
<p>There are kids whose horizons are wider and want a four-year degree. But they’re not the majority.</p>
<p>EDIT: And the local vocational high school, which serves 11 area school districts, is at capacity. Admission is competitive (based on grades).</p>
<p>Seems like this article was written to sell one of the author’s books. Given that motivation, it would seem natural to write something controversial.</p>
<p>Our local paper does publish stories about the shops in our high-schools and there have been many business articles on the need for community college and tech grads for modern manufacturing in the local papers.</p>
<p>The problem is that most students have no idea what immediate post-graduate job prospects their particular major at their school offers. In my current post freshman year internship, i’m working with three other interns who graduated from schools ranked much higher than mine with liberal arts degrees. The difference is that I just finished my freshman year, and they just graduated. I think liberal arts degrees can be great, but way too many LA students seem to have no idea how that philosophy degree connects to a first job. </p>
<p>I don’t know what my degree is going to be worth in a first job, but I do know what jobs people graduating from my program today are getting. And I can dissect that information, by major, geographic location, and specific field. I don’t see why liberal arts programs don’t make that same information available, like most good undergrad b-schools do.</p>
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<p>Perhaps because liberal arts schools, and liberal arts majors, are less focused on first jobs out of college and more focused on preparation for a rich and fulfilling life?</p>
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<p>However, graduating into the unemployment line tends not to lead to a rich and fulfilling life.</p>
<p>If students knew beforehand how graduates from their schools and majors did, then they may be better able to prepare ahead of time. For example, minimizing student loan debt, aggressively applying early for paid internships and post-graduation jobs, etc. rather than being surprised by unemployment at graduation.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, few universities make public their <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/internships-careers-employment/1121619-university-graduate-career-surveys.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/internships-careers-employment/1121619-university-graduate-career-surveys.html</a> .</p>
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<p>Maybe only where I live, you say? Well, let me put it you this way. We both live in the United States. We’re just about to have a Presidential election between two Harvard graduates. Indeed, for the nearly 30 year stretch between 1989-2017, the country will be run by somebody with a degree from Harvard or Yale (or in one case, both). If Hillary is then elected President in 2016, that will stretch the Harvard/Yale hegemony by at least another 4 years. On the other hand, it’s been a long time - since Truman - that we’ve had a President who never graduated from college, and even he still went to a business school and law school. And Truman was preceded by the only 4-term President in US history, and who happened to graduate from…Harvard. </p>
<p>Or let me put it to you another way. The United States as a whole is dominated by a limited number of media outlets - NYTimes, Wall Street Journal (News Corp), Time Warner, ABC/ESPN (Disney) - that seems to be the de-facto publicity arms of the elite colleges. Heck, just yesterday, the [Washington</a> Post](<a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/chinas-harvard-connection/2012/05/18/gIQAldGZZU_graphic.html]Washington”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/chinas-harvard-connection/2012/05/18/gIQAldGZZU_graphic.html) ran a story detailing the connections of the leaders of China with Harvard. When the Jeremy Lin ‘Linsanity’ story broke, the nation’s top sports media outlets seemingly couldn’t stop mentioning Harvard - which was especially conspicuous considering that Lin was hardly the first nor even the best Asian player in NBA history. {Yao Ming is by far the greatest Asian player in basketball history.} If Jeremy Lin had gone to some no-name college, or even to a traditional basketball powerhouse school such as Kentucky, the Lin story would have attracted much less attention. {First Asian-American in the NBA, who was undrafted but had played at Kentucky, and had a February run of success with the Knicks would have made for moderately good copy, but not a giant media sensation.} It’s that he went to Harvard is what gave the story that extra spice. And how many times during the run-up to the Facebook IPO did the mass media mention that the company was founded at Harvard? Heck, I think it’s hard to find many media stories that didn’t mention that fact. In contrast, I struggle to think of many media stories that detailed the founding locations of, say, Groupon or Linkedin.</p>
<p>The fact is, we Americans live in a country where, whether we like it or not, our politics and mass media are dominated by certain brands. </p>
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<p>Surely we’ve all heard teachers and parents use the threat of a career of manual labor to motivate recalcitrant kids. What we instead need is for those teachers and parents threaten those kids with college. The message might be: “Junior, if you don’t shape up, then your trade school dreams will die and you’ll find that you have no choice but to go to college.” The high school honors and AP courses would then be derided for being populated by those students who are ‘too incapable’ of doing anything else and who have only mediocre futures to look forward to, for all of the ‘top’ kids would be in the shop classes. </p>
<p>I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.</p>
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<p>You might try hanging out on the homeschool email lists. The range of goals for
parents and students are wide indeed.</p>
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<p>Or is it unskilled labor?</p>
<p>The good (i.e. skilled) blue collar jobs do require their own post-secondary education, even if it does not lead to an associates or bachelor’s degree.</p>
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<p>Let me put it to you this way. If a kid at your local high school was going to Harvard, would your local paper publish a bio on that kid? I know my local paper certainly did every time somebody from my high school went to Harvard. </p>
<p>On the other hand, for every one of those particular local kids who went to a community college, how many times would your local paper publish a bio? I can’t think of a single time when my local paper did.</p>
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<p>Nor does it exclude it - which graduating with a degree that you pursue only because of its employment prospects might well do.</p>
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<p>Are they so wide as to actually have parents outright denigrating college? After all, plenty of parents denigrate manual labor.</p>
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<p>Did anyone else note that the responder slipped an extra word into what I said?</p>