A DIFFERENT KIND OF SUCCESS
Blueprint, Fall 1999, volume 4

by Daniel Yankelovich

A new reality about the global economy is slowly sinking into the American consciousness. The rewards for having the right skills can be spectacular, while the consequences for not having them are devastating.

When assembly lines and strong trade unions dominated American manufacturing, it was possible to make a good living without bringing special skills to the job. Workers may have complained about being hired "from the neck down," but they were well paid. However, the disparity in rewards between the millions of minimum-wage dead-end jobs and the more interesting, knowledge-intensive jobs is growing explosively. Today, the economic prospects for young Americans without skills are as grim as the prospects for those with the right skills are glowing.

The broad earnings gap between high school graduates and college graduates has made Americans less complacent about the education their children receive. Most parents realize their children must acquire high levels of education to avoid downward mobility. Employers are even more concerned than parents, complaining that the high school graduates they see lack basic math, writing, grammar and spelling skills.

Young people have not failed to respond. Educational aspirations are high and rising: Between 1970 and 1997, the percentage of Americans 25 and older who had completed four years of college more than doubled (from 11 percent to 24 percent), and the percentage of high school graduates increased sharply (from 55 percent to 82 percent). Still, more than three out of four adult Americans lack a four-year college education.

If our high schools do a bum job of preparing young Americans for the new global economy and the vast majority lack a college education, then the nation has a serious problem on its hands.

 

A High-Status Skill Development Option

To create a new tier of middle-class jobholders with prospects for advancement, we need new educational options that not only teach young people the technical skills most in demand, but also bestow credentials that are equivalent or superior in status to those given by an average four-year college.

Imparting technical skills is not enough. The nation has plenty of sound vocational programs, but they do not appeal to young people and for good reason. As matters stand today, the graduate of a mediocre four-year college who has acquired no useful skills has far better life chances than the graduate of an excellent vocational program who has learned a variety of useful skills. This is because employers are willing to invest far more in training college graduates than in training those without college credentials, whatever their skills.

In an increasingly competitive world economy, this anomaly is likely to cause all kinds of trouble. If tens of millions of Americans are frustrated economically while others benefit through no special virtue beyond their parents' ability to pay for misleading credentials, then neither our democracy nor our economy benefits.

Our colleges and universities have not adjusted to the idea that traditional IQ is just one kind of intelligence whereas many forms are called for in the workplace. These include entrepreneurial and improvisational skills, perseverance, judgment, salesmanship, and technical capabilities not measured, imparted nor highly valued in colleges.

What we need is a new Skill Development Option, developed in institutions that do not separate "training" and "education" as sharply as colleges do, that are not rigidly tied to the four-year post-high-school residential model - and that employers view as imparting skills needed for workplace performance at levels as high or higher than four-year colleges.

Fortunately, we have in place an institution ideally situated to manage the majority of the necessary tasks: the nation's two-year community colleges. With the right kind of support, they can greatly improve the life chances of a majority of our youth.

 

The Community College

Community colleges have a track record of success in helping people develop needed skills. They are local institutions with close ties to city, county, regional, and state governments and institutions - and with local employers who can assist in training and job placement.

However, the nation's community colleges need a great deal of support if they are to compensate for a deeply flawed K-12 system of public education and also ease the school-to-work transition for our neediest young people. Wide variations in dropout rates suggest that some are more successful than others at educating and training this population. A close study of those that succeed should pay off handsomely. As a society, we know a lot about how to spread the best practice to a wider base. What we need is the political will to do so.

Community colleges (or equivalent institutions) must fill the need for:

One of the most striking characteristics of less well-educated populations is their lack of information. The nation has access to many resources to fill this need: computer-driven data bases, new methods of individual assessment that do not try to fit everyone into the same mold. The trick is to make this information available and useful to the individual.

Community colleges are also well-positioned to become second-chance institutions. Many young people lack the maturity and the incentive when they are growing up to take full advantage of their educational opportunities. Later on, in their 20s or 30s or even later in life, they develop the requisite maturity and incentive, but have no practical means of getting a second chance. Community colleges can fill this need for millions.

The only way to win enduring public support for a long-term initiative such as this is to base it on the American public's own priorities. In particular, it must match the public's sense of urgency, its spirit of fairness, and its insistence on self-reliance and on practicality. The program proposed here meets these four requirements.

Americans today are prepared to give considerable priority to addressing the problems of our nation's young people, and they recognize that a lack of job skills is a significant source of those problems. True, research shows that most Americans look at today's teenagers with misgivings. They feel that kids are not developing the ethical and moral values needed to become responsible adults views strongly affected by a focus on such problems as teen-age pregnancy, youth violence, and crime. Yet Americans have not given up on kids and believe that helping young people is of paramount importance.

They are also well aware of the huge disparities between the incomes of haves and have-nots. They regard programs designed to help have-nots improve themselves as fair if such programs are based on the principle of reciprocity, especially if they involve education.

It is true that the public is deeply skeptical of government efforts to solve social problems, partly based on the perception that past efforts have not achieved practical results. However, the more the public has come to mistrust institutions, the more confidence it has expressed in the ability of individuals to control their own lives. Young people willing to sacrifice time, energy, and resources so they may acquire new skills squarely meet the public insistence on self-reliance.

There is a traditional American ethos embodied in the "American Dream": If you work hard, live by the rules, and make the effort to better yourself through education, you can succeed in our society better than in any other nation on earth. Remarkably, despite all of the transformations in social values in recent years, this faith persists. An upgraded community college system can make this dream work for millions of Americans.

 

What About the Demand Side?

If we greatly increase the supply of more highly skilled Americans, will there be enough jobs for them to fill? It is customary to answer by projecting the size of the demand for specific kinds of jobs (e.g., medical technicians, computer programmers, electronic equipment repair people). But in the global economy of today, this approach is impractical. So swift is the tempo of economic change that the most promising jobs in the future will be those that do not exist today, created by companies that have just been launched.

Fortunately, we do not have to tie our economic fate to projections of the demand for specific jobs. Corporate employers are convinced that certain core skills are common to almost all good jobs. The most elementary is literacy. If you are not literate or numerate, you cannot find and hold a good job. Once beyond this elementary level, you can add a wide range of technical skills.

In a recent study my firm conducted, we found that employers agreed on the handful of cognitive and communication skills needed for the best jobs. These include: analytic ability, the ability to articulate one's views, the ability to make coherent presentations, flexibility in acquiring new skills, and the ability to work harmoniously with people who come from diverse backgrounds and cultures. Employers believe that people with these and related skills will have the flexibility to change jobs as conditions require.

The fundamental issue is whether our economy is vital enough to keep growing and to keep creating jobs in response to bottomless consumer demand. (Consumer spending now fuels two-thirds of our economy.) That depends on the future competitiveness of the American economy, which in turn depends on our having a highly educated, highly skilled workforce. With an ever larger number of well-trained people, the chances are that if the world economy remains relatively peaceful and stable, we will maintain our competitive edge and with it create tens of millions of good new jobs.