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from the we-don't-need-no-stinkin'-degree dept.
New Executive Order Fights Credential Inflation In The Federal Workforce:
On Friday, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to fill job vacancies based on merit, rather than require a minimum level of education for candidates seeking open positions. The order rightly recognizes that a job candidate with several years of relevant experience may be just as qualified, if not more so, than one who has collected a stack of advanced degrees.
"Employers adopting skills- and competency-based hiring recognize that an overreliance on college degrees excludes capable candidates and undermines labor-market efficiencies," the order reads. "Currently, for most Federal jobs, traditional education — high school, college, or graduate-level — rather than experiential learning is either an absolute requirement or the only path to consideration for candidates without many years of experience."
The order still allows federal agencies to prescribe minimum educational requirements for job candidates if the degree is legally required by the state or local government where the federal employee will be working. Additionally, they may consider a candidate's education if the degree "directly reflects the competencies necessary" to do the job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @08:35PM (1 child)
You're both overestimating the difficulty of Shakespeare and underestimating the average person's intelligence. I graduated in '09 and read 3 Shakespeare plays in English classes during high school, and another in middle school.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:08AM
I thought this as well. Then I became a teacher and got more experience across a wide array of schools. And I learned I was simply wrong. I think the one thing our experience emphasizes is how clueless we are when young of not only the rest of the world, but even of our own peers. That or it may be that you went to an outlier of a school and/or went entirely AP/Vanguard/etc are are now extrapolating your peers/experience to the average, though I'm assuming you'd have the common sense not to do that. In reality the average American student is in awful shape and getting worse by the year.
You can actually quantify this as well. The PISA is an international exam that is given to 15 year olds, which I'll stick with. This [nytimes.com] article goes over some of the data from the most recent results. About 20% of American 15 year olds read below a level expected of a 10 year old. And reading is somewhere we did, relative to our other results, well. In math we came 38th in the world, even though we spend more than the vast majority of the world on education per child. I'm also excluding tertiary education spending there, so it's not just a product of crazy high college costs. A different exam [nytimes.com] carried out by the Education Department showed rapid and severe declines in educational achievement. As of 2017, only 34% of 8th graders in the US are "proficient" in reading. And those numbers are getting worse across all groups. The worst performers are getting weaker faster than the rest, but even the top is also declining.
The more concerning thing about this is when you think about the fact that these people will be the ones making up the next generation. The United States seems set to enter what may be a prolonged decline if things don't suddenly take a 180, and there's 0 indication of this happening. And for what it's worth I got out of teaching fairly quickly. Our education system is not geared towards solving this problem, but instead hiding it. I taught mathematics and was invariably an outlier of their other teachers in that I love the field and have had tremendous experience and success with the field at all levels. And my students did get a whole lot of out of it. I even had one girl go out of her way to thank me outside of class. Apparently I helped her realize it wasn't such a scary subject after all, and she felt I'd changed her life. That sort of stuff made me feel awesome. What didn't make me feel awesome was the recurring and never-ending pressure to somehow make sure the ~20% (and growing - this was a while back now) of the class who either shouldn't even be there or couldn't care less about learning, also 'excelled'. It was a wink/wink/nudge/nudge for pass them along, by whatever means necessary. No thanks, teaching is clearly not for me. If you want to know why most teachers in the US suck, it has nothing to do with not paying them enough.