SoylentNews

"exec" writes:

Story automatically generated by StoryBot Version 0.2.2 rel Testing.
Storybot ('Arthur T Knackerbracket') has been converted to Python3

Note: This is the complete story and will need further editing. It may also be covered
by Copyright and thus should be acknowledged and quoted rather than printed in its entirety.

FeedSource: [HackerNews]

Time: 2017-03-13 15:57:30 UTC

Original URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/reverence-bachelors-degree/408346/?single_page=true [theatlantic.com] using utf-8 encoding.

Title: America Needs to Get Over Its Reverence for the Bachelor's Degree

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- Entire Story Below --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

America Needs to Get Over Its Reverence for the Bachelor's Degree

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story [theatlantic.com]:

Two years ago, my nephew was set to graduate from Maryland’s Towson University with a degree in political science. After six long years, both he and his parents were ready to breathe a sigh of relief—he had made it to the finish line. He had never been excited about school, and his parents had worried about his lack of enthusiasm, wishing he could be engaged in something that ignited his curiosity and provided him more of a motivation to focus, something more hands-on and practical. But they also knew that without a bachelor’s degree, my nephew’s ability to move into a rewarding career, earn a middle-class salary, and enjoy some economic security would be very limited. And they worried that if he didn’t complete that degree before he turned 25, he likely never would (a reasonable concern, given national statistics on college completion). Determined to launch him into adulthood with the strongest possible foundation they could, they persuaded him to go to college and crossed their fingers.

They knew their son well. In fact, he was not burning the midnight oil in the library. As graduation day approached, all three of them were greeted with an unwelcome reminder of his distracted approach to school; my nephew could not march that spring because he was still three credits shy of the requirement. Holding up their son’s transcript, his adviser pointed out that he had taken the same economics course twice—one year apart. My nephew hadn’t noticed. When his exasperated parents demanded an explanation, all he could offer up was that the class had been taught by a different professor, and held in a different room. He got a B both times around.

He eventually completed his degree, but is currently unemployed and living at home, and his life in the two years since he graduated has been a collection of dismal white-collar jobs—in a call center chasing down delinquent customers for Baltimore Gas and Electric, and a law firm processing home foreclosures. He longs for the days when he was delivering pizzas. (He asked not to be named in this story, because he’s sensitive about publicizing the details of his education and employment.)

Another nephew of mine, Jeffrey, faced a similar dilemma, but took a different route. Although bright and curious, Jeffery had little interest in academics and could not wait to leave high school behind him—not because he lacked ambition or big dreams, but because he was far too restless to sit around for another four years. Jeffrey knew that he was not likely to succeed in traditional college. So after high school, he pursued his passion for cooking and enrolled in an apprenticeship program in culinary arts at Milwaukee Area Technical College. He was there for three years, during which time he spent one day a week in the classroom and four days in an Italian restaurant that sponsored him as an apprentice, working directly under the mentorship of the head chef and earning money along the way. The program was highly structured, hands-on, and designed to teach specific skills—menu planning, portions and measurements, cost control, customer service, basic nutrition, sauces, and so on. At the age of twenty-two, he graduated with the status of “journeyman cook” and a formal certificate of completion.

Following his dream, Jeffrey promptly moved to New York, pounding the pavement of lower Manhattan, resume and recommendations from his mentors in hand. In short order, he landed a job as a line chef at Laconda Verde, an Italian restaurant owned by Robert De Niro. Two years later he moved to Del Posto, a Michelin-starred restaurant run by the celebrity chef Mario Batali. He continued developing his culinary skills, while also learning about the restaurant business and nurturing newfound interests in Italian history, wild foods, organic farming, and urban living. It was a bold move for a young man from suburban Milwaukee, the kind of move that expands horizons and builds an understanding of how the world works. That’s certainly a lot better than dropping out of college, the most likely outcome had he gone the more traditional route.

Unfortunately for Jeffrey, however, it’s very hard to make a decent living as a cook, even in the best restaurants of New York. So after three years of hard work and great experience but very little money, he decided he was ready for a change and moved back to Milwaukee. He quickly discovered that without a bachelor’s degree his ability to get any job other than cooking was going to be tough. But older, wiser, and a little bit calmer, he was ready to consider getting a bachelor’s degree. That is, until he looked into it and discovered that he would have to start completely from scratch. None of the courses he completed at MATC would transfer to a four-year school. After three years in a college-based apprenticeship program and three years of solid work experience, he was still the equivalent of a brand-new high-school graduate in the eyes of higher education.

Jeffrey is currently working as a sous chef at an Italian restaurant in downtown Milwaukee. He is enjoying being higher up in the kitchen food chain than he was in New York, but the prospect of earning a true middle-class salary, the kind you can raise a family on, seems impossibly distant to him. If he had a bachelor’s degree, he would have a better shot at more remunerative jobs in, say, food-service management—half of all such jobs now require a B.A., and food service managers with a B.A. or more earn $20,000 more a year than such managers with an associate’s degree or less, according to the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce. He’d also love to someday open his own restaurant, a risky proposition for which the experience and connections that come from managing restaurants is almost a necessity. But the thought of starting a B.A. from scratch leaves him deflated. Four years is still just too long.

The traditional higher-education system works great for lots of students. But it forces countless others, like my nephews, to choose between two bad options: either enter a four-year bachelor’s degree program for which they are not ready, academically or emotionally; or pursue some kind of job-focused training program that, while valuable, may effectively put a ceiling on their careers.

It’s a dilemma millions of middle- and upper-middle-class families know well, but it’s even worse for working-class and poor families. At the end of the day, one of my nephew’s parents could afford to pay for a four-year degree, even if they knew a lot of the coursework would wash over their son. But for many low-income students, spending four years in school before even starting a career is not an option. That’s part of the reason why so many low-income students end up in technical training programs—not because they are not interested in earning a bachelor’s degree, but because they need to earn a decent income along the way. Many of those technical programs lead to good-paying jobs. What they don’t lead to is a bachelor’s degree. And without a B.A., there is only so far you can reasonably expect to rise in this country.

The lack of good options for my nephews and students like them up and down the income scale is not inevitable. It’s possible to envision a better option, one that rejects the false and damaging logic that job training and experience must always come after, not before, academic training. In fact, some colleges are experimenting with alternative “upside-down” degrees, in which students who choose job training and work experience right out of high school aren’t getting onto an educational dead-end road but, rather, onto a bridge that can lead, with a little more schooling, to a bachelor’s degree. But for these alternatives to become widespread, higher education will have to rethink some unquestioned—and highly questionable—assumptions about what a B.A. is or should be.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, in the United States training is widely understood to be the end, not the beginning, of an educational journey that leads to a particular job or career. Undergraduates are supposed to get a general education that will prepare them for training, which they will presumably get once they land a job or go to graduate school. Any training that happens before then just doesn’t count.

It is because of this belief that general-education requirements are the center of the bachelor’s degree and are concentrated in the first two years of a four-year program. The general-education core is what distinguishes the B.A. from a vocational program and makes it more than “just training.” It is designed to ensure that all degree holders graduate with a breadth of knowledge in addition to an in-depth understanding of a particular subject area. Students are exposed to a broad range of disciplines and are pushed to think critically about the social, cultural, and historical context in which they live. It is supposed to guarantee that all graduates can write, have a basic understanding of the scientific method, have heard of the Marshall Plan and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and know that iambic pentameter has something to do with poetry.

While few would challenge the importance of general education, both to students and to a well-functioning democracy, there is good reason to question why it has to come at the beginning of a B.A.—and just how general and theoretical it needs to be. The pyramid structure of the bachelor’s degree, which requires that students start with the broad base of general requirements before they specialize, is what makes college unappealing to so many young people.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There is no iron law of learning dictating that students must master general theories or be fully versed in a particular historical or cultural context before learning how to do things. Some students will do well under this approach, but there is solid evidence that some students learn better through experience. For these students, theory does not make sense until it is connected to action. Putting a lot of general or theoretical courses on the front end just leaves them disengaged or, even worse, discouraged. They will do better if they start by learning how to master certain tasks or behaviors and then explore the more abstract concepts behind the actions.

State and community colleges in the state of Washington figured this out years ago and offer a variety of options for students who want to begin their college career with technical training. Evergreen State College allows students to earn an upside-down bachelor’s degree, with the technical education coming first, followed by two years of broader, general education. The program is designed for students like Jeffrey, with a more flexible approach to learning that honors the purpose of the general-education requirements more than a rigid set of rules around exactly how many credits a student must have to graduate, and when. Under this approach, students can use the last two years of college to round out their education with courses designed to give them a broader understanding of the historical and social context in which they live and work, along with addressing any gaps in writing, analytical, or math skills. For many students who have been out in the world working and applying their skills already, the opportunity to pull back and see the big picture can be very appealing.

Other community colleges in Washington offer a bachelor’s of applied science, or BAS, a four-year degree designed explicitly to build on a two-year technical degree and provide a seamless pathway for students to continue their education. Some of the programs, like the BAS in manufacturing operations at Clover Park Technical College, add business and management skills to a two-year program teaching students how to operate and repair complex machinery. Others, like the BAS in radiologic technology at Bellevue College, allow students to continue deepening their technical skills in a particular field.

The programs are still relatively new, but early outcome data is encouraging. According to a 2014 impact evaluation, 75 percent of graduates were employed two years out, with average earnings ranging from more than $80,000 for graduates of the radiology programs to $27,000 for those earning an applied-management degree, with an average of $37,000 across all programs—comparable to the earnings of students graduating with traditional four-year degrees. Some students had transitioned successfully into graduate programs. The BAS degree is proving popular and growing: since 2010, when the degrees were first launched, enrollments have gone from just over a hundred students to nearly 1,000 in 2014. The colleges are planning for continued growth.

Other skeptics worry that a new crop of degree options will just dilute the value of the B.A. even more—and this is a valid concern. The explosive growth of vocational programs at community and for-profit colleges over the last two decades should definitely give us pause. There is clearly strong demand for programs that promise to lead directly to jobs—the number of vocational certificates awarded by colleges doubled between 2001 and 2011—and while we know that many of these programs generate good outcomes for students, we also know that a large number of them are of very poor quality and leave students with unmanageable debt and rotten employment prospects. The ubiquity of the programs is also playing a role in the relentless credential creep that is driving up the educational requirements for jobs like administrative assistance and bookkeeping. Today, there are many schools that offer one-year certificates in dental hygiene. There are also programs that offer a two-year associate’s degrees in dental hygiene. Now, some schools have even started offering a bachelor’s of applied science in dental hygiene. And the differences among these are difficult to discern. Policymakers—state education agencies and accreditors—need to ensure that BAS degrees do not simply provide a way for colleges to stretch out programs that do not really require four years of education.

Neither of my nephews was well served by a higher-education system that is too rigid to meet their needs. Both could have used an opportunity to learn in a more engaged, hands-on style, enabling them to develop concrete skills and apply them in the real world. While those alternatives exist, too often we penalize students who choose a training program right out of high school, sending them down educational dead-ends.

In the case of my nephew who earned a B.A., he and his family spent tens of thousands of dollars on an education that took many years but has left little mark. He got that four-year degree, and all of the long-term advantages that come with it, but one can’t help wondering what other activities might have filled those six years of bored meandering in college repeating courses. What else could he have been doing that would have left him more fulfilled, motivated, and excited about the future?

In Jeffrey’s case, he has some solid skills and great experience under his belt, as well the confidence that comes with mastering a trade, but his future is constrained.

It is often said in the United States that no member of Congress or leading CEO started their career in a community-college technical-training program—pathways to positions of leadership start with a bachelor’s degree. Is this true because graduates of technical-training programs are not fit to become leaders, or because we don’t allow them to? Try saying the same thing to someone in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland. Many politicians, senior managers, and even CEOs have come up through those countries’ impressive vocational-training systems. The issue isn’t that a career that starts with technical training can’t lead to more advanced learning and skills. It is that our higher-education policies simply don’t allow for it—and that’s just a failure of imagination.

        A short film on a group of young people who meet every week in the name of freedom of expression.

The facts on why facts alone can’t fight false beliefs

“I remember looking at her and thinking, ‘She’s totally lying.’ At the same time, I remember something in my mind saying, ‘And that doesn’t matter.’” For Daniel Shaw, believing the words of the guru he had spent years devoted to wasn’t blind faith exactly. It was something he chose. “I remember actually consciously making that choice.”

There are facts, and there are beliefs, and there are things you want so badly to believe that they become as facts to you.

Back in 1980, Shaw had arrived at a Siddha Yoga meditation center in upstate New York during what he says was a “very vulnerable point in my life.” He’d had trouble with relationships, and at work, and none of the therapies he’d tried really seemed to help. But with Siddha Yoga, “my experiences were so good and meditation felt so beneficial [that] I really walked into it more and more deeply. At one point, I felt that I had found my life’s calling.” So, in 1985, he saved up money and flew to India to join the staff of Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, the spiritual leader of the organization, which had tens of thousands of followers. Shaw rose through the ranks, and spent a lot of time traveling for the organization, sometimes with Gurumayi, sometimes checking up on centers around the U.S.

The hotly anticipated Congressional Budget Office report on the Republican replacement for Obamacare found it would increase the number of uninsured Americans by 86 percent.

The Republicans’ effort to pass their proposed replacement for the Affordable Care Act just got a whole lot harder.

The Congressional Budget Office on Monday projected that the House leadership’s American Health Care Act would result in 24 million Americans losing their health insurance while raising premiums for those covered on the individual market. Their bill would lower federal deficits by $337 billion over 10 years, largely as a result of cuts to Medicaid that would reduce its enrollment by 14 million, according to the estimate [cbo.gov]. Average premiums would rise by as much as 20 percent in 2018 and 2019 before falling in later years.

CBO is the official nonpartisan scorekeeper of legislation on Capitol Hill, and its projections on the impact of policy proposals can determine whether they have the political momentum to pass the House and Senate. But they are rarely a surprise, and both parties had telegraphed in recent days how they thought the score would turn out.

As efforts to repeal the ACA sputter, the GOP can refocus on protecting private enterprise from the voracity of a health-care industry that takes too much and delivers too little.

“The old order changeth,” Tennyson wrote in 1912, “yielding place to new.”

For three-quarters of a century, Americans have been debating whether the state should guarantee health coverage for all. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the “yes” side seemed at last to have prevailed, or nearly so. Obamacare is not quite a universal health-care program, but it shifted the U.S. closer to that outcome. For seven years, Republicans have vowed to shift it back. Now the moment for reversal has arrived. If Paul Ryan’s version of health-care reform prevails, the speaker will have accomplished something that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher never could: repeal a fully operational social insurance program.

Who did the Russian ambassador meet in D.C.? Welcome to America’s capital city, where everyday encounters may not be what they seem.

It is a funny feeling to realize you may have unwittingly come into contact with Russian intelligence—but not, these days, a totally uncommon one in Washington.

“There I was, standing in the entrance hall,” recalled Trevor Potter, a prominent election lawyer and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. This was in December, at a lavish holiday party at the French ambassador’s residence, teeming with D.C. types—diplomats, journalists, consultants, lobbyists, current and former officials. Potter had just entered when he saw the French ambassador, whom he knew, conversing with a man he didn’t know: a stocky, Slavic-looking fellow in a dark suit.

“The French ambassador said, ‘Do you know Sergey, the Russian ambassador?’ I said I did not, and we shook hands,” Potter told me recently.

Images of this year's Holi festival from India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

This week Hindus around the world celebrate Holi, the Festival of Colors. Holi is a springtime celebration observed on the last full moon of the lunar month. Revelers traditionally throw bright colored powders at friends and strangers alike as they celebrate the arrival of spring, commemorate Krishna's pranks, and allow each other a momentary freedom—a chance to drop their inhibitions and simply play and dance. Gathered here are images of this year's Holi festival from India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

Private-equity firms have been rapidly buying and selling off companies for decades, and workers in Lancaster, Ohio, are living with the consequences.

Men started making glassware along Pierce Avenue in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1905. That was when Ike Collins and his business partners fired up a small furnace to melt silica and other minerals inside The Hocking Glass Company near the banks of the Hocking River. Locals were soon calling the outfit “The Hockin’.”

There were other glass companies in Lancaster, drawn there by cheap natural gas. But following a 1937 merger with the New York-based Anchor Cap and Closure, The Hockin’, now Anchor Hocking, grew into the world’s largest manufacturer of glass tableware and the second-largest maker of glass containers such as beer bottles and peanut-butter jars. It even played a role in the invention of late-night TV, in 1950, by sponsoring [slate.com] the pioneering NBC show Broadway Open House. Anchor Hocking became Lancaster’s largest employer by far, the rare Fortune 500 company based in a small town. At its peak, it employed roughly 5,000 people there, including executives in the headquarters, and many more in plants around the country.

Leading Republicans used to be able to write the Iowan off as an extremist outsider. He’s still an extremist, but it’s harder to see him as an outsider in the age of Trump.

Steve King has always made a habit of speaking his mind, and quite frequently his mind has been controversial, blatantly false, or outright racist.

The Republican congressman from Iowa is the man who said in 2013 that while some children brought to the U.S. illegally were good kids, there were others [nytimes.com] “who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”

Fewer people would sign up for employer-sponsored plans, and fewer employers would offer coverage.

Much of the focus around the Obamacare repeal debate has centered on what would happen to people who buy insurance on their own, but about half o [kff.org]f Americans are insured through their jobs—a situation that has shielded them from many of the concerns around Obamacare and its repeal.

But by 2020, about 2 million fewer people would get insurance through work if the GOP’s proposed Obamacare replacement bill, the American Health Care Act, passes, according to a scorecard report [cbo.gov]released today by the Congressional Budget Office [theatlantic.com], a nonpartisan agency that tracks the financial impact of legislation.

The CBO projects this will happen because the AHCA would repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate, so some people might not sign up for their employer’s health plan, with no threat of being fined later. But also, the GOP bill might induce more employers to stop offering health insurance.

Two years ago, my nephew was set to graduate from Maryland’s Towson University with a degree in political science. After six long years, both he and his parents were ready to breathe a sigh of relief—he had made it to the finish line. He had never been excited about school, and his parents had worried about his lack of enthusiasm, wishing he could be engaged in something that ignited his curiosity and provided him more of a motivation to focus, something more hands-on and practical. But they also knew that without a bachelor’s degree, my nephew’s ability to move into a rewarding career, earn a middle-class salary, and enjoy some economic security would be very limited. And they worried that if he didn’t complete that degree before he turned 25, he likely never would (a reasonable concern, given national statistics on college completion). Determined to launch him into adulthood with the strongest possible foundation they could, they persuaded him to go to college and crossed their fingers.

Why do people reliably stock up on the same things before they get snowed in?

In this animated interview, the sociologist Bruce Western explains the current inevitability of prison for certain demographics of young black men.

A true illustration of our place in the universe

David Frum on Donald Trump's authoritarian tendencies

Get 10 issues a year and save 65% off the cover price.

Copyright © 2017 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission