What is the purpose of vocational education? How can we achieve it?
Kevin Carey, in the March 1st New York Times “A Well-Meaning Job
Training Bill That May Hurt More Than Help,” opined that it should be doing
more than simply helping people get started in new careers. He criticized “The Jobs Act,” a rather
grandiose name for an otherwise good bill sponsored by one U.S. Senator from
each major party and cosponsored by 12 more “bipartisan” ones, “including three
Democrats who are running for president,” concluding it would, per the
article’s title, “hurt the students it is designed to help.” He didn’t like the bill’s shortening minimum
Pell-grant tuition-coverage eligibility for programs only eight weeks long, as “study
after study finds that too many” of them don’t succeed in “better jobs and
wages,” but did not mention how many people completing such courses are hired
into their new fields. He went off on
the “dynamics” of how certificate programs, often provided by “for-profit”
institutions (an expression he seems to use as a pejorative), “shortchange
women,” because most cosmetology certificate holders are female, and have
“limitations… stratified by race,” as more blacks than those in other groups end
their education with one, and hastily concluded that, for these two masses of
people especially, “the bill leaves students at the mercy of a higher education
market that routinely fails them.” He
cited the irrelevant statistic that “only about one in four students whose
credential is a short-term certificate go on to earn an associate’s or
bachelor’s degree within six years,” not seeing that those succeeding in fields
they have chosen usually either conclude their higher education or wait years
before continuing it. As a substitute for
more vocational certificate graduates, Carey advocated “career advising and job
search assistance,” as they “have been shown to help,” as if they, somehow, avoided
the flaws of “short training programs of wildly uneven quality.”
Instead of scuttling a not only positive but rare and
commendably bipartisan effort, how could it be improved? The answer is to require accreditations for
certificate programs. It may take a
while for bodies issuing them to develop their standards, and for schools to
meet them, but that would be healthy, as program quality at reputable
institutions would be certain to quickly improve. As well as coursework rigor, accrediting
boards should also require that certain percentages of graduates – overall, not
diced into sex and race groups – be hired in the certificates’ fields. When programs meet these standards, the Pell
grants, described by Carey as “about $3,000” for 8-week ones could start. This – not dividing Americans by demographic
factors, vilifying organizations trying to earn money, or snobbishly pitying
people for choosing careers they know do not pay well – is the solution we
want.