School-to-Career Blog 011707
The views expressed here are Chris' and are not necessarily the same as the Wake County Public School System.
What's Wrong with Vocational School? - Charles Murray, Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2007
Highlights from the article
... people with IQs of 100 or higher ... far too many of them are going to four-year colleges.
In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses.
Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.
There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college--enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.
Government policy contributes to the problem by making college scholarships and loans too easy to get, but its role is ancillary. The demand for college is market-driven, because a college degree does, in fact, open up access to jobs that are closed to people without one. The fault lies in the false premium that our culture has put on a college degree.
A reality about the job market must eventually begin to affect the valuation of a college education: The spread of wealth at the top of American society has created an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen.
Walk into Microsoft or Google with evidence that you are a brilliant hacker, and the job interviewer is not going to fret if you lack a college transcript.
The ability to present an employer with evidence that you are good at something, without benefit of a college degree, will continue to increase, and so will the number of skills to which that evidence can be attached. Every time that happens, the false premium attached to the college degree will diminish.
People who go to college are not better or worse people than anyone else; they are merely different in certain interests and abilities. That is the way college should be seen. There is reason to hope that eventually it will be.
Read the entire article. web page, PDF (620 KB)
Chris' thoughts -
It's great to find well respected educators saying what I've been saying for years!
Far too many of our student's parents think that a four-year college education is a ticket to success. It also gives them parental-bragging rights by allowing them to boast that their little Johnny graduated from XYZ University. A better boast would be that little Johnny has a great job that he really enjoys, has a great family, and he is highly respected in his community. The college degree is something that divides the haves from the have-nots. Americans seem determined to keep that division alive.
Why can't we just respect the dignity and importance of all jobs? No one is a better person because they graduated from a university. They just chose a different path. It is great that those individuals who were born with a high IQ have chosen to enter professions that require a high level of intellect. But that doesn't make them any better than the janitor who empties their wastebasket every night.
We're all part of a big community. It's up to us to respect the contributions that all community members make to the community.
Chris writes for the following Blogs:
- Wake County School-to-Career Blog
- Association for Career and Technical Education's (ACTE) New and Related Services Division, School-to-Work/Careers Section (ACTE blog)
- Association for Career and Technical Education's (ACTE) New and Related Services Division, School-to-Work/Careers Section (ACTE blog) (alternate view)
- Wake County Public School System's Morning Announcements (WCPSS blog)
Wake County Public School System programs are staffed and offered without regard to race, gender, age, color, religion, national origin, citizenship status, political affiliation, or disability.