Re: "Credentials are so 20th century" - "The degree is doomed" - Harvard Business Review

[Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

In the Post WWII era, veterans' educational benefits heavily emphasized 
higher education, to the extent that many occupations that had never 
required degrees to enter found themselves unable to fill openings 
because the labor market became flooded with new grads with four-year 
degrees who were looking for better opportunities. Many employers 
responded by upping the education "requirements" for skilled jobs to 
make them more attractive to the new grads, and before long jobs like 
drafter or machine operator were redefined as "designer" or "technician."

Then technology made those jobs more complex than they used to be, and 
instead of just adding more OTJ training, the education requirements 
were pushed off onto academia. This resulted in academics coming to 
believe that they were the ones defining the skills that needed to be 
taught for most skilled occupations - not altogether without 
justification, since most employers now seemed to employ a "we don't 
know what we want but we'll know it when we see it" paradigm for filling 
many jobs and provided little or no guidance to academia on what to 
train people to do for them.

This model began to break down in the 80s. Reductions in government 
support to higher education resulted in people having to borrow massive 
amounts of money to get a college degree, and they expected to be paid 
enough to repay their student loans AND live a halfway normal life. 
Employers are now looking for ways to reduce the pay rates for as many 
jobs as they can, and realizing that people don't actually need college 
degrees to do a lot of jobs is the result.

Gene Kim-Eng

(I finally got to use "paradigm" in something where it actually made sense!)



On 12/8/2014 11:20 AM, Tony Chung wrote: