It seems, no matter how much I try to escape it, I find a way to have multiple discussions about higher education policy each week. This week's has been spurred on by the SOTU Address and President Obama's call for more and more students to achieve a college education, my lingering Spring tuition balance, and the rolling social disturbances begun by unemployed young people globally.
Bloomberg's Businessweek 's current cover article is titled 'The Kids Are Not Alright.' The article touches upon many social disturbances over the past year, from the tuition hike riots in London last year to the current political uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. Each of these movements was greatly influenced by the lack of fulfilled promises made to the youth; the notion that if you are willing to work hard, and in many cases pay to become educated, that you will find a career at the other end. Young people, en masse, feel as if they have been lied to and have united to rise against those they feel are to blame. This may resonate with some who returned to graduate school, like myself, in frustration that jobs higher than temp administrative roles were not available. While I'm not ready to riot, I do think that we have reason to be concerned - and critical.
According to Businessweek, currently, though 15-34 year olds in the US make up about 34% of the work force, the age group claims just over half of the unemployment claims. Obviously, jobs cannot be created overnight, and no one has a silver bullet to grow our economy or it would have been done already. What I'm curious about, though, is the President's recent mandate that we, as the United States should have a much higher college graduation rate. While I'm inherently a huge proponent of an educated populous and work force, my worry is: What will we all do? If thousands of current college grads are living at home and unemployed or under employed, arguably not attained the training and experience necessary to be managers in the next 5 to 10 years, who will lead this newly educated work force? Or who will employ them? Most on my mind, with current state cuts to scholarship and university job funding, how will all of these new graduates pay back their loans?
I think it's not only an unfunded mandate (as I'm certainly not going to count federal student loans as government funding), but a common policy issue: are we asking the right questions? It's well intentioned to think that we can solve our problems with more education, but perhaps what we need to ask is: Where can we find real innovation? In my mind, attaining education you cannot use in a career to support yourself and family is, somewhat, futile. However, when there is great demand for talent we will both find that we have higher education achievement among most communities, and more job creation. Now... how do we mandate that?
