We don’t place enough value on jobs that aren’t finance or tech related. We don’t value them, we don’t pay them well, because these positions (teachers, other educators, people running the day-to-day of our social welfare systems, artists, etc.) are not inherent money-makers. Then, we don’t advise that young people go into these positions because they aren’t paid well.
When we talk about companies providing higher education, what do we envision that to look like? Do they serve options that allow for some exploration in the liberal arts realm, or do students need to know exactly what they want to “be” and who they want to work for as they select their “undergraduate” programs? (Based on prediction number 7 of Busteed’s “Ten Predictions for the Very Near Future of Higher Education” in Forbes, “undergraduate degree” may not be the name anymore…)
In Future U’s podcast on November 18th, 2019 (Episode 44: Community College Innovation), Michael Horn spoke to offering both guided pathways, as well as alternatives to guided pathways. “Guided pathways” better serve students who know what industry they want to jump in after completing their degree, but Horn makes a great point: not every student is like that. A lot of them have no idea what they even enjoy studying, much less what they want to do after college. Not allowing flexibility for students in this bucket is a primary criticism of European education systems, in fact.
Leaders and influencers in the United States are pushing post-secondary education in the direction of “guided pathways” and employer-approved educational systems because our higher education has become incredibly expensive. The way we value higher education is tied directly to immediate payoffs, which is difficult as we continue to expand our resources and opportunities to more and more students.
Ultimately, “guided pathways” exist in the money-maker industries. I participated in a small NACE event on Monday, and one of my colleagues from UC Berkeley mentioned that as Career Services professionals, her team was not concerned about their business students or their engineering students. It is their liberal arts students who “meander” more as they look for work after college. The straightforward pathways exist in fields such as accounting, finance, and engineering, and all of these majors are always in demand. But not everyone can be, or wants to be, an accountant or engineer, as much money as they might make, as straightforward of a path as it may be. The skeptic in me wonders who the structure of “guided pathways” really benefits, particularly with corporations at the helm. If corporations are deemed the “accreditors” of higher education and begin taking educationally-related parts of the “guided path” into their own hands, who does this system serve? The students and the people of this world – or the corporations?