Check Your Underlying Assumptions

Wisdom tells us to examine the underlying assumptions of any argument before agreeing with it. That way, when offered two options, neither of which is palatable, one can sometimes show that the underlying assumptions behind the two options are flawed and a third more agreeable option will make itself apparent.

The President, the US Department of Education, DESE, even the Missouri legislature are pushing for changes to education to "prepare students for the workforce of tomorrow." There's a lot of talk about whether this approach to learning is appropriate, whether it is communistic in nature, who should design it etc. But let us for a moment examine the underlying assumption behind it.

Why should the federal or state government CARE if students are educated? Because an uneducated child frequently becomes an unemployed adult and the government (on all levels) has instituted safety nets, otherwise known as entitlement programs (welfare, WIC, food stamps, public housing, free lunch etc.) to catch these people. All of these programs cost money and those out of work people don't contribute to the economy, which doesn't increase the tax base, which makes the government harder to run.

If we peel back one more layer, however, we come to the assumption that better educated children will lead to employed adults. Education will reduce unemployment, boost the economy and overall aid the operation of government. But the Economic Policy Institute says THIS assumption may not be valid. The argument frequently given is,

"[T]the jobs problem is not a lack of demand for workers but rather a mismatch between workers’ skills and employers’ needs. Another version of the skills mismatch is also being told about the future: we face an impending skills shortage, particularly a shortfall of college graduates, after the economy returns to full employment.

The common aspect of each of these claims about structural problems is that education is the solution, the only solution. In other words, delivering the appropriate education and training to workers becomes the primary if not sole policy challenge if we hope to restore full employment in the short and medium term and if we expect to prevent a (further) loss of competitiveness and a further rise in wage and income inequality in the longer term."

An EPI Briefing Paper challenges this critical assumption and throws into question whether we are shoving a whole lot of money towards the wrong solution for the wrong problem. The paper, citing the work of several Federal Reserve Banks and researchers, found:

• There is no one education group—particularly not the least educated, as the structural argument would suggest—fueling the rise of long-term unemployment in this recession. If there has been some transformation of the workplace leaving millions of workers inadequate for the currently available jobs, then it was not based on a major educational upscaling of jobs.
• The challenge the nation faces as high unemployment persists is not better education and training for those currently unemployed. The problem is a lack of jobs.
• It is hard to find some ever-increasing need for college graduates that is going unmet: college graduates have not seen their real wage rise in 10 years, and the pay gap with high school graduates has not increased in that time period. Moreover, even before the recession college students and graduates were working as free interns, a phenomenon we would not observe if college graduates were in such demand.

EPI contends not that we don’t have enough people with the right skills to fill the jobs in the American workforce, but rather that we don't have enough jobs to employ the people looking for work. This makes the question not, “How do we best educate people for the jobs of the future?” but rather, “How do we create jobs in the future?”

We know that small businesses are usually the ones that develop jobs that bring the nation out of recession. In other words, jobs are created by people recognizing and then working to fill a demand for products or services. Even more simply, the best way to get people working is for them to make their own jobs, not wait around for someone else to create them. Education certainly plays a role in this process. It can provide a foundation of basic skills like math, communication and maybe even a little science. To prepare students to succeed in an entrepreneurial society, it should promote creativity and an urge to look beyond oneself to find what others want and then meet those wants.

Looking at the current trend in education towards group think, group projects (where individual achievement and creativity are reigned in) and standardized testing (of what we already know) it does not appear that we are preparing the students of today for the needs of tomorrow. To claim that we can even know what skill sets are going to be needed tomorrow in a dynamic, entrepreneurial economy is illogical on its face. If we knew what was needed then some entrepreneur would already be working to supply it. The whole argument for preparing our students for the workforce of tomorrow falls apart if the underlying assumption that we can identify skill sets that are going to be needed tomorrow is false. We are chasing a phantom. We may find that we have a fabulous education system where everyone scores really well on the tests and yet our unemployment numbers continue to rise. We may push a whole generation into the debt of post secondary education with little or no hope of getting a job to pay off that debt. Maybe, before we plunk our money on the table, we should spend a little time checking the underlying assumptions.