University versus Vocational Careers & Financial Outcomes

Interesting article from NPR US on how many high paying vocational or trade jobs are vacant due to deference towards higher education, college or university, but often uncertain employment outcomes and lower salaries from the latter?

Why? Too many middle class see university as a path to upward mobility, but may indicate that some occupations guarantee employment and high salaries whether vocational or university? 

Conversely, many university or college graduates struggle to find related employment and reasonable salaries versus many trade or vocational occupations, in demand.  Meanwhile many developed nations have unskilled and skilled worker shortages made worse by ageing and decline in the working age population that has passed the ‘demographic sweet spot’, but compounded further by many deferring to higher education.

From NPR National Public Radio:

High-paying jobs that don’t need a college degree? Thousands of them sit empty

Like most other American high school students, Garret Morgan had it drummed into him constantly: Go to college. Get a bachelor’s degree.

“All through my life it was, ‘If you don’t go to college you’re going to end up on the streets,’ ” Morgan said back in 2018. “Everybody’s so gung-ho about going to college.”

So he tried it for a while. Then he quit and started training as an ironworker, which is what he was doing on a weekday morning in a nondescript high-ceilinged building with a concrete floor in an industrial park near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

Morgan and several other men and women were dressed in work boots and hard hats, clipped to safety harnesses with heavy wrenches hanging from their belts. They were being timed as they wrestled 600-pound I-beams into place.

Back then, the demand for ironworkers was rising – and it still is: the sector is growing 4% annually, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Ironworkers earn, on average, $27.48 per hour, or $57,160 per year. Morgan was already working on a job site when he wasn’t at the Pacific Northwest Ironworkers shop. At 20, he was earning $28.36 an hour, plus benefits.

Five years later, he’s on the job full time, working “six-10s” — industry lingo for 10 hours a day, six days a week. He helped build the Rainier Square Tower in Seattle and a data center for Microsoft. “I’m loving it every day,” he said. “It was absolutely the right choice.

As for his friends from high school? “Someday maybe they’ll make as much as me.”

Raising alarms

While a shortage of workers pushes wages higher in the skilled trades, the financial return from a bachelor’s degree is softening, even as the price, and the average debt into which it plunges students, remain high.

But high school graduates have been so effectively encouraged to get a bachelor’s that high-paid jobs requiring shorter and less expensive training are going unfilled. This affects those students and also poses a real threat to the economy.

“Parents want success for their kids,” Mike Clifton, who taught machining for more than two decades at the Lake Washington Institute of Technology before retiring, said in 2018. “They get stuck on [four-year bachelor’s degrees], and they’re not seeing the shortage there is in tradespeople until they hire a plumber and have to write a check.”

The Washington State Auditor found in 2017 that good jobs in the skilled trades were going begging because students are being almost universally steered to bachelor’s degrees. Recent labor statistics suggest that’s still the case – in Washington State and around the country.

President Biden, in his State of the Union address this month, spoke of “jobs paying an average of $130,000 a year, and many do not require a college degree.”

Among other things, the Washington auditor recommended that career guidance — including choices that require less than four years in college — start as early as the seventh grade.

“There is an emphasis on the four-year university track” in high schools, Chris Cortines, who co-authored the report, said after it was issued. Yet, nationwide, nearly three out of 10 high school grads who go to four-year public universities haven’t earned degrees within six years, the most recent figures from the National Student Clearinghouse show. At four-year private colleges, that number is nearly one in five.

“Being more aware of other types of options may be exactly what they need,” Cortines said. In spite of a perception that college “is the sole path for everybody,” he said, “when you look at the types of wages that apprenticeships and other career areas pay, and the fact that you do not pay four years of tuition and you’re paid while you learn, these other paths really need some additional consideration.”

And it’s not just in Washington state.

Today, nearly 90% of construction companies nationwide are having trouble finding qualified workers, according to the Associated General Contractors of America; in Washington, the proportion is 88%. Ironworkers remain in particularly short supply, along with drywall installers and sheet metal workers.

The $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure plan – Biden’s signature legislation passed by Congress in 2021 – will create 1.5 million construction jobs per year for the next 10 years, the White House says, boosting the share of all jobs that are connected with rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure from 11% to 14%, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Median wages for construction jobs are higher than the median pay for all jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

“The economy is definitely pushing this issue to the forefront,” Amy Morrison Goings, president of the Lake Washington Institute of Technology, which educates students in these fields, said in 2018. “There isn’t a day that goes by that a business doesn’t contact the college and ask the faculty, ‘who’s ready to go to work?’ “

In all, some 30 million jobs in the United States that pay an average of $55,000 per year don’t require bachelor’s degrees, according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.

Yet the march to bachelor’s degrees continues. And while people who get them are more likely to be employed and make more money than those who don’t, that premium appears to be softening; their inflation-adjusted median earnings were lower in 2018, the most recent year for which the figure is available, than in 2010.

“There’s that perception of the bachelor’s degree being the American dream, the best bang for your buck,” said Kate Blosveren Kreamer, deputy executive director of Advance CTE, an association of state officials who work in career and technical education. “The challenge is that in many cases it’s become the fallback. People are going to college without a plan, without a career in mind, because the mindset in high school is just, ‘Go to college.’ “

It’s not that finding a job in the trades, or even manufacturing, means needing no education after high school. Most regulators and employers require certificates, certifications or associate degrees. But those cost less and take less time than earning a bachelor’s degree.

Tuition and fees for in-state students to attend a community or technical college in Washington State, for example, came to less than half the cost last year of a four-year public university, and less than a fifth of the price of attending the cheapest private four-year college.

Washington is not the only state nudging students into education for the trades. At least 39 states have taken steps to encourage career and technical education, and many have increased funding for it, a 2017 Brookings Institution review found.

At the federal level, legislation introduced in Congress in January would make some short-term workforce programs eligible for federal Pell Grants. “For too long, the college-for-all mentality drove Americans toward expensive and often ineffective education pathways,” its sponsors said. “As our country stares down a historic worker shortage, fewer Americans are getting the skills they need to be successful.”

The branding issue

Money isn’t the only issue, advocates for career and technical education say. An even bigger challenge is convincing parents that it leads to good jobs.

“They remember ‘voc-ed’ from when they were in high school, which is not necessarily what they aspire to for their own kids,” Kreamer said. Added Kairie Pierce, apprenticeship and college director for the Washington State Labor Council of the AFL-CIO: “It sort of has this connotation of being a dirty job. ‘It’s hard work — I want something better for my son or daughter.’ “

The Lake Washington Institute of Technology, about 20 miles from Seattle, changed its name from Lake Washington Technical College, said Goings, its president, to avoid being stereotyped as a vocational school.

These perceptions fuel the worry that, if students are urged as early as the seventh grade to consider the trades, then low-income, first-generation students, and students of color will be channeled into blue-collar jobs while wealthier and white classmates are pushed by their parents to get bachelor’s degrees.

“When CTE was vocational education, part of the reason we had a real disinvestment from the system was because we were tracking low-income and minority kids into these pathways,” Kreamer said. “There is this tension between, do you want to focus on the people who would get the most benefit from these programs, and — is that tracking?”

In a quest for prestige and rankings, and to bolster real-estate values, high schools also like to emphasize the number of their graduates who go on to four-year colleges and universities.

Jessica Bruce enrolled in community college after high school for one main reason: because she was recruited to play fast-pitch softball. “I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life,” she said.

But she “couldn’t quite figure it out,” she says today. She was an apprentice ironworker in 2018, making $32.42 an hour, or more than $60,000 a year, while continuing her training. At 5-foot-2, “I can run with the big boys,” she said at the time, laughing.

Five years later, now 46, she’s starting a job installing 500 tons of rebar for a Boeing hangar near Seattle, working mostly outside, which she likes. She’s also back in school, of sorts, taking online courses to get her certification to become a fitness instructor as a side gig. And she’s bought a Harley.

Bruce says she has “absolutely no regrets,” herself. As for her own daughter, who’s 15, “if it’s college then it’s college,” she says. “I fully support that.” But students now in high school “are becoming maybe a little bit more aware” of the potential for making good money in the trades, she added. “I know my daughter is aware. I’ve told her there’s every kind of trade out there.”

The original 2018 version of this story was co-reported with Ashley Gross of KNKX.

For related blogs and articles on adult learning, career guidance, demography, economics, industry based training, VET vocational education & training and younger generations click through:

University Higher Education or VET Vocational Training?

Soft Skills for Work and Employment

Study Advice for Starting University

University Graduate Employment

International Education – National Political Challenges – Return of International Students and Education in Australia

Article in The Conversation Australia titled ‘COVID halved international student numbers in Australia. The risk now is we lose future skilled workers and citizens‘ about the prospects for universities with international students returning, but in much lower numbers. This would also affect the skilled permanent immigration system by decreasing the available pool of potential applicants onshore.

However, there are several related points including the broader sector, neither countering nor rebutting nativist PR in media/politics addressing ageing monocultural voters, backgrounded by local and global demographic decline.

The latter is a contentious point as Australians have been subjected to decades of imported fossil fuel supported ZPG spruiking ‘nebulous’ NOM net overseas migration representing short term churn over (inflated by the UNPD in 2006) demanding more visa, border and immigration restrictions to halt population growth for environmental hygiene; ‘greenwashing’ and ‘dog whistling’.

While most comments reflect the zeitgeist of demanding more support for locals, a comment from Conor King, a Melbourne based academic, elaborates and explains better:

‘The article is a very narrow emphasis on a major achievement of providing education to a great number of people.  With over 80% of students leaving Australia to return to home country or go to another, the residence outcome is both useful but far from typical – 80% figures comes from Immigration-Treasury study of Australia’s population and immigration from early 2000s to mid 2010s.  

That was before the massive expansion in Chinese students in a few unis (far from all) – with Chinese students preferred by Immigration because they do return home in large numbers and otherwise tend to obey visa requirements.

What is interesting is the comments that seem to forget that humans wandered out of Africa through some mix of need, whimsy and opportunity, and have not stopped wandering since.  

For various periods some places experienced less, and the folk there suffering physical, cultural and philosophical isolation turning them inward and inbred. Reflected in current day nationalisms and their appeals to modern day stories of times past.

A national border should be like a state or local government border – an indicator of a set of ever developing local customs and rules, not a barrier to movement of people, ideas or goods.

In sum – Australia’s education institutions educate people – lots of them.  That’s good.’

King points out a misunderstanding that has been encouraged by ‘Australia’s best demographer’ informing media i.e. at times suggesting ALL students are eligible for automatic permanent residency when it’s only a minority who are eligible and then only another minority actually gain residency under the permanent cap.

Further, the sector is much broader than universities, even if they look down their noses, but also includes schools, English colleges and the vocational sector; who are also important for lower skilled pathways but also act as ‘net financial budget contributors’, why is this important?

Although the Anglosphere puts much trust in suboptimal UNPD data analysis, the OECD population data gives a much more stark graphical presentation i.e. all cohorts in most nations are in decline but increasing dependency ratios of pensioners and retirees to be supported by public services, but fewer tax payers?

‘COVID halved international student numbers in Australia. The risk now is we lose future skilled workers and citizens

The saying “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone” reminds us not to take things for granted. It is often when we no longer have something or someone that we recognise the value of what we’ve lost. This is true of international students in Australia whose numbers halved during the pandemic.

Can hindsight help us understand what we had and help to guide our future? That question lingers as tens of thousands of new and returning international students arrive back in Australia now that borders have reopened.

Students pursue international education for a variety of reasons. The main one is to improve their employment prospects.

International students are looking for high-quality, relevant curriculum and credentials that will best serve their career plans. While studying, they also seek social connections that help them to navigate local education and employment systems.

The pandemic created chaos and uncertainty about enrolments, border closures, flight availability and quarantine requirements. Over the past two years, many international students had to put their plans on hold. They hung on to the possibility of studying and working in Australia.

Let’s not forget, they can choose other countries that will be seeking highly educated and skilled graduates. Some have already moved on to countries where borders were open, such as Canada. These countries offered access to high-quality international education with fewer complications and greater certainty about transitioning to work visas.

Their absence hit us hard

Consider what Australia lost when so many international students were gone. In 2019, they contributed an estimated $40.3 billion to the economy. International education supported about 250,000 jobs in Australia.

Border closures reduced enrolments by up to 70% in some parts of the higher education sector.

The financial impacts on Australian universities have been smaller than originally predicted, but the loss of billions in revenue should not be discounted. Universities were exposed to the risks of depending on a never-ending flow of new international students and their tuition fees. The pandemic’s impacts on university finances led to the loss of as many as 35,000 academic and professional jobs.

Local communities and businesses also missed the consumer power of international students and visiting family members who purchased goods and services. Employers have struggled to find enough local workers for job vacancies that these students would fill.

Australia must extend the welcome mat.

The Australian government recently announced incentives for international students to return soon to help overcome labour shortages and stimulate market growth. Visa fee rebates and relaxed restrictions on allowable working hours are aimed at recovery in the international student market, while filling gaps in the workforce. What remains to be seen is how well entry-level and part-time jobs in service and hospitality will translate into future employment opportunities that match these students’ qualifications.

The fall in international student numbers also meant losing key resources for intercultural learning. Although many of us are longing to travel abroad for a dose of intercultural exposure, learning at home between local and international students is a relatively untapped resource. Increasing the numbers of international and local students studying together is part of the solution identified by the Australian Strategy for International Education.

Many international students will need extra support to develop social capital – the friendships, community contacts, mentors and networks that help to build a sense of belonging now and in the future.

International students have been treated like commodities for higher education and the labour market. But they are people, whose choice of international education is connected to their hopes and plans after graduating.

The global pursuit of talent will increase graduates’ opportunities to decide which country they choose for education, for employment and for permanent migration. Not every international graduate will choose to stay in Australia. Fluctuating immigration policy makes it difficult to predict who will be allowed to stay and who will not.

This is not a short-term issue

Many countries, including Australia, need to attract talented graduates to make up for low birth rates, low immigration due to the pandemic and skilled worker shortages. International students are preferred immigrants because they combine experience from their home countries with experience studying and living locally.

As international students return to Australia, the welcome mat needs to stay out longer. It matters how we support them, not only upon arrival, but throughout their academic programs and as they prepare for their future employment.

International students invest in their education and the country where they study. We in turn need to recognise their many contributions and invest in their potential.

The longer-term view requires strategy for supporting them as students, employees and future associates, within and beyond Australia’s borders. Let’s think carefully about what can be improved as international students return to Australia.’

For blogs and article related to international education and demography click through:

Demography, Immigration, Population and the Greening of Hate

Population Pyramids, Economics, Ageing, Pensions, Demography and Misunderstanding Data Sets

Population Decline and Effects on Taxation, Benefits, Economy and Society

E-Learning for University Students in Africa

International Education – Foreign Student – Value

Immigration is not Cause of Unemployment

Immigration Population Growth Decline NOM Net Overseas Migration

EU Tourism Skills and Employment with Coronavirus

While Covid-19 has caused much unemployment with lock downs and related economic issues, tourism and hospitality vocational skills are key in developing and driving short term to long term employment for youth and women especially, for broad economic recovery in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

 

From CEDEFOP The European Centre for Development of Vocational Training:

 

‘Tourism at a crossroads: skills and jobs demand in the coronavirus era

 

As EU Member States struggle to revive their tourism sectors in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, skills are emerging as the deciding factor for successful economic recovery.

 

Tourism is a key employer of the EU economy. Employing some 13 million people, it contributes to substantial spill-over employment effects in other sectors, especially in construction, retail and healthcare. From 2000 to 2017, more than 1.8 million new jobs were created in the sector.

 

People working in tourism are vulnerable to coronavirus-related challenges and skills development implications. Almost one quarter of them are seasonal and temporary workers. The sector also attracts young workers, acting as a first entry point to the labour market for recent graduates, as well as a response to youth unemployment. It also offers easy employment access to vulnerable groups, such as women (almost two thirds of the workers in the sector), and migrants….

 

Economic Impact of Tourism (Source: CEDEFOP)

 

….The sector also suffers from negative perceptions regarding working conditions and career prospects. Offering targeted and high-quality training opportunities could be a way to attract more and better-prepared candidates. Reskilling and upskilling of existing employees is necessary to respond to the emerging and persisting new trends in the sector, such as provision of services to targeted groups of visitors (for example, elderly or with disabilities).

 

Understanding the business and societal challenges and opportunities that affect employment levels, occupation tasks and, consequently, skill profiles in tourism is paramount for designing and offering relevant high-quality vocational education and training.

 

Read the full Skills developments and trends in the tourism sector analysis for in-depth information.’

 

For more articles and blogs about adult learning, career guidance, COVID-19, digital marketing, economics, EU European Union, industry based training, small business, soft skills, tourism marketing, training delivery, VET vocational education & training, work skills and younger generations click through.

 

University Higher Education or VET Vocational Training?

Guardian article has interesting points about the value or not of higher education versus vocational, white collar professionals versus practical or blue collar occupations and front line personnel in let sectors versus invisible managers. Important that career counsellors, teachers, parents, peers and communities are aware so that youth are not compelled or led to expensive higher education for unclear graduate outcomes and careers.

 

Coronavirus is teaching the UK it’s wrong to deride the practical professions

Liz Lightfoot

 

Post-pandemic, we must put vocational courses centre stage and stop favouring academic pupils over those who invent, make or care.

 

When my son was 15 he announced he intended to study law and be a barrister. “Why law?” I asked. “That’s what clever people do,” he replied.

 

He changed his mind, but at universities up and down the land there are students struggling and dropping out of courses because they chose what clever people do, often under pressure from their families to pursue academic, rather than more practical, routes to employment.

 

As the Covid-19 pandemic whips us to our senses, the full extent of our reliance on people who didn’t pursue an academic route has hit us like a hurricane. So this has to be the time, at last, for the UK to put vocational courses and qualifications centre stage. That means recognising them for what they are, not chasing the chimera of parity of esteem with academic ones, as in the past.

 

We don’t need only doctors, lawyers, civil servants, accountants and money analysts. We are crying out for care workers, plumbers, electricians and car mechanics. We applaud manufacturers who change tack to make ventilators and face masks. We are prostrate with gratitude to those keeping some semblance of normality going – the supermarket cashiers, bus and train drivers, and the refuse collectors. Oh, how we miss our hairdressers as we battle to disguise our greying locks.

 

We’re grateful to the farmers who keep producing, the drivers who deliver our online purchases; postal delivery workers; to the cheerful cornershop owner, the bakers, the ICT technicians who can restore our devices.

 

Then there’s a new appreciation of the caring services, social workers, nurses, paramedics and, of course, care workers. Parents, struggling to amuse and home educate their children, are now in awe of the nursery and teaching professions….

 

For related blogs and articles about adult learning, career guidance, higher education teaching, TAFE education & training, VET vocational education & training and younger generations click through.

Skills of Critical Thinking

Critical thinking and related literacies are viewed as essential soft, work or life skills to be taught and learnt by school students, apprentices, trainees, university students, employees and broader society, but how?

Teaching Skills of Critical Thinking in Students (Image copyright Pexels)

Following is parts of an article from The Conversation focusing upon argumentation, logic, psychology and the nature of science to help people understand and analyse the world round us in an age of fake news, conspiracy theories, anti-science and anti-education sentiments.

‘How to teach all students to think critically

December 18, 2014 2.27pm AEDT

All first year students at the University of Technology Sydney could soon be required to take a compulsory maths course in an attempt to give them some numerical thinking skills.

The new course would be an elective next year and mandatory in 2016 with the university’s deputy vice-chancellor for education and students Shirley Alexander saying the aim is to give students some maths “critical thinking” skills.

This is a worthwhile goal, but what about critical thinking in general?

Most tertiary institutions have listed among their graduate attributes the ability to think critically. This seems a desirable outcome, but what exactly does it mean to think critically and how do you get students to do it?

So what should any mandatory first year course in critical thinking look like? There is no single answer to that, but let me suggest a structure with four key areas:

 

Argumentation

The most powerful framework for learning to think well in a manner that is transferable across contexts is argumentation.  Arguing, as opposed to simply disagreeing, is the process of intellectual engagement with an issue and an opponent with the intention of developing a position justified by rational analysis and inference.

 

Logic

Logic is fundamental to rationality. It is difficult to see how you could value critical thinking without also embracing logic.  People generally speak of formal logic – basically the logic of deduction – and informal logic – also called induction.  Deduction is most of what goes on in mathematics or Suduko puzzles and induction is usually about generalising or analogising and is integral to the processes of science.

 

Psychology

One of the great insights of psychology over the past few decades is the realisation that thinking is not so much something we do, as something that happens to us. We are not as in control of our decision-making as we think we are.  We are masses of cognitive biases as much as we are rational beings. This does not mean we are flawed, it just means we don’t think in the nice, linear way that educators often like to think we do.

 

The Nature of Science

Learning about what the differences are between hypotheses, theories and laws, for example, can help people understand why science has credibility without having to teach them what a molecule is, or about Newton’s laws of motion.  Understanding some basic statistics also goes a long way to making students feel more empowered to tackle difficult or complex issues. It’s not about mastering the content, but about understanding the process.’

 

This article is from 2014, however it is unclear what Federal and State Education Departments are doing to include the explicit teaching and learning of critical thinking skills to students via curricula and syllabi?

For more articles about university teaching and learning skills click through.