According to the Federal Reserve, almost 50 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed. What’s critical, said Selingo, isn’t only whether young people graduate from college but “how students go to college.”

Over the past few years, Selingo talked with high school and college students, university faculty, parents, high school teachers, recent graduates, and employers of all sizes and kinds. What he found was that there is a deep disconnect between our higher education system and our 21st-century economy.

Employers, said Selingo, are looking for students with “soft skills” like curiosity and creativity, grit and humility. They’re looking for employees who are good at problem-solving, communication, and writing. The head of global learning at Xerox told Selingo that new employees know how to take courses, but they don’t know how to learn.

College has become more structured as workplaces and career paths have become less so. “College is very task-based,” said Selingo. “It has a certain cadence to it.” Students know due dates, vacation periods, course options. In the workplace, by contrast, recent graduates face an unstructured schedule full of “competing priorities and decisions that need to be made on the fly.” The students who get the most out of college, said Selingo, have learned how to navigate life and build relationships outside the classroom.

The most successful millennials, said Selingo, share three markers of success. The first is that they have less undergraduate debt and more flexibility to choose jobs based on their desires and opportunities for career advancement rather than simply for the money.

The second is that they have at least one internship. “Hands-on learning has become so much more critical,” said Selingo. “Increasingly today it is the only pathway into a job.” Some large companies hire 75 percent of new employees through their intern pools.

The third marker is having a college degree; students with some college credit but no degree are far more likely to struggle than those who complete their degrees.

Selingo believes that students, schools, colleges, parents, and employers can all make changes to fix our current system. He offered three ways to help more young people navigate the years after high school successfully:

First, fail fast, fail cheap. “Most students today don’t see good models of failure in high school or college,” said Selingo. They write a paper or do a presentation, get a grade, and move on. At work, we write draft after draft until we get it right, and have to bounce back from failures.

Second, put more students to work, and give them hands-on learning opportunities. The number of teens working a job while in high school has dropped to a historic low. Meanwhile, colleges put a greater emphasis on general education classes that don’t teach students how to apply their theoretical knowledge in practice.

Third, give students more time. Young people are expected to head to college three months after high school graduation, finish college four years after that, and then become adults. This structure is a relic of the post-World War II era, said Selingo, when veterans went to school on the G.I. Bill, found jobs, got married, and bought houses in quick succession. By contrast, the process of financial independence takes years longer—today’s college graduates achieve that on average at age 30. Job hopping and occupation hopping are part of today’s economy.

“We need to rethink this pathway after high school graduation and into the workforce,” concluded Selingo before opening the floor up to questions from the audience.

How, asked one audience member who teaches at a community college, can students who don’t have the time or money to take internships gain the soft skills employers are looking for?

“Hands-on, project-based learning,” said Selingo. “Can we build more of the ambiguity of what the workforce is into the classroom?”

Another audience member who was reviewing college scholarship application essays from aspiring doctors asked Selingo how he would advise such students to move forward, and whether he thinks their plans will pan out in four years.

“I’m assuming they want to become doctors because we keep telling people to major in STEM,” or science, technology, engineering, and math, said Selingo. He’s heard a lot of talk about “job-ready majors.” But what is a job-ready major in a world where the technology and economy keep shifting? Too many students are “chasing jobs,” basing their majors on a job that exists today but might not exist four years from now, said Selingo.

Students are better served, he said, by choosing a major that’s rigorous, where they’ll read and write a lot, where they’ll work with the best professors, and where they’ll meet the smartest classmates.

The post Your Kid’s College Degree Might Be Worthless appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The educational landscape of today is rapidly evolving—millennials have an abundance of options for their degrees, including community college, online learning, and for-profit schools, as well as more traditional four-year private and public institutions. As they try to choose majors and classes, they have to navigate new branches of research and scholarship that seem to appear every year. And when it’s time to graduate, employment prospects are uncertain, often bewildering, and they are probably leaving school in the red. Most students borrow money for college, and the average total educational debt among graduates of not-for-profit, four-year colleges was over $28,000 in 2014—a crisis that current presidential campaigns have highlighted. So how should higher education change to serve the students of today? In advance of an upcoming Zócalo Public Square event with Jeffrey J. Selingo asking “Have universities failed millennials?”, we posed to a range of experts a related question: “Are universities doing all they should for millennials?”

The post Are Universities Cheating Millennials? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

 
Stanley Hall grew up in the tiny village of Ashfield, Massachusetts, near the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains in the northwest corner of the state. At age 18, he left home for Williams College, just 35 miles away, with a goal to “do something and be something in the world.” His parents were farmers. His mother, Abigail, wanted her son to become a minister, but young Stanley wasn’t sure about that plan. He had different ideas about college; he saw the four-year degree as a rite of passage—a chance to follow his passions and to explore.

Though Stanley excelled academically at Williams—he was voted smartest in his class—his parents considered his undergraduate years a bit erratic. When he graduated from college, he told his mom he didn’t think he had the “requirements for a pastor.” Even so, he moved to New York City and enrolled in a seminary.

The big city was intoxicating, and living there persuaded Stanley to abandon his religious studies short of a degree, and at the age of 25, after securing a loan, he set off for Germany to study philosophy. While there, Stanley traveled extensively, visiting the theaters, bars, and dance halls of Berlin. “What exactly are you doing over there?” his father sternly asked him. He added physiology and physics to his academic pursuits and told his parents he was thinking about getting a Ph.D. in philosophy. His mother questioned the benefit of a Ph.D. “Just what is a Doctor of Philosophy?” she asked.

His parents wanted him to come home and get a real job, and even Stanley wondered what was next. He felt he was drifting through his 20s.

“I am 25 and have done nothing for myself, scarcely tried my hand in the world to know where I can do anything,” he told his parents. But he continued his studies and explored Germany for a few more years. By then, Stanley was out of money, in debt, and without an advanced degree, so he returned home to the United States after his parents refused to support him financially. He was 27 years old.

Stanley Hall’s story is similar to that of many young Americans today. They go off to college, resist their parents’ pressures to choose a job-connected major, and then drift through the years after college graduation, often short of money or any real plan. But here’s the difference: Stanley Hall grew up in a totally different America—the one of the late 1800s.

We think this kind of lengthy takeoff is a relatively new situation for parents, but it’s not. Sure, the timetable to adulthood is definitely longer now than ever before and affects far more people, but even at the turn of the 20th century, when the economy offered fewer career choices for people like Hall and far fewer had college degrees, young people still roamed around throughout their 20s.

Hall eventually started a career—he earned an advanced degree, taught at Antioch College and Harvard University, married in his mid-30s, and became president of Clark University in Massachusetts. While at Clark, he developed a fascination with the period in life between childhood and adulthood. He founded the American Psychological Association, and in the early 1900s, he wrote an influential book that coined a new life stage that he called “adolescence.”

Hall described this transitional period from childhood to adulthood, between the ages of 14 and 24, as being full of “storm and stress.” Industrialization and automation, along with child labor laws, meant that teenagers no longer had to work in the factories or on the farms. And the emergence of the high school movement in the United States required children to acquire more education before entering the workforce.

In reality, the adolescent stage in the early 1900s was much shorter than Hall described. Employers didn’t demand that most teenagers go to college, so they were able to get a solid full-time job after graduating from high school, followed quickly by marriage and parenthood. Then around the middle of the last century, the job market began requiring that more young Americans add a college degree to the equation. The timetable to adulthood lengthened to the middle of a person’s 20s, although it was still short by today’s standards. After World War II, the GI Bill allowed returning veterans, mostly men, to go to college for free, and the fast-growing postwar workforce quickly absorbed them. They got married, bought houses in the developing suburbs, and had kids, achieving all those key milestones in their 20s. Between 1950 and 1960, the percentage of men 19 to 24 years old living with their parents fell by half.

That post–World War II era cemented in our minds an idea that remains to this day: teenagers graduate from high school, earn a college degree, secure a job, and move out of their childhood home—all by the age of 22 or so. But the 1950s turned out to be an anomaly in a century-long extension of the timetable to adulthood. World War II forced many adolescents, drafted to serve, to grow up before they were really ready to be adults; the GI Bill made it easy and cheap to go to college; and companies were quick to hire a new crop of college-educated veterans, as the United States faced little global competition from countries still rebuilding from the war.

Yet by the 1960s, the trend of a quick launch to adulthood was ending, and by the 1970s, young 20-somethings started living with their parents in larger numbers. In other words, the “boomerang generation,” named for college graduates who return home to live with their parents today, existed 40 years ago, too. It was just much smaller.

The difference between then and now is that manufacturing was still the foundation of the U.S. economy. In 1970, factory work accounted for 25 percent of jobs nationwide (compared with 10 percent today). Even in the bad economy of the 1970s, a college degree wasn’t necessary for financial success, allowing more than one pathway to solid middle-class jobs for most young people. At that time, the wage premium for a college degree—how much more the typical bachelor’s degree recipient earned compared with a high school graduate—was below 40 percent. In 1976, Newsweek ran a cover story asking “Who Needs College?” with a picture of two college graduates in their caps and gowns on a construction site with a jackhammer and a shovel, suggesting that as much as “27 percent of the nation’s work force may now be made up of people who are ‘overeducated’ for the jobs they hold.”

But the 1970s marked the last full decade when a large slice of the population didn’t need a college degree. The recession of the early 1980s effectively killed off manufacturing in the United States, and the next decade’s technology revolution essentially mandated education after high school. The economic benefits of World War II had finally ended. The increase in the wage premium started to speed up for college graduates, and after 1983, it turned into a runaway train. In 1983, the wage premium was 42 percent. Today, it surpasses 80 percent.

The high school movement of the early 1900s, which brought about the new life stage of adolescence, turned into the universal college movement as we neared the end of the 20th century. College did not become that much more valuable, but the loss of many blue-collar jobs caused the high school diploma to become much less valuable. More education was necessary in a knowledge economy, and acquiring that education required a longer timetable between adolescence and adulthood. Beginning in 1980, the next three decades would see a massive run-up in the number of students enrolled in college (both undergraduate and graduate students), leading to further delays in passing the milestones of adulthood, from marriage to buying a house, and forever changing how we view what had been a predictable transition from education to the workforce.

The post How the Knowledge Economy Delays Adulthood appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.