Academia’s Growing Credibility Gap

The gap between what academia promises and what it actually delivers is becoming ever more apparent by the day. “And I have to tell you that there is anger [among students] when we tell them that green jobs are going to be there and they aren’t,” Robert Templin, president of Northern Virginia Community College said Thursday.

Templin spoke at a forum co-sponsored by The University of Phoenix and The Atlantic. Meanwhile, students in search of greener jobs are missing out on real ones.

“There are 12 million manufacturing jobs, most of them unfilled, because people don’t have the skills,” Jay Timmons of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) said at The Atlantic Forum. Indeed, Jane Oates, Assistant Secretary at the U. S. Department of Labor (DOL) claims that guest workers from abroad are filling some of those jobs.

Both Democratic president Bill Clinton and his Republican successor George W. Bush promoted the Brave New World of the service economy that would replace the Industrial Age. Perhaps they were mistaken.

“An economy that doesn’t make things doesn’t grow,” Timmons argued. The stagnant incomes in place even before the current economic crisis seem to underline that point.

Oates, an Obama Administration appointee, noted that every manufacturing job created multiplies out to create at least two more. Nor do these jobs pay chicken feed.

U. S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, who keynoted the Atlantic Forum, pointed out that welding jobs pay about $90,000 a year.  Oates averred that guest workers are filling many of these positions that would otherwise go begging.

Sen. Hutchinson said that one company she encountered solved its welding shortage by co-sponsoring a course in it at the local community college. It’s nice to know that some colleges are teaching something useful.

“American higher education has become so obsessed with filling seats that they are diluting course requirements,” Oates claimed.

“At one company in Texas, the CEO told me, ‘I could hire every engineering graduate in the state and I still wouldn’t have enough college-ready engineering students,’” Sen. Hutchinson remembered.

Yet and still, all agreed that the problems in education occur long before college admissions take place. “More than half of the graduates who come to us every year require remediation,” Templin stated.

This functional illiteracy continues to occur despite the alleged rigors of No Child Left Behind, a law whose benefits largely seem to have been illusory.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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