Further Reading...
We couldn’t resist quoting a bit more from the article “Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature”:
This focus on [tertiary education] as job training reflects not only a misreading of the data on jobs and pay, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of the way labor markets work, the way careers develop and the purpose of higher education… One study by economists at Yale found that half of the premium earned by STEM majors can be explained not by what they learned in [uni] but by the greater intelligence, diligence and other characteristics that they brought to those majors in the first place. Or to put it another way, they would have earned more no matter what they majored in. And, of course, starting a major is not the same as completing it … those who chose majors simply to please their parents are more likely to give up or burn out. “It’s just harder to weather the hard times if you don’t have the intrinsic motivation”… You might not expect [school leavers] to understand that careers don’t proceed in straight lines, but surely their parents ought to. ... one study found that only 27 percent of people have jobs that are substantially related to their college majors — a reality that applies even to the STEM fields.
Having made that critique, Steven Pearlstein advocates what sort of education many students not only resonate with but will also benefit from in the future job market...and it has to do with 'the human factor':
In today’s fast-changing global economy, the most successful enterprises aren’t looking for workers who know a lot about only one thing. They are seeking employees who are nimble, curious and innovative. The work done by lower-level accountants, computer programmers, engineers, lawyers and financial anal
ysts is already being outsourced to India and the Philippines; soon it will be done by computers. The good jobs of the future will go to those who can collaborate widely, think broadly and challenge conventional wisdom — precisely the capacities that a liberal arts education is meant to develop.
