One of the many conundrums in labor economics is whether a college graduate has attained skills or acquired a credential. A diploma is just a piece of paper, albeit a pretty one; it is given only after a lot of hard work. But what does it mean?
This is what we know: the paper may get your foot in the door, but it won’t do your work for you; the world does not owe you a living; there is no money-back guarantee on your diploma.
This is what we also know: most college students have to be organized; they need to write and think critically; they need to assimilate a large amount of information in a short period of time. Of course, some college students skate by without learning anything, but most pick up skills that they can use on the job.
And, most pick up skills that they can use in life, because the world changes so quickly. The skills used to get through college can also be used to learn new skills, and we’ll all have to learn new skills.
Most undergraduate curricula consist of two years of general education credits and prerequisites, followed by two years of work in one’s major area of study. Some students complain that the general education credits are a waste of time and money. Some professors complain that the emphasis on work in the major takes away from the courses needed to learn the things that will take one far beyond the first job.
The debate sharpens as more and more specific, career-oriented majors are developed. Take a look at the 150 or so majors offered by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: is Agricultural Communication really so specialized that it needs its very own major, separate from Communications, Journalism, or Marketing? Are Hospitality Management, Recreation Sports and Tourism, and plain old Management all that different from one another? Is someone with a Management degree less able to manage a hotel or restaurant than someone with a Hospitality Management degree? Should the Hospitality Management graduate be allowed to work as a sales manager for an industrial equipment company?
Some of it is turf wars – different academic departments want to find a way to ensure that they continue to exist, and if that means setting up a brand new major, so be it.
Some of it is that students are looking to improve their chances at an entry-level job in a field that seems like fun. Why be a boring old Marketing major if you really want to do Sports Marketing?
And some of it is employers who can’t quite see how a regular old Business major would be able to handle the their special snowflake needs, and we certainly can’t ask employers to provide any sort of training or worker development that might cut into short-term profits.
But what if you take that job in Agricultural Communications and find that you hate it? That maybe you would enjoy work in hospitality instead? Or developing computer code? Then, the general skills will come into play.
Or, what if you graduate in Agricultural Communications and find that all of the agri-business companies have outsourced or automated the work. (Hey, it could happen.) Then what do you do?
You shouldn’t have to go back to college to get another degree to get another job in a different field. That’s why a general education matters and narrow career fields are a bad idea.
James Fallows wrote a great piece on credentialism about thirty years ago, and many of his arguments still hold true. He was wrong about the loss of entrepreneurial spirit, but right about the weakness of people who can earn credentials but who maybe can’t do the work as well as someone who lacks the requisite pieces of paper.
General education could be made less fluffy, but it matters.
