You Can Get a Good Job Without a Bachelor’s Degree

Careers in skilled services pay well. More Americans just need the right training.

“To get a good job you must have a bachelor’s degree.” This is a common myth that needs to be debunked. For years, Americans have been told that, with the decline in manufacturing, the blue-collar job that required a high school degree or less was gone for good.

The truth is that not all good jobs for people with less than a bachelor’s degree have been eliminated. Far from it. There are 30 million jobs in the U.S. that pay good wages without a B.A.: The median salary is $55,000 with an opportunity to move up the career ladder.

But it’s important to understand that today’s good jobs are different from those of the past. Job-seekers without a B.A. in 2017 need to search beyond traditional blue-collar sectors and look to skilled-services industries. Nationally, a gain of 4 million jobs in financial services, health services, information technology and other skilled-service industries has more than offset the 2.5 million well-paying jobs lost in manufacturing since 1991.

There is a catch: To secure these roles, workers need to get some education or training beyond their high school diploma. Much of the growth in good jobs that pay without a B.A. (including in manufacturing) has benefited workers with associate degrees or some college education — 4.1 million since 1991.

These jobs are not isolated to just a few communities. Twenty-three states have increased good jobs that pay without a B.A. in blue-collar industries, including Utah where these jobs have more than doubled. Jobs in skilled services have also increased in nearly every state, more than doubling in Arizona, Idaho and Montana since 1991.

We’re not saying that B.A.s are overvalued — the degree is still one of the surest ways to gain a competitive edge in the job market and earn middle-class wages. But we cannot expect every student to attend a four-year college and get a B.A. before they start working.

College debt is at an all-time high, and students are questioning the return on their investment. Many young people will work full-time for years before getting a B.A.; others will never complete a four-year degree at all. Those without a bachelor’s degree shouldn’t be consigned to a lifetime of minimum-wage jobs or miss out on a chance to be a part of the middle class.

There’s an added concern: Not everyone has equal access to the jobs we’re talking about. White workers have the largest share of good jobs that pay without a B.A., but the number is declining. Latino workers have a smaller share, but have seen the most growth, and black workers have the smallest share with only slight growth. Men hold the largest share of these good jobs, 70 percent, a proportion that has been consistent for 25 years. Women, lamentably, have not gained ground in the non-B.A. job market.

We can do better.

The best way to promote Americans’ access to good jobs at the sub-baccalaureate level is through policies that strengthen the connections between school and work. Policy-makers should ensure that students are being exposed to career possibilities as early as middle school, and that high school students have greater access to career and technical education, work-based learning programs such as internships and youth apprenticeships, and effective career counseling that helps them get on pathways to good careers.

Across the country, we see states and cities developing innovative new approaches to prepare students for careers in in-demand fields. Colorado has started paid apprenticeships for high school students to gain real-world experience in growing sectors such as advanced manufacturing and technology. New Orleans is developing paid internship opportunities aligned with credentials that have value in the labor market. And 34 states have said they will consider some measure of career readiness in how they hold schools and districts accountable under the Every Student Succeeds Act, the new federal K-12 law.

In postsecondary education and training, leaders should use three strategies to promote the labor market value of such programs. First, they should ensure the transparency of non-B.A. college programs’ economic value by investing in consumer information tools — students should know what college will be worth. Second, governments should encourage the use of outcome-based funding models, such as the Department of Education’s gainful employment rule, so that programs are awarded public and private funding based on how their graduates are doing in the workplace. Finally, policy-makers, educators and employers need to better align skills training with the needs of hiring companies. Tax incentives — such as the tax credits for employer-provided training used by Kentucky, Virginia and several other states — have helped to improve collaboration.

A college degree will always be an important path to work. But it’s not the only path, or even the best one. The more schools, businesses and governments do to make that clear, the better off we’ll be.

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Racial Discrimination at Harvard and America's 'Elite' Universities
    
The Justice Department made news on Thursday when it filed a “statement of interest” in a long-running lawsuit against Harvard University that supported claims of Asian-American students that the university is discriminating in its admission process.

In fact, the evidence uncovered during the discovery process of the pending lawsuit seems overwhelming that Harvard is violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and has imposed a racial quota system, including a ceiling on the number of Asian-American students accepted, no matter how outstanding their qualifications.

The Justice Department’s filing is in opposition to a motion recently filed by Harvard asking a federal court in Boston to throw out the lawsuit without a trial.

In 2014, Students for Fair Admission filed its lawsuit under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in education on the basis of “race, color, or national origin.” Although Harvard is a private university, Title VI applies because the university receives federal funds. The lawsuit claims Harvard is using its admissions policy to keep out Asian-American students in the same way it infamously discriminated against Jewish students in the 1920s and 1930s.

Harvard has fought a four-year battle during the discovery process to keep its admissions process and records secret. But the records that Harvard has been forced to produce show the university has been engaging in blatant discrimination. The evidence includes several internal reports prepared by Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research in 2013 that concluded Harvard was discriminating against Asian-American students.

The university took steps to bury the reports and hide their findings after it became aware of the conclusions.

Asian-Americans have been only about 19 percent of the freshman class at Harvard, although that number has increased slightly since this lawsuit was filed. But that number has remained consistently the same for years despite the increasing numbers of Asian-American students applying to colleges.

Harvard’s own reports showed that Asian-Americans would comprise 43.4 percent of the class based on academics alone, and their share would be 31.4 percent even if you included the university’s preferences for athletes and legacy admissions.

Harvard admissions officers keep down the numbers of highly qualified, highly credentialed Asian-Americans by unswervingly giving them low ratings on “personal” factors—the same type of low “character” and “fitness” ratings Harvard used to prevent qualified Jewish students from getting in 100 years ago.

Harvard’s expert witness in the case claimed this was not discrimination because he accepted the assumption that white applicants have better personalities than Asian-American students. This is the type of odious and offensive ethnic stereotyping Harvard has used to justify its discrimination.

Sadly, Harvard is not alone in what it is doing. Evidence brought to light in the litigation revealed that twice a year, admissions officers from Harvard and 15 other schools, including Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, and Stanford get together to secretly compare their racial admission numbers to ensure they all have approximately the same racial percentages of admissions.

Another shameful example of this discrimination is M.I.T., my alma mater, which, when I was there, prided itself on being a place where applicants were accepted based on merit regardless of race. But, it seems, M.I.T. began engaging in similar discrimination in the mid-1990s. The number of Asian-American students there has been stalled at about 26 percent since then.

Caltech, M.I.T.‘s big rival as a science and technology institution, has always rejected racial preferences and quotas in its admissions — and Asian-Americans now account for 43 percent of its undergraduates.

That so many other so-called “elite” universities have taken Harvard’s side by filing briefs on behalf of Harvard shows that such blatant, unlawful, and abhorrent discrimination is an accepted policy throughout higher education. It really is nothing less than a modern, politically correct version of Jim Crow in education.

Harvard and these other schools long ago abandoned Martin Luther King’s objective of achieving an America where our children are not “judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Everyone who abhors discrimination and believes in equal treatment should cheer the Justice Department’s intervention in this lawsuit — a lawsuit the Obama administration did its best to ignore. The brief filed by the Justice Department makes the point that Harvard has failed to meet the legal standards outlined by the Supreme Court that allow race to be a consideration in college admissions but only under limited circumstances. Instead, the university is engaging in racial bias and racial balancing, none of which is allowed under the law.

This case is set for trial on Oct. 15 before Judge Allison Burroughs, an Obama appointee, in Boston’s federal district court. Unfortunately, this gives Harvard the home court advantage with its $37 billion endowment and the influence it wields with its alumni throughout the upper echelons of power in the city.

We will have to wait and see whether justice will prevail and whether Asian-American students finally will get what they are entitled to: the ability to apply to colleges knowing that the color of their skin won’t be used against them.

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Education Waste Leaves Taxpayers No Choice

By government standards $62,500 is not a lot of money, but there’s more to learn for taxpayers, parents and students in this San Diego Union-Tribune story. A lawsuit by the California Taxpayers Action Network charged that San Diego County superintendent Randy Ward, with collaboration from chief financial officer Lora Duzyk, gave himself unauthorized raises totaling $70,000 to $100,000 over eight years. The means, the network charged, was the “me too” clause giving administrators a raise whenever teachers got one. The county board launched an audit, at a cost of $70,000, which it failed to complete. The board released no report and would not comment on the Union-Tribune story.

Ward said he did nothing wrong, but the San Diego County Office of Education settled with the Taxpayers Action Network for $62,500. By law, the county office is required to represent Ward and Duzyk. So taxpayers are on the hook, not the bureaucrats their own selves. That also applies in settlements for sexual harassment and such.

As the Union-Tribune learned, the county paid Randy Ward more than $300,000 in 2016 and he retired that year with a pension of $181,000. In government monopoly education, the big bucks and lavish benefits flow to non-teachers who add no value in the classroom. As with teachers, bureaucratic pay is not linked to any gains in student achievement or accountability. So merit and results play no role.

For their part, the county offices of education are another layer of absorbent bureaucratic sediment though which taxpayer dollars must trickle down before reaching the classroom. These offices tend to be holding tanks for bureaucrats between jobs. Like school districts, they tend to get active when education spending is on the ballot, the Proposition 30 tax hikes of 2012, for example.

In this collective farm of mediocrity and failure, more money is always the answer. If parents opt for independent schools, their tax dollars still go directly to the government system. Like veterans on the G.I. Bill, parents and students deserve full educational choice, with the dollar following the scholar, as a matter of basic civil rights. If politicians at any level support educational choice, they sure are keeping quiet about it.

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