College-Educated Women Outnumber Men in U.S. Workforce

Another statistic dispelling the feminist Left's myth about a gender wage gap.

For the first time in American history, women now outnumber men in the college-educated workforce. The Wall Street Journal reports, “Since 2013, the female share of college-educated workers has been around the 49% mark, with 2019 being the year that women cross into a very slight majority.” Meanwhile, the overall labor force in the U.S. is still a slight majority male.

The Journal further notes that this milestone has been a long-time coming: “Since the 1980s, women have made up the majority of those seeking bachelor’s degrees. By 1999, women received 57% of bachelor’s degrees, and it has been that way more or less for almost two decades.”

Far from a fluke, this would appear to be the new normal. But how could the “patriarchy” let this happen?

The Federalist’s Helen Raleigh notes that this news puts the lie to a well-worn leftist trope, writing, “Of course, when we talk about women in the workforce, one of the left’s favorite topics is the pay gap between the sexes. We’ve all heard the famous statistic that ‘a woman makes 77 cents for every dollar a man earns.’ They’ve used this number as evidence that the United States is a patriarchal society that discriminates against women or, even worse, that there is a war on women going on in America.”

In fact, Raleigh further observes, “More women in the labor force means more women are creating wealth. It is estimated that by 2030, women will control more aggregate wealth in the United States than men. So far, no activists, no politicians, and certainly no male workers are complaining about this reverse pay gap.”

Clearly, the Left’s canard that American women aren’t getting a fair shake is patently false.

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The Key to Success for Young People Isn’t Always College

As young people worry about their futures, going to college isn’t necessarily their first step toward a good job.

Entrepreneur Isaac Morehouse predicts the relevance of colleges, and the degrees they confer, will erode as employers increasingly look for workers with demonstrated, often self-taught job skills.

“I think it will be a long, slow decline, where probably the very elite schools will stick around, and probably some of the really hands-on, practical vocational schools will stick around,” but middle-of-the-road schools with fuzzy liberal arts programs will disappear, Morehouse said.

“People will realize more and more you can bypass that, and you can learn the skills cheaper and quicker in other ways, and you can prove that you’re worth hiring in ways that are more effective than that diploma,” Morehouse said.

The learning tools for success are ubiquitous through the internet and hands-on learning.

Morehouse has put that philosophy into practice as a labor market disrupter. Six years ago he created Praxis, a six-month professional boot camp to help participants build their brands and talent portfolios to land apprenticeships leading to jobs. In July he launched Crash, a crowdsourcing platform for job seekers to promote their talents to employers.

Morehouse said 300 people have gone through the Praxis apprenticeship program. Most apprentices lacked college degrees and about 90 percent of them got non-tech jobs with an average starting pay of $50,000. The 200 people who created profiles through his Crash program in its first three weeks received 80 interview requests and 21 job offers, he said.

Research shows employers are moving away from hiring workers solely based on academic credentials.

Phil Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University, said his organization’s recent study showed 62 percent of employers have shifted away from hiring practices focused on a candidate’s college major or are contemplating doing so. And in an Association of American Colleges and Universities study, 78 percent of CEOs and upper management said academic discipline doesn’t matter as much as what a job candidate can do.

Managers want prospective hires with broad communicational, analytical, and technical competence.

But Gardner cautioned about interpreting the data. Front-line hiring managers might have the same goals, but different outlooks than upper management on who and how to hire. “I think you’re going to see a continued transformation of higher ed” to produce graduates with the skills that businesses want, Gardner said.

If colleges can’t do that, Gardner said, they face the chopping block.

Gardner agreed that some liberal arts majors are not prepared for today’s job market, but doesn’t foresee the demise of liberal arts programs. “I think colleges and universities are doing a much better job with their liberal art grads getting their technical skills,” Gardner said. “We’re going to interdisciplinary education, multidisciplinary thinking. We’re looking at lots of learning outside the classroom,” incorporating online resources and practical experiences.

Gardner has seen those approaches during campus visits and has read about them in higher education publications.

He pointed to the University of Tampa’s example in trying interdisciplinary or team internships in which a group of students addresses a problem in the community and a faculty member serves as a coach.

Employers would suffer if liberal arts graduates disappear because they’re the creative class, he said. They have unique skill sets different from engineers and computer scientists. While Gardner said that’s a widely held view among many academics, he acknowledged most information backing the assertion is anecdotal. Liberal arts colleges, unlike engineering and some business fields, have done a poor job of collecting long-term information on graduates, so supporting data is weak.

But he said IBM and other companies have transitioned from manufacturing to a systems, problem-solving approach. They seek employees with communication skills and skill sets that allow them to work across boundaries, and that know-how is picked up through liberal arts education, he said.

Rich Feller, a professor of counseling and career development at Colorado State University and past president of the National Career Development Association, agrees.

“The real commodity today is skills because we’re in a skills-based economy…that’s looking for self-directed learners who can add value without companies spending any money because companies are not doing as much training as they used to,” Feller said.

“Colleges are trying to fill their seats, so they don’t want to talk about this” shift to skills-based hiring,” Feller said. Feller trains counselors and psychotherapists. He is developing tools for aptitude assessment and narrative storytelling, which have helped his students get jobs.

If students understand their skills, it helps them understand how they learn, why they master training programs, and succeed in a job. Teaching storytelling guides students in understanding their personal story and how to promote themselves.

Gardner doesn’t agree that a glut of college students is leading employers to find new ways to differentiate among applicants. He said the picture is distorted because some states have more college graduates than available jobs. The college might be in a wider labor market, but many graduates are unwilling to move away from family and friends to find a job.

Some employers are starting in-house training programs or establishing apprenticeship programs, especially in the industrial sector.
However, he concedes there is an oversupply of students pushed into four-year degrees. He said social stigmatization that began escalating in the 1980s led to an undersupply of two-year college graduates in hard-to-fill trades or technical jobs.

The trend toward de-emphasizing college degrees likely is the result of the tough climate for employers, said Michelle Snyder, spokeswoman for the American Staffing Association, a trade group. The labor market is tight, with more jobs available in the boom economy than qualified candidates to fill them. There is a skills gap among job-seekers. Employers are competing vigorously for the same small pool of talent.

Many staffing companies are encouraging their clients to consider hiring applicants who don’t possess all the job requirements, Snyder said. Some employers are starting in-house training programs or establishing apprenticeship programs, especially in the industrial sector.

Job seekers are blasting out 150 resumes with GPA and leadership skill bullet points that go through an automated application-tracking system scanning for keywords among thousands of resumes just to generate one interview, Morehouse said. On average, hiring managers muddle through 250 resumes to fill a position. He said the time is ripe for change. It’s becoming more common for young people to do a short-term, volunteer project, accept an internship, or work a low-pay, part-time job, then parlay that trial run into a full-time job, he said.

Charles Marohn, president of Strong Towns, an online media company focused on municipal financial sustainability, also thinks the old-fashioned method of hiring based on college degrees is declining.

After making what he described as terrible hiring decisions based on his genuine like of the applicants when he ran a planning consulting firm for local governments, he shifted his hiring approach. He wants to hire the best people, not the best resumes.

Marohn de-emphasized college degrees and academic credentials. Resumes, references, and cover letters are no longer the first thing he looks at. Instead, he’s prioritizing job skills and competency.

His first step is to simply ask for an email address and location. Online Q&A sessions and two sets of questionnaires are used to gauge candidates’ style and approach, work habits, and life experiences. Only after that four-step process are resumes and references requested, and interviews scheduled. Marohn said some of his best hires would have been weeded out of the process quickly if he sought resumes first.

That squares with Morehouse’s attempt to upend the college-centered hiring approach.

“I think we are helping to find hidden talent everywhere, and unleash it to go find opportunities that they didn’t know existed,” Morehouse said. “We’re reinventing the way that people get jobs.”

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Flaws in Australian education system ignored as journos plunge into class warfare

The sources quoted by journalists can tell media consumers a lot about the politics of a newspaper or electronic network but sometimes not much about the truth of the story.

Look at the reaction to the release last Wednesday of preliminary results of this year’s National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy tests. Journalists at Nine Entertainment’s newspapers, the ABC and Guardian Australia were likelier to quote teachers, teacher unions and politicians continuing their long criticism of national testing. Media on the right often quoted education researchers who have argued Australia is not getting value for its spending on schools.

Many teachers hate NAPLAN and anything that makes them accountable for student performance. But here’s the thing: the media should not care. The $57.8 billion we spent across all levels of government and school systems in 2016-17 is not for the edification of teachers. It’s to educate our children. Some tweets last Wednesday highlight personal attitudes among media types.

Former teacher and Sydney Daily Telegraph education writer Maralyn Parker tweeted: “Oh FFS, #NAPLAN has failed. The constant testing and huge scammy $$$$$ industry around teaching and preparing for the tests is stuffing up Australian children.” Nine newspapers cartoonist Cathy Wilcox tweeted: “What if, now bear with me, just as an experiment, we properly funded public schools (crazy I know), then compared NAPLAN results to see if it made a difference?” Unbelievable that a highly paid cartoonist whose work is published in The Sydney Morning Herald did not already know the figures.

Australia has increased funding across all school systems from $36.4bn to $57.8bn in the nine years since the Gillard government committed to the first round of Gonski funding rises. The Turnbull government committed an extra $18.6bn across four years in Gonski 2.0 funding in 2017. All that money has bought some improvement in primary school NAPLAN results, flatlining overall in literacy and numeracy and disappointing Year 9 results.

Remember NAPLAN was not a plot by a conservative government to hurt political enemies in the teacher unions. It was introduced in 2008 by then education minister Julia Gillard in the first Rudd government.

The most sensible reactions to NAPLAN numbers each year usually came from long-time critics of educational standards such as Kevin Donnelly, from the Australian Catholic University, and Centre for Independent Studies researchers Jennifer Buckingham and Blaise Joseph.

Progressives tend to deny there is a problem and want the test scrapped or its standards lowered. Funny thing is we have known for many years why Australia lags in international tests. Admission standards for teaching are too low, more than half of university education degree entrants being accepted with an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank of less than 50.

Better paid and more qualified teachers with proper mentoring in the job seem to work in systems that continually outperform ours, particularly in Shanghai, Singapore and Finland. Education reformers in the US and Canada have proved better quality headmasters with more independence in hiring and firing staff — usually backed by activist parents bodies — can lift results in even the most underprivileged areas.

Unfortunately state education departments here have used headmaster independence to load the role with managerialist tasks to defend schools against lawsuits rather than to lift education outcomes.

The Australian under former education writer Justine Ferrari in the noughties highlighted the role of curriculum in letting down children. This has only worsened as teachers have been required since 2012 to overlay all their work with three mandated cross-curriculum priorities: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures; Asia and Australia’s engagement with it; and sustainability. In a worst-case hypothetical, maths teachers with fairly poor HSC results who did no maths to Year 12 and none in their education degrees are now burdened with these three overlays in trying to teach kids struggling to understand mathematics.

Teachers often complain about lack of student discipline and lack of parental support for schools trying to impose such discipline.

Technology and the rise of social media, smartphones and iPad use in education have had a perverse effect. Some schools have now banned mobile phone use. I have heard of parent-teacher nights when parents themselves did not put away their phones and Facebook feeds while teachers were giving individual feedback about children.

Auto-correction software on devices is having an adverse effect on spelling ability while teachers talk of students coming to school, often with no breakfast, having been up past midnight on devices.

The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday raised another important issue with screen use. University of Sydney cognitive psychology professor Sally Andrews said poor grammar skills “could be the result of skim reading on screens”. “That means they’re not picking up on the subtleties of sentence construction and punctuation marks that occur when you read a book on paper,” she said. Many parents no longer read books to their kids.

Like The Australian, the News Corp tabloids last Wednesday also quoted Donnelly and Joseph, who discussed these issues. The Sydney Morning Herald chose the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, which runs NAPLAN, and federal Education Minister Dan Tehan to defend the test. It quoted Australian Education Union acting federal president Meredith Peace and NSW Primary Principals Association president Phil Seymour bagging it. ABC 7.30 interviewed Tehan but host Leigh Sales seemed to think the testing should be scrapped.

It is instructive the left media did not question teaching methods or curriculum, discipline and electronic learning approaches. Nor did most media go to the core philosophical question: what is our education system for? Do we want world-class students or do we want to reshape the world?

Some quotes from educators suggest more of the latter. Former Victorian premier and education minister Joan Kirner: “Education has to be reshaped so it is part of the socialist struggle for equality.”

Former Griffith University education lecturer Gregory Martin: “A major task for leftist academics is to connect education with community struggles for social justice.”

Former head of the Australian Education Union Pat Byrne: “We have succeeded in influencing curriculum development … conservatives have a lot of work to do to undo the progressive curriculum.”

Media consumers are grateful when journalists shine a light on such areas. Parents marvel at children’s lack of numeracy and literacy skills, things taken for granted in previous generations. Maybe modern “child-centred learning” needs a rethink.

Having watched direct instruction in action at Noel Pearson’s Hope Vale school north of Cooktown last month I can only concur with Donnelly in Friday’s Tele: “The most effective way to learn stresses … ‘automaticity’ — essential knowledge and skills like times tables and learning to read have to be automatic before students complete more complex tasks.”

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