Wednesday, November 14, 2018



The latest "Times Higher" top 200 universities in the world for 2019

British universities did very well this year and two Australian universities made it into the top 50

Rank

 1           University of Oxford     United Kingdom
 2           University of Cambridge     United Kingdom
 3           Stanford University     United States
 4           Massachusetts Institute of Technology     United States
 5           California Institute of Technology     United States
 6           Harvard University     United States
 7           Princeton University     United States
 8           Yale University     United States
 9           Imperial College London     United Kingdom
 10           University of Chicago     United States
 11           ETH Zurich     Switzerland
 =12      Johns Hopkins University     United States
 =12      University of Pennsylvania     United States
 14           UCL     United Kingdom
 15           University of California, Berkeley     United States
 16           Columbia University     United States
 17           University of California, Los Angeles     United States
 18           Duke University     United States
 19           Cornell University     United States
 20           University of Michigan     United States
 21           University of Toronto     Canada
 22           Tsinghua University     China
 23           National University of Singapore     Singapore
 24           Carnegie Mellon University     United States
 25           Northwestern University     United States
 26           London School of Economics and Political Science, UK    
 27           New York University     United States
 28           University of Washington     United States
 29           University of Edinburgh     United Kingdom
 30           University of California, San Diego     United States
 31           Peking University     China
 =32      LMU Munich     Germany
 =32      University of Melbourne     Australia
 34           Georgia Institute of Technology     United States
 35           École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Swiss
 36           University of Hong Kong     Hong Kong
 37           University of British Columbia     Canada
 38           King’s College London     United Kingdom
 39           University of Texas at Austin     United States
 40           Karolinska Institute     Sweden
 41           Paris Sciences et Lettres – PSL Research University,
 42           The University of Tokyo     Japan
 43           University of Wisconsin-Madison     United States
 =44      McGill University     Canada
 =44      Technical University of Munich     Germany
 46           Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
 47           Heidelberg University     Germany
 48           KU Leuven     Belgium
 49           Australian National University     Australia
 50           University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign     USA

SOURCE 







Young Americans need to be taught skills, not handed credentials

Most education is now disconnected from the needs of students and the labour market

I cannot think of a market that is more dysfunctional in America right now than education. Total student debt topped $1.5tn this year and a Brookings study found that nearly 40 per cent of those borrowers are likely to default on their loans by 2023.

Some of the borrowers will have attended predatory for-profit colleges, for which the Trump administration recently loosened regulations.

The imprimatur of a $75,000 Harvard degree is in such demand that the school is now being sued by a group of Asian-American students who say more of them should be allowed in on the basis of high test scores. But at the other end of the spectrum, several new studies show that a garden variety four-year degree isn’t paying off the way it used to. One recent survey found that 43 per cent of college grads are underemployed.

This certainly mirrors what I hear from chief executives, many of whom tell me they cannot find the skills they need either at the top or the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Ivy League colleges are great for those who can afford them but most education has become completely disconnected from the needs of both students and the labour market.

There are plenty of MBAs who can read a balance sheet but have neither operational nor soft skills. Four-year business administration graduates are settling for low wage gigs, while $20-an-hour manufacturing jobs go unfilled because employers can’t find anyone with vocational training.

Desperate companies are trying to plug the gap — telecoms group AT&T has set up an internal online course to train the 95 per cent of those in its own technology and services unit that have inadequate ability in Stem subjects — Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Walmart Academy has trained thousands of workers, including in basic skills they should have learnt in high schools.

There are myriad factors that have created this dysfunctional system, but one that hasn’t been talked about enough is the unfair bias towards schools rather than skills. According to a 2017 Harvard Business School report, more than 6m good paying jobs in the US are at risk of “degree inflation”, meaning that skilled labour is locked out of the market for lack of a degree, even if one is not needed for the job.

For some middle-level positions in 2015, two-thirds of employers were asking for a college degree, even though only 16 per cent of people working successfully in similar positions had them. That cuts social mobility. But it also inflates the price of what may be a needless credential and costs employers, who pay more for people with fewer skills and a higher propensity to jump between companies.

How to end this arms race? Some businesses and educators are working with non-profits that help them vet skills of workers with no credentials. One such programme is run with state governments in Colorado and Indiana, as well as companies such as LinkedIn and Microsoft. Skillful evaluates and ranks workers based on their hard and soft skills via online and in-person testing and training. It then pairs them with appropriate jobs.

Others, like Year Up, provide something similar at a national level for young people, identifying and training the highly-motivated for six months, and matching them with major companies such as Salesforce or JPMorgan who can trial them for another six months without a full hiring commitment. “We think of it as supply chain management for talent,” says Gerald Chertavian, the CEO and founder of the programme.

Perhaps the most successful and scalable bridging of the skills and credentials gap thus far has been the P-Tech high school, initially started by IBM as a way to create a middle-market talent pool and now said to run with 500 other industry partners in 110 schools in eight states.

It graduates students with both a high school and associates’ degree, and they are guaranteed jobs paying $50,000-a-year. Corporate partners are willing to make this assurance since they have a hand in shaping the curriculum to their taste. The completion rates of the graduates are 500 per cent of the national average. The schools are non-selective, use unionised teachers, and serve a disproportionate number of lower-income students of colour.

Some worry about allowing business this sort of seat at the table in shaping education. I do not. Other countries — Germany, for instance — have shown it is possible to provide high-quality education and job-market skills at once.

We are at a crisis point in education today, but it is also a good moment to change the trajectory of things.

The Perkins Bill, which funds vocational education, was recently reauthorised by Congress. That means that there’s now a guaranteed pot of nearly $1.3bn over the next six years to be thrown at revamping secondary and tertiary education to meet the needs of employers and the labour market.

States have a fair amount of leeway about how they use the funds. It would be great to see more of them talking to employers about what they need and putting money into programmes that foster skills rather than simply award credentials.

SOURCE 






Australia: Vocational education graduates earn barely more than school leavers

Another failure of credentialism.  Learning on the job is just as good

Students graduating with a vocational qualification earn only marginally more on average than students who finished year 12 at high school, and the small differential sticks with them all their working lives.

The lack of earnings premium is so startling it has left researchers puzzled, especially given the shortage of skilled labour in vocational jobs.

For women in some jobs a vocational education qualification left them worse off than if they'd got a job straight out of school, and this disadvantage also stayed with them for a lifetime.

In 2016, males with a vocational qualification earned just 2.1 per cent more than males who went straight into jobs from year 12. Women vocational graduates earned 1.8 per cent less than women who had gone from year 12 straight into the workforce.
He said the data was not necessarily a reflection of the quality VET providers or TAFEs. It was a reflection of ...
He said the data was not necessarily a reflection of the quality VET providers or TAFEs. It was a reflection of Australian job market and what people think should be rewarded most. Rob Homer

Professor Stephen Parker, national sector leader for education at KPMG, said while there are some irregularities that need to be accounted for, the data shows people with vocational education and training qualifications are not more well off, on average, despite the cost and time they put into further education.

The data comes from a long-term Household Income and Labour Dynamics Australia survey and was analysed by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling for KPMG.

Looking at a whole working life, the small gap between people with VET qualifications and people with year 12 qualifications does not change over a career. Male VET graduates continue to make barely any more than year 12 students well into their late 50s. And the negative premium for women continues right up to age 60.

"I can't fully explain it. This is such a stunning finding. We know there is a shortage of skills. We can see it in the government's skills shortage list. Certain jobs are in short supply but this is not pushing up average incomes in jobs done with vocational qualification."

Professor Parker there were exceptions. Some VET graduates, such as plumbers and electricians, earned more than people with less-sought after VET qualifications. But the overall trend remained.

He added that people who left school before year 12 earned far less than year 12 finishers or VET graduates. This meant that people doing VET at least had a lifetime premium over people who left school before year 12.

He said the data was not necessarily a reflection of the quality of VET providers or TAFEs. It was a reflection of the Australian job market and what people think should be rewarded most.

"Poor old TAFE has been targeted. But the problem lies in the jobs and the status attached to them."

By comparison with VET, males with university qualifications could expect a wage premium of nearly 19 per cent versus the benchmark year-12 graduate. Women university graduates could expect a 13 per cent premium.

"That's also about the nature of the job market and the status that is attached to higher education. It's about the expansion of the professions and the expansion of the knowledge economy."

But another puzzle in the data was that the 40-year trend for graduates showed no increase or decrease in the wage premium even though vastly more people were graduating which, in a market system, should mean the price of labor  would fall.

"So the market is not working perfectly," he said.

The data show the gender wage gap remains wide. In 2016 not only did women with VET qualifications earn less than people who went to work straight from school, they earned less than men with VET qualifications. In 2016 women university graduates' hourly earnings ($40.90) were 19 per cent lower than for men ($50.60).

Women who went to work straight after year 12 earned $30 an hour, compared to men, who earned $32.90.

"The really worrying thing is that the gap between men and women's hourly wage is not closing and it's across all qualifications."

"In the old days and perhaps still, people were resistant to the militant word 'patriarchy', a society run by men. But when you look at these figures you would say we are looking at a patriarchy in numbers." [Rubbish!  Women study different subjects]

SOURCE 




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