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Why some college grads aren’t employable

December 18, 2011 By

Some college graduates aren’t prepared for work, recruiters tell Jeff Selingo. The top students at nearly any college and most students at top colleges are worth interviewing. But a surprising number of applicants “clearly were not ready to go to college in the first place, yet possess a degree.”

“The focus on access and completion has come at a real cost,” one recruiter told me (he didn’t want his company identified because he’s not allowed to speak on its behalf). “We’re encouraging students to go to college who should be considering other options, and then we’re pushing them through once there.”

In the past, college graduates have fared much better than less-educated workers. That may change for average graduates of average colleges with not-very-rigorous degrees. And that’s a large group.

Many graduates write poorly. “It’s clear they’re not learning basic grammar, usage, and style in K-12,” recruiters say.

While many graduates are hard workers, others skated by in college.

The recruiters complained about professors who clearly gave grades that were not deserved, allowed assignments to be skipped, and simply didn’t demand much from their students.

In addition, many young workers feel entitled to a job, recruiters say. They blame “parents obsessed with their kids’ happiness.”

Many employers have cut training and mentoring to save money, the recruiters admit. Employers want to hire well-educated people who are ready to work with minimal support.

 

Filed Under: Careers, College Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Cape Cod hires Serbs, Jamaicans

August 1, 2011 By

Summer jobs on Cape Cod are filled by college students — from Eastern Europe, writes James Kirchick in The Atlantic. A restaurant  hires Jamaicans on nine-month visas. The Massachusetts unemployment rate is 7.6 percent, but Cape businesses say they can’t find competent Americans to fill seasonal jobs.

Foreigners work harder say bosses and employees.

“They don’t ask about pay, overtime, take long breaks. They just do it,” Alexandra Ivanov, a 21-year-old Bulgarian currently spending her third summer in Provincetown working at a fudge shop and a clothing store, tells me about her fellow foreign laborers. “I don’t think Americans could do it like us.”

“We don’t see too many coming in for work,” David Oliver, owner of Cape Tip Sportswear Company, tells me when I ask him about the state’s 265,600 unemployed residents. Meanwhile, “every day, two or three” foreign students come into his shop looking to add another job to their repertoire. “In general, the foreigners work harder and are much more focused than the American ones,” he says.

The Lobster Pot restaurant in Provincetown staple employs 34 Jamaicans on the H-2B visa. (It’s a temporary visa, but workers keep coming back year after year.)

Three years ago, the last time there was a shortage of H-2B visas, he hired 30 Americans through a labor firm. On the very first day, McNulty says, he had to let four of them go because they “weren’t skilled” or “got into trouble with the cops.” That summer, the restaurant considered shutting down its lunch service due to the foreign worker shortage.

I visited Cape Cod seven or eight years ago for an economics ‘n journalism conference. All the hotel employees came from overseas; most were energetic, ambitious college students from Eastern Europe.

Unemployment was much lower then. You’d think U.S. college students — or unemployed adults — would be willing to work low-wage temporary jobs rather than sit at home.  Are the business owners unwilling to hire people who expect overtime and breaks?

A bill that would force employers to “e-verify” their workers’ legal status will drive away 70 percent of the agricultural workforce, farmers warn. Americans won’t pick crops.

Mike Carlton, director of labor relations for the Florida Fruit and Vegetables Association, . . . said his group monitored hiring by citrus growers, who are required to offer jobs to Americans before they can turn to the H-2A program for temporary foreign laborers.

In one sample, Mr. Carlton said, 344 Americans came forward to fill 1,800 pickers’ jobs; only eight were still working at the end of the two-month season.

Americans can earn the same money flipping burgers or cleaning hotel rooms, the farmers say.

Filed Under: Careers Tagged With: , , , , ,

Subversion through punctuation

September 30, 2010 By

Teaching at a new high school, Miss Eyre defied the zeitgeist and dared to teach a lesson in writing mechanics.

I photocopied handouts with rules. I circled mistakes on students’ papers. I made them write down proper usages of punctuation marks. I did all that and so much more.

And it felt GOOD.

She might photocopy workbook exercises and make her students do them.

I know. I’m a terrible teacher. I’m supposed to assume that my students will magically figure out the rules of the conventions of the English language simply by being wide-eyed ingenues before the great literature of the world and writing about their lives, this despite the fact that relatively few of them have learned any great life lessons at their tender ages.

. . .  I have realized that teaching usage conventions the stupid way has produced, for me, fifteen-year-olds who can’t use commas properly and aren’t even sure what they are. So I’m going to teach them. Because that’s what I do. Ignorance is not bliss.

. . . Jeez, what will I do next? Make everyone in the class read the same story? Force kids not to copy research reports from Wikipedia? STOP ME BEFORE I TEACH AGAIN!

In an earlier post, she tries to persuade a dozing student that he won’t be able to go to college or get a good job if he never does any work in school.

You only have to graduate from high school to become a garbage man,” commented Hector, who sits behind Ross. “That’s what I’m going to do.”

What if the city isn’t able to hire as many trash collectors in the future?

“I’ll just live with my mom,” Hector said.
“Me too,” Ross added.
Mothers of New York City, Miss Eyre wants you to have a talk with your children: What are their plans for the future?

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

‘Credit recovery’ is a cheat

September 17, 2010 By

‘Credit recovery’ — after-school classes for failing students — is raising graduation rates by lowering standards, writes Erich Martel, a social studies teacher in Washington, D.C., on Education Gadfly.

In D.C. schools, a student who flunks a class with 120 to 135 seat-time hours can make it up with an 82- to 92-hour hour credit-recovery “class.”  Students who need more teacher attention get less.

Rules ban homework.  All assignments are completed during class time.

During the past two school years, students enrolled in different subjects were assigned to one teacher and grouped in a single classroom. In some cases, non-instructional staff members, such as counselors, were assigned to “teach” CR classes. The clear expectation of school officials responsible for these assignments was that students would spend most of their time completing work sheets with little active teacher instruction.

Many students were simultaneously enrolled in two courses, even though one is the pre-requisite for the other, as in math, Spanish, and French. Some students, mainly ELL/ESOL, were enrolled in as many as three English courses at the same time. CR teachers reported a range of direct and indirect pressure by administrators to pass students enrolled in these courses despite failing grades, extensive absences, and late enrollment.

Credit recovery undercuts the work ethic, while giving students an inflated sense of achievement, Martel writes.

The program is expanding rapidly across the nation. Students get diplomas; administrators get higher graduation rates.  Community colleges get more remedial students.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Should teachers grade homework?

August 27, 2010 By

Increasingly, teachers are assigning homework but not grading it, reports the Chicago Tribune.

Educators say many of the daily assignments measure a student’s work ethic more than knowledge. Besides, they say, some papers come back with an obvious assist from mom and dad.

Homework should be seen as practice, says Ken O’Connor, a teacher turned consultant. Students benefit from feedback on what they need to improve, he says. “Nobody gets better from getting a 1 out of 10.”

The change comes as many schools revamp their entire approach to grades. The end-of-term average that for years lumped together tests, homework and class participation did not show whether students mastered a specific set of skills, teachers and curriculum experts said.

Now, many teachers calculate a student’s grade without regard for homework. They reserve that for a separate section of the report card that asks if “students complete homework on time.”

A St. Louis-area school district has told teachers to grade homework, but not to count the score in the final grade.

Some Detroit schools mailed activities packets to students in grades three through eight, telling them the homework is due on the first day of school.

Teachers, should homework be graded? If so, how much should it count in assessing the final grade?

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College students cut study time

July 11, 2010 By

College students aren’t studying as much they used to, reports the Boston Globe. The average four-year college student studies 14 hours a week, down from 24.4 hours in 1961, estimate Philip Babcock at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at UC-Riverside. The trend isn’t based on the student’s major, gender, race or SAT scores.

“It’s not just limited to bad schools,” Babcock said. “We’re seeing it at liberal arts colleges, doctoral research colleges, masters colleges. Every different type, every different size. It’s just across the spectrum. It’s very robust. This is just a huge change in every category.”

Babcock and Marks think professors are assigning less demanding work because of  “the growing power of students and professors’ unwillingness to challenge them.”

In theory, college students should spend two hours studying for every hour in class. Since 15 credit hours is considered a full load, that would mean 30 hours of studying.

Two thirds of  first-year college students say they studied less than six hours a week as high school seniors, reports Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP), which has tracked declining study time for 20 years.

College students work somewhat harder, but many make it through without much effort.

In one CIRP survey subset last year, analyzing predominantly private institutions considered to be mid-level or high-achieving colleges, some 32 percent of college freshmen somehow managed to study less than six hours a week — not even an hour a day. Seniors studied only slightly more, with nearly 28 percent studying less than six hours a week. And other surveys of today’s students report similarly alarming results. The National Survey of Student Engagement found in 2009 that 62 percent of college students studied 15 hours a week or less — even as they took home primarily As and Bs on their report cards.

In a 2008 survey of  University of California undergraduates, one third of students said they “did not know how to sit down and study.” These are students drawn from the top 12.5 percent in the state, based on grades and test scores.

Some say today’s students can study more efficiently.

“A student doesn’t need to retype a paper three times before handing it in,” said Heather Rowan-Kenyon, an assistant professor of higher education at Boston College. “And a student today can sit on their bed and go to the library, instead of going to the library and going to the card catalog.”

But average study hours fell from 24.4 hours a week to 16.8 between 1961 and 1981, before the Internet was a factor. And the decline in studying isn’t linked to more students holding jobs or more marginal students on campus. It’s everybody.

Professors who demand a lot from students have to work harder themselves — and listen to students’ complaints, say Babcock and Marks.

Letting students rate their professors, a trend that started in the 1960s, encourages professors to go easy on homework in exchange for glowing course evaluations, said Murray Sperber, a visiting education professor at Berkeley.  It’s an unstated “non-aggression pact.”

In Kevin Drum’s comments on Mother Jones, summarized on Atlantic Wire, one person suggests that college students know prospective employers will focus more on extracurriculars and “leadership” than on their grades. Another blames the rise of adjunct instructors, who are very dependent on course evaluations.

A state university professor writes:

Right around the time studying went down, grades went up. From the mid-60′s to the mid-70′s, the average grade went from around a 2.5 to around a 2.9.

Grade inflation is the rational explanation, writes James Bowman in New Criterion. If you can get A’s and B’s by studying 14 hours a week, why work harder?

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , ,

The work-ethic and knowledge gap

December 23, 2009 By

Most American students are lazy and lack basic knowledge, writes Kara Miller, a Babson College professor of rhetoric and history, in the Boston Globe.

My “C,’’ “D,’’ and “F’’ students this semester are almost exclusively American, while my students from India, China, and Latin America have – despite language barriers – generally written solid papers, excelled on exams, and become valuable class participants.

One girl from Shanghai became a fixture at office hours, embraced our college writing center, and incessantly e-mailed me questions about her evolving papers. Her English is still mediocre: she frequently puts “the’’ everywhere (as in “the leader supported the feminism and the environmentalism’’) and confuses “his’’ and “her.’’ But that didn’t stop her from doing rewrite after rewrite, tirelessly trying to improve both structure and grammar.

Undergrads from China have the strongest work ethic, Miller writes, but she’s also been impressed by students from India, Thailand, Brazil, and Venezuela. They struggle with English, but they’re carried forward by their respect for professors and for knowledge.

By contrast, many of her American students “appear tired and disengaged.”  While the best U.S. students are knowledgeable and innovative, too many lack the basics.   “We’ve got a knowledge gap, spurred by a work-ethic gap,” Miller writes.

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