Andy wrote:
My jaw dropped this morning as I read Chester Finn’s Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled The Self-Inflicted Economic Death of Ohio. First, because the piece quantified some of my gut feelings about Ohio’s talent drain, and second, because of the magnitude of the problem.
It’s So Important To Keep Talent In Ohio « Cincinnati IT – an andy erickson blog
Unlike Andy I am still searching for a word to describe how I felt when I read this article. I have a seventeen year old son and we talked frequently about college and jobs over the last year. Our talks were stimulated by what they did not discuss at high school. Let’s just say he is learning a lot more about the job market from me than from his school and he goes to a “good†school. About a year ago his school started the college selection process. This is a lot earlier than when I was going to school so I was duly impressed. I don’t think I even talked about colleges and majors until I took my SAT test. I was pretty clueless about colleges but I was well prepared for a major in a science or engineering field. What shocked me was that my son’s college counselor was encouraging him to pursue a liberal arts major. I was curious about their reasoning so I started asking questions. The deeper I probed the less I liked about the philosophy of our present education system. It was not hard to figure out that the college counselor’s recommendations were a natural result of the educational system that was in place. My son had plenty of opportunities to try out science and technology courses but was generally steered away from them. When we met with the counselor and I mentioned that the biggest job needs for the next decade are still in the science and technology fields, she said that he should have pursued a course selection with more science and technology courses in it. Okay, let’s drop “Conversational Frenchâ€. Her answer was, “He can’t do that!†Besides she said, “He is taking Honors English and Historyâ€. Huh! Another point she made and I have heard it repeated several times, is that you what you study in college does not determine your career choice. This is definitely not true for those pursuing a job in a technology field. Wow! When I worked for a large chemical company we rarely interviewed college graduates who did not have an engineering degree. That was just a fact of life. Another fact of life is that engineers are paid well. If you happened to have and engineering degree and work experience from a co-op program you were gold and would get top dollar. It really looks like the high schools are just going through the motions of college/career counseling.
About a month later he got his PSAT results. He got a 700 on the math portion and the PSAT report recommended that he consider a college with science or technology major. Go figure!