Page 22 - MidJersey Business - September 2015

HIRE EDUCATION
Harvard Univer- sity scholars have warned that the U.S. education system is failing to prepare mil-
lions of young adults for successful careers by providing only a one-size- fits-all curriculum.
For two years, researchers worked on the Pathways to Prosperity Proj- ect at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and found that only 30 percent of young American adults successfully complete a bachelor’s degree. The other 70 percent? They’re struggling.
“I think it’s pretty clear that some piece of that has to do with so many kids just sort of drifting into college without any particular career plan,
with no knowledge of the relationship between the subjects they decide to major in and what the labor market is like,” says Dr. Robert Schwartz, who leads Harvard’s Pathways to Prosperity Network. “You find a lot of kids who, to their surprise, end up with a college degree but with a credential that doesn’t have very much value in the labor market, so they wind up taking jobs that are really not the kinds of jobs they had in mind.”
The trend contributes to a generation of frustrated, underemployed
workers. It also helps to
widen the skills gap that has
not produced enough qual- ity employees for certain technical industries.
“There’s still this belief that the four-year college is the ticket to economic
security,” Schwartz says. He contends that the current architecture of the Ameri- can socio-educational track places too much emphasis on a single pathway to suc- cess, which can marginalize young adults that do not obtain a degree from a four- year school.
“We don’t have a strategy to connect this large pool of kids who, for whatever reason, are not interested in four-year degrees or are falling by the wayside for
a variety of reasons even though they may start
out enrolled in college,” Schwartz says. “If we got those kids into programs that were really aligned with the labor market, with either a one-year cer- tificate or better yet, a two- year technical program,
I think we would start to narrow the skills gap.”
The mission of the Pathways to Prosperity Network is to ensure that more young people gradu- ate high school, attain an
initial postsecondary degree or credential with value in the labor market, and launch a career while leaving open the possibility of further education.
The Pathways network consists of 10 states—Arizona, California, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, Ohio, and Tennessee—working to create career pathways in grades 9-14.
But the challenges are not limited to schools and students.
“We have a big problem on the employer
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The Pathways to Prosperity Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education recommends a “comprehensive pathways network” made up of three elements:
nEmbracing multiple approaches to help youth make the transition to adulthood nInvolving the nation’s employers in things like work-based learning
nAnd creating a new social compact with young people.