Comments on Hired and Not Necessarily Prepared

• Those Junior and Senior Years
• Posted by dean dad on October 3, 2006 at 9:25am EDT

• Another way of phrasing this finding would be that employees who had four years of college are more capable than employees with two years of college.

  Well, duh.

  If that were not the case, we'd have a hard time justifying those junior and senior years.

  A more relevant comparison would be to look at the students who start at cc's and transfer for the four-year degree, as opposed to students who started at four-year colleges.

• Why ask Dogbert anything?
• Posted by Glen McGhee on October 3, 2006 at 9:35am EDT

• Why would you want to ask Dogbert anything about those he hires? Why should anything Dogbert says be considered "valid"? More interesting would be a study of the organizational biases, etc., evident in their responses! Studies like these are worthless precisely because they decontextualize the survey data to such a great extent. Data without context is meaningless.

• Good news for humanities teachers
• Posted by Nathan SMith on October 3, 2006 at 11:30am EDT

• I think this report is important and confirms something we have suspected for a long time: Higher Education, both at community colleges and at four-year institutions, is still an integral part of preparedness for the job market. But our over-emphasis on technological skills and under-emphasis on the basic humanities disciplines has resulted in a workforce of graduates from four-year institutions who are deemed "poorly prepared" in the areas of Written Communication and Writing in English. This should be seen as a clarion call to teachers of the humanities and a wake-up call to administrators that these subjects are still essential to training and developing young people for success in any field.

  http://ndsmith.wordpress.com

• Why isn't this obvious?
• Posted by Larry on October 3, 2006 at 11:40am EDT

• Although I am generally against community colleges (which is a topic for another time), I don’t find the report that helpful. The questions were really quite vague.

  I went through the survey and although the survey prioritized various attributes, none of the questions were falsifiable. So, for example, I have no idea how many community college grads could, for example, write a program in C++ that takes a text file and generates a list of the ten most frequently occurring words. (Even a non-computer science student should be able to do this by the end of their second year of college.) Likewise, “oral communication” defined as “Oral Articulate thoughts, ideas clearly and effectively; have public speaking skills.” doesn’t tell me what a student could or could not do. Perhaps if the students were given five minutes to explain to someone how to, say, diagnose and fix a windshield wiper assembly, or to summarize Proust, I might have a better idea at how bad these kids are.

  In general, community college grads begin with a lot of disadvantages. For one, they were unable to go to a real school and therefore they will lack the sophistication of someone who went to a four-year school is endowed with. This usually manifests itself in uniformly problems with reading and writing. So, it is no surprise that after the second year of college, they are still lagging.
  (And, as a rule, my firm will not hire people with less than an MA for any position.)

• The reasons students go to community college
• Posted by Mona on October 3, 2006 at 2:25pm EDT

• For the record, a lot of students who attend community college require some remediation, which is forced upon institutions by the states (they don't want four year schools doing it, and high schools are graduating students even when they lack the skills and knowledge), but moreso, people choose community colleges for a number of reasons. Those include cost (compare under $100 per credit hour to $300 plus per credit hour), flexible class schedules for working adults and/or adults with children or elders to care for, proximity to home, and readiness (some students aren't ready for university at age 18).

  Whether eduaction is by a community college or a traditional four year institution, all students, even the very bright and capable ones, are coming to college under-prepared. Random thoughts:

  Is a 180 day school year, and a short school day really working for our kids,(the US is not an agrarian society where the kids need to be home before sundown to hoe the back 40).

  Are the assignments in and out of class sufficiently interesting and challenging or are they designed to be easy (so that most kids can earn a grade of "excellent")?Or are they just time-fillers?

  Are kids over-invovled in non-academic activties? Some involvment in these things develops children's skills and helps them mangage their time. Over-involvement seems to produce crabby, stressed, over-achieving yet somehow under-performing kids.

  I guess what I am saying is that everyone has to be on the same team with kids from the time they are young - parents, teachers, future employers, etc. If we were all to work togeteher in setting goals, educating students to meet the goals, and continually evaluating progres, the business community (and society at large) might be far more impressed by the product?

• hring but unknowing
• Posted by bradley bleck , instructor at Spokane Falls CC on October 3, 2006 at 8:50pm EDT

• I have to agree with the first few comments, of course I should be a better writer and thinker after two more years of education, unless I've become dumb-as-a-post between my sophomore and junior years. I will say that in the state of Washington, while this doesn't pertain to writing particularly, students who start at a community college graduate at a slightly greater degree than do those who begin in a four-year school.

  What this might indicate, at least in general terms, is that for the first two years community college students do as well or better than their four-year counterparts. This could be because they are taught by people who want to teach at that level, people who want to teach rather than research, and they are taught by people with a good bit of teaching experience. Yes, despite not being "real" schools, many people do set their career sites on such work. Because of this, students don't get stuck in huge sections with grad students who are only teaching for the stipend (not that all grad students are bad teachers mind you (but I was)).

  So, while we are cheaper when it comes to ged ed requirements, we are better as well at taking the world's educational flotsam and jetsom and getting them ready for the world and a life worth living. And maybe they can come away with a "real" job, or an understanding that different schools have different missions and produce, dare I say such a thing, different levels of knowledge and understanding by design. Expecting anything would be tom-foolery.