For more than a decade, ever since I served on the Spellings Commission at the Future of Higher Education, I have questioned: wherein is the American enterprise community in higher education reform? Doesn’t it recognize that the extremely inefficient way to certify competency for maximum managerial, technical, and professional jobs raises employment costs, making it less competitive within the worldwide marketplace? I have made pleas in the halls of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for more commercial enterprise involvement.
A college is a screening tool that isolates people with intelligence, field, honesty, desirable verbal exchange skills, and proper work ethics from people with fewer acceptable attributes. In maximum instances, graduates use very little that they discovered in the lecture room directly of their paintings. Given rising university costs, we want to find cheaper, higher methods of certifying competence, each in figuring out the best future workers and training them for specific obligations.
Wage and income data make it clear that a majority of the “human capital” that workers accumulate comes from on-the-task schooling and revel in. Companies are in the education business informally whether they prefer it or not. Some organizations have had formal education packages for decades; a few have even sponsored college-degree education. For example, in the golden age of American automobile production, General Motors owned the “General Motors Institute,” which stressed engineering studies and a co-op version wherein students mixed conventional mastering with plenty of sensible enjoyment. Similarly, for over 50 years, McDonald’s Hamburger University has supplied management training to thousands of mid-level-and-above managers, now not imparting levels but a certification that educated individuals know approximately how McDonald’s runs its operations. Indeed, almost all large organizations have some formal education for brand-spanking new entry-level people.
Now Amazon is coming into the fray, now not offering university stages (the importance of an increasing number of puzzled anyway with the aid of some in the commercial enterprise international), however alternatively realistic training for at the end a hundred,000 personnel. The technology utilized by Amazon is continuously evolving, so it needs to teach people productivity-enhancing procedures constantly. This shows a new employment norm that could develop: companies look at capacity employees to see if they are functionally literate and check their excessive college overall performance to peer if they are reasonably clever and disciplined. Then the firm hires the worker and offers them schooling –now and again, some weeks, perhaps months, or years. The employee signs a multi-year agreement giving them some job safety, and the corporation is confident of at least some return on its human capital funding. College may or won’t be at the least partly circumvented.
Alas, a few wrinkles should be labored out if this is a substantial model. Most vital, using business enterprise testing to see who’s potentially trainable workers should run afoul of the unlucky 1971 U.S. Supreme Court selection in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. And next regulation-making employers terrified of the use of checking out because it can be used to “disparately effect” minorities. Politically, the identical modern politicians who’ve hounded many for-profit higher training operators out of business could attempt to block commercial enterprise attempts to greater aggressively input the training enterprise in perceived opposition with allies in the university network that offer them with each intellectual ammunition and tremendous monetary support.
