"So the graduations hang on the wall
But they never really helped us at all
No they never taught us what was real
Iron and coke, chromium steel" -Billy Joel, Allentown
It's Monday morning and I'm already knee-deep in RAM upgrades. I'm sitting
in front of an ancient, generic 386; I've opened its shell; I'm preparing to
eat its innards like a plastic oyster. People in my office assume I know what
I'm doing, but I don't. I just know more than they know, which isn't saying
much. Mr. Bui, for example, does not know his new Windows 95 operating system
from a bag of peanuts. Last week I found him trying to write a letter at the
DOS prompt.
On a voluntary basis, just last week I tutored a fellow named Said on how to
reduce fractions. Said is a refugee from Somalia, and he has been in the country
for about a year. He's in school again, taking remedial Math and English in
preparation for computer science. While Said was rotting in a refugee camp in
Kenya, I was in college, learning about Shakespeare, sororities, and intellectual
fascism. In one year, Said will be making more money than I will. I’m
happy for Said, but is this the way it's supposed to work?
"The brightest kids in my class," Leah said, "are the most hopeless."
Leah is a friend of mine, an English teacher, complaining about her high school
students. "I see them sitting there in their seats, not taking notes, not
doing anything. I go up and yell at them," she said, "and they look
at me like they feel sorry for me and they say, 'Look, Ms. Michaels, we like
you. But we don't need to learn any of this stuff. We're just going to go into
computers, and make more money than you do.' The sick thing is," she told
me, shaking her head, "is that they're probably right."
"To say 'computers' is missing the point," said another friend of
mine. "The whole economy is moving towards I.T. That's why when you go
to an Atlanta computer jobs store you get a million calls the next day."
Meanwhile people look at their college loans and wonder whether they're paying
for the most drawn-out kegger of their lives. Even Newt Gingrich, a college
professor, described college as “the world’s most expensive dating
service.”
"We've oversold college," Bob Greene told me. Bob is a recruiter for
Dekalb Tech, a state vocational institute where almost anyone can take vocational
courses (including computer science) for free on HOPE scholarship. "80%
of the 'real' jobs out there don't require a college degree . . . Most people
in college don't know how to clean their socks! We had a lady with a Masters
in English? Went into automotive? Started work at John Smith Chevrolet making
$35 thousand, then $50 thousand within a year. These are very practical programs.
We have to get people jobs." Dekalb Tech, along with Atlanta Tech, Chattahoochee
Tech, Gwinnett Tech and so on are all part of the Georgia's Department of Technical
Adult Education, and as such must warrantee their education the same way a dealer
warrantees a car. If an employer sends a graduate back complaining of insufficient
training, the school must retrain the graduate for free.
On the other hand, such non-profit technical programs take at least a year to
complete, and only the ones run by the state are cheap. The for-profit computer
training schools have a different sensibility. "We're not a school,"
one rep told me. "We're a training provider. We're a partner with Microsoft.
We're here to do business." At this particular school, $5,200 would pay
for twenty three days of training for the MCSE. Their prerequisites? "We
don't ask," she said. "It's your money."
"Assuming you have no prior experience in the computer
field whatsoever," I said, "how much could you expect to make after
passing this test?"
She thought about it. "Somewhere between forty five and
fifty thousand, minimum," she said. I turned green. The average salary
of a person with a Bachelor's degree in '96 was $36,680. A Master's earned $47,609.
Is college becoming a warehouse for middle-class chumps? Or has it always been
so?
As technology has become increasingly dependent of the microchip, (and as computer
interfaces have become more and more powerful, yet simultaneously more user-friendly)
a new social class has emerged, a computer employee quite distinct from the
electrical engineer/scientist/Dilbert types who originally held dominion. These
workers dress well and can hold conversations with members of the opposite sex,
and they’ve got a lot of money, which they spend on cars, cell phones,
cocaine. They didn’t play D&D when they were young, and they don’t
see computers as a portal to a controllable fantasy world. To them, computer
credentials open the door to the lifestyle that their diploma can no longer
assure.
But as people without college degrees realize how accessible computer training
is, and how lucrative computer jobs are, they are beginning to invade the field
and replace even this new group. And as high school students grow more computer
literate, the vocational training track becomes increasingly viable; in most
computer schools, nobody cares about your GPA. "They need to speak at the
7th grade level," Bob Greene told me. "The average is around the 10th
grade level.” And this field attracts an increasing number of minorities
like Said, who can skip the vagueness of common spoken English for the specificity
of computer lingo. It is also attracting an increasing number of women, who
make up more than half of the students taking computer-related certifications
or associate's degrees.
By the time America enacted child-labor legislation, it had already been proved
that age, sex, race, and religious belief had nothing to do with how well one
fit in a factory; one person was as good as another. All that people needed
to know was how to show up to work on time, listen to orders from superiors,
and perform repetitive tasks without complaint. This was what employers needed
from new employees, and this is how schools modeled their classes, like factories.
The idea that students should be machined identically, like ball bearings, started
as a job market requirement.
As America enters the Information Age, much of the environmental factors that
created the factory-school have changed or disappeared. Students are no longer
ball bearings, identical objects to be used anywhere; they are silicon chips,
imprinted with specific information, to be placed in a particular location in
a particular way. Both more and less adaptable than a ball bearing, but much
more expensive to produce.
But education, a naturally conservative field, has been slow to change. "The
curriculum is already overcrowded with low-level information.” writes
Chris Dede in The Evolution of Learning Strategies. "Using information
structures as a firehose to spray yet more information into educational settings
would make the situation even worse." Unfortunately, this shallow sort
of response is precisely the sort of thing that appeals to a system where primary
administrators are elected or appointed.
Colleges have been the slowest to climb aboard the computer education bandwagon;
more high school students (58%) use computers at schools than college students
(55%), and elementary schools, at 68%, use more than everyone. The resistance
of collegiate faculty (many of whom are less than computer-literate themselves)
has been unpopular with politicians and administrators who wish to gain credit
for "innovative approaches" to education. Politicians as opposite
as Newt Gingrich and Cynthia McKinney have gotten into bed over the need to
"wire our classrooms to the Internet." Gingrich at one point proposed
a tax-credit for poor persons to buy laptops. They are flakes, perhaps, but
powerful flakes, and administrators have to justify their existence to people
like this every year.
For example, at James Madison University (my alma mater), pressure to innovate
and integrate (i.e. compete with vo-tech training schools) was too much to resist.
A liberal arts college with a low faculty-student ratio, the school was at one
point expected to rival the local U.V.A. at the undergraduate level. But one
can hardly call a traditional Liberal Arts program "innovative," so
in order to compete for state funding, administrators decided to concentrate
on developing vocation-specific programs that promised quick and lucrative employment:
Business, Health Science, and of course, Computer Science. To protect the disciplines
that could have been called vo-tech from Liberal Arts criticism, they were all
(except business) clumped into a school called the College of Integrated Science
and Technology, which was loudly hailed as the seamless, integrated, proactive
solution to all the problems the Liberal Arts programs were having getting people
jobs. The Physics department was eliminated because of its small size; English
was placed inside the nascent Communications Department; American History was
removed as a graduation requirement.
CISAT was obviously a lot of technology with very little science, i.e. it was
vo-tech. People were angry until CISAT majors began graduating and making good
money, which was good for the school. Nobody pointed out that the students had
spent four years getting Bachelor's degrees in fields that debateably did not
require them, which might not have been good for the students. Or that the required
Liberal Arts classes that had taken up all this extra time and money had been
watered down by part-time nobodies.
This is not to say that all universities embraced "proactive" fad
responses. Nor is it to say that no response from Liberal Arts disciplines was
necessary, because it inarguably was. Many colleges have developed "seamless"
programs attempting to direct academic attention towards the greater implications
of this headlong plunge into the Information Age while simultaneously educating
students on the technical aspects involved. At the School of Literature, Communication
and Culture at Georgia Tech, students can take classes in The Rhetoric of Electronic
Communication, Graphic Design, The New Testament in The Western Tradition, and
software applications. At Georgetown’s College of Communications, Culture,
and Technology, students can study the implications of the Communications Act
of '96 with one of the original drafters, or take PERL programming language
courses. While graduates of these schools might not have a standard career track
awaiting them like a business major (or an MCSE) might, they will be ripe for
consulting work as companies begin to consider "Internet Strategies"
and the like, from a position of profound ignorance, just like in those IBM
commercials.
Annette Kolodny, university dean and noted feminist academic, writes that "the
challenge for policy makers and the general public is to resist the impulse
to force colleges into substituting the kind of rote training that technology
can cheaply supply for the more expensive education that teaches thinking and
analytic skills. . . Despite all the trendy importations of corporate models
into academe (like many others, my own campus embraced "total quality management")
[I] reject the notion that colleges are merely training vendors, that students
are end products. . . or that prospective employers represent higher education's
ultimate customers." Other educators voice fears about overemphasis on
the technical in general; while primary school students' scores on math and
science tests have steadily increased since 1976, reading and writing scores
have not followed with any consistency.
When I asked Bob Greene, who has three college degrees, what the difference
was between vo-tech and college, he was disdainful in the way only the college-educated
can be about their own credentials. "I think it's social," he said.
"More prestige, maybe more money, a wider choice in marriage. I think it
should all be seamless, just post-secondary schools, period. Why discriminate?"
Another article on technology in education cited the exact same reason for the
continuation of traditional college; middle-class parents and students don't
want jobs alone. They consider smelly dorms, six-foot bongs, football games
and token nights in jail, to form "an essential rite of passage."
‘Course the snobbish aspects are also real. “Sure, we love the ideal
of equal public school education,” Erica Peterson wrote to Salon Magazine,
“but in the end, it's important for Jane to meet the right people, make
the necessary connections, and, above all, separate herself from those inappropriate
childhood friends.”
Prestige, choice in marriage? Sure. More money? Not necessarily, which undermines
the choice in marriage part. Rite of passage? It’s just as illegal to
smoke out of a six-foot bong in your clean apartment as it is in a smelly dorm,
college football is on TV, and getting arrested for trivial offenses has never
been easier.
So is it ”essential?” Given the recent 90% increase in the cost
of education, compared to the 5% increase in earning power, "essential"
is, perhaps, no longer the word.
So why go to college? Sure, it's fun, but so is being young and fabulously
rich. Can you imagine making $45,000 per year at twenty? You could get your
MCSE and read a lot on the side. Plenty of folks are self-educated, and going
to college is obviously no antidote to ignorance; just look at the Harvard-educated
buffoons currently running the country. Hell, if you went to a city school,
you didn't get much "campus life" in the first place. So what's the
point? Well, here it comes:
1.Actually, your Liberal Arts-type college degree is still worth a lot. The
unfortunate corporatization of the education system has reduced the value of
an undergraduate degree to the extent that a lot of people are now learning
in college what they should have learned in high school; as Ms. Kolodny pointed
out "markets may be excellent devices for increasing profits and personal
wealth, but they are notoriously unreliable as protectors of the public good."
To get people to pay more and get less makes perfect sense from a business perspective.
Nevertheless a Bachelor's degree is still seen by employers not so much as training
as a "certificate of trainability." You might not know anything yet,
but your mind has been trained to learn.
2. The social/prestigious aspects of college, whether warranted or not, are
actually fairly important, much in the same way your golf game can affect your
business deals. Whether it's PC or not, college graduates are still the effective
ruling class in this country. And right at the top of that class are Liberal
Arts types. Among Fortune 500 companies, the most common degree is History,
followed by Sociology. Last year Microsoft, Sun, and Intel executives came before
Congress to complain about the education system. Their complaint? Not enough
liberal studies. The schools recent overemphasis on the purely technical is
creating a generation of drones, people who can crunch code, but can't create
code. They have to be handed the format. So look out; creative people are in
demand everywhere, and Liberal Arts-types are seen as inherently creative. And
they're in demand at the top more than anywhere else.
3. You're going back to school anyways. In fact, the more money you make, the
more likely it is that you will enroll in continuing adult education; in 96,
58% of those making more than $75,000 were enrolled in continuing education,
compared to 23% of those making under $10,000. Some of this may be computer-related,
some might not, but one way or the other, the days of coasting on your college
degree are over. However, you can still coast on the good study habits and time-management
skills you picked up in college. Chances are your company is going to pay for
the class, too. I certainly would think twice about paying $5,200 for twenty
three days, no matter what the salary on the other end. But that's peanuts to
a company that needs an NT administrator by the end of the month.
4. You can adapt to changing office environments better, which makes you more
attractive to employers. I wasn't always a network administrator. I started
out coordinating volunteers, then added grant-proposal writing, then administrative
support, then computer and information management. Modern operating systems
are fairly easy to pick up, and there's lots of free help. Whereas the person
who learns NT 4.0 yesterday may have to learn UNIX tomorrow, and may never be
able to pick up grant-writing.
5. The lower end of the computer job pool is artificially swollen right now,
and overspecializing in Microsoft products. The situation is kind of like the
Detroit car industry back in the eighties; Microsoft has forced software consumers
through so many shaky upgrades that tech-support centers are swamped in calls.
In any other industry Microsoft would be out of business, but its virtual monopoly
on operating systems has so far protected it. This will not last. Nor will the
ignorance of the workforce; as the next generation of computer-literate students
graduate from high school and college, there are going to be fewer and fewer
secretaries trying to figure out how to print to file and such. This means that
hiring standards will be much stricter than they are now, and nobody's going
to pay you $30 for a RAM upgrade; they'll do it themselves. That sector of computer
jobs that depends on ignorant people using computers and software for the first
time has been steadily shrinking and will continue to do so.
6. This means that to remain computer illiterate is to commit career suicide
no matter where you want to work. Nobody is using typewriters anymore. The other
day my girlfriend was accosted by a panhandler selling hot Windows 95 CDs. He
might have been a bum, but he knew enough to include the license pak and CD
key.
Finally, let's all remember the whole "common good" thing for a second. Money isn't everything. Americans say this all the time because they have such a problem believing it. Preservation of culture, enhancement of the appreciation for the diversity of life's experience- these hedonistic pursuits are vital for the preservation and extension of a healthy society, and are heavily dependent on increasingly neglected parts of the education system. Pray they never become obsolete.