Why Skills Are Not Enough to Land a Job

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/why-skills-are-not-enough-to-land-a-job/

But other analyses of the academic data, by the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and independent economist Joydeep Roy, place the modern diploma in a more complex economic frame. First, while Achieve compares various states’ graduation criteria, as EPI President Lawrence Mishel explains, “none of their comparisons are historical, showing a change from an earlier period.” Yet historical trendlines suggest that skills required in high-school curricula today might often exceed those the job market demands—linked in part to the so-called “deskilling” of certain conventional trades, which some economists argue is pushing highly trained workers “down the occupational ladder” (read: baristas with BAs). If there is a gap in qualifications, it seems to center on overqualified workers who can’t find positions commensurate with their credentials. (By the way, the same research reveals steadily rising portions of high schoolers taking Algebra II, along with calculus, chemistry, and physics—so maybe it’s not the school system that lacks rigor but the labor market).

There are, of course, serious problems with inequality, inconsistency, and racial segregation across the public education system. And many high-school graduates start community college needing major remedial coursework, and may struggle to catch up to college-level academics. But cynicism about lackluster diplomas may be misplaced, or more dangerously, distract the public from holding corporations and policymakers accountable for dismal job prospects.

The worries about inadequate graduation standards echo the perennial warnings emanating from the corporate world about the so-called “skills gap,” which economist Paul Krugman calls a “zombiidea” frequently manipulated by business “opinion leaders” seeking to avoid blame for mass joblessness or low wages. “Instead of focusing on the way disastrously wrongheaded fiscal policy and inadequate action by the Federal Reserve have crippled the economy and demanding action, Krugman wrote last year, “important people piously wring their hands about the failings of American workers.”

The same very important people seem now to be wringing their hands about high school’s being simply “too easy.” EPI’s latest analysis of workforce data, however, reverses the blame equation for young graduates by showing long-term barriers to secure employment that can’t be explaineaway by variations in academic rigor. Historically, the unemployment rate among younger workers (under age 25) has been more than double the general unemployment rate, reaching 12.3 percent versus 5.3 percent in early 2015. Black and Latino high-school graduates suffer joblessness rates of nearly 30 and 20 percent, respectively, compared to 17 percent for whites. Moreover, long-term unemployment has consistently afflicted workers at all education levels, undercutting the notion that some magical pool of jobs is waiting to be claimed by those with just the right skill sets. (And thus makes it harder for employers to justify not offering decent wages and working conditions.)

[Snarkoleptic]

1. “important people piously wring their hands about the failings of American workers.”

A classic example of blame-the-victim and it plays right into the hands of the charter school/school privatization set.

Offshore jobs, expand the H1-B visa program, criticize workers for not finding full employment as well as our education system for failing to prepare Americans for the 'new labor force', lather, rinse, repeat. The result is more corporate power and weakened labor.

[MisterP]

3. and yet it's still all "STEM shortage!" "get a STEM degree!"

[Octafish]

4. Is economics count?

The author was a Chicago Boy helping implement the scam for Pinochet:

President Clinton and the Chilean Model.

By José Piñera

Midnight at the House of Good and Evil

"It is 12:30 at night, and Bill Clinton asks me and Dottie: 'What do you know about the Chilean social-security system?'” recounted Richard Lamm, the three-term former governor of Colorado. It was March 1995, and Lamm and his wife were staying that weekend in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.

I read about this surprising midnight conversation in an article by Jonathan Alter (Newsweek, May 13, 1996), as I was waiting at Dulles International Airport for a flight to Europe. The article also said that early the next morning, before he left to go jogging, President Bill Clinton arranged for a special report about the Chilean reform produced by his staff to be slipped under Lamm's door.

That news piqued my interest, so as soon as I came back to the United States, I went to visit Richard Lamm. I wanted to know the exact circumstances in which the president of the world’s superpower engages a fellow former governor in a Saturday night exchange about the system I had implemented 15 years earlier.

Lamn and I shared a coffee on the terrace of his house in Denver. He not only was the most genial host to this curious Chilean, but he also proved to be deeply motivated by the issues surrounding aging and the future of America. So we had an engaging conversation. At the conclusion, I ventured to ask him for a copy of the report that Clinton had given him. He agreed to give it to me on the condition that I do not make it public while Clinton was president. He also gave me a copy of the handwritten note on White House stationery, dated 3-21-95, which accompanied the report slipped under his door. It read:

Dick,
Sorry I missed you this morning.
It was great to have you and Dottie here.
Here's the stuff on Chile I mentioned.
Best,
Bill.

Three months before that Clinton-Lamm conversation about the Chilean system, I had a long lunch in Santiago with journalist Joe Klein of Newsweek magazine. A few weeks afterwards, he wrote a compelling article entitled,[font color="green"] "If Chile can do it...couldn´t North America privatize its social-security system?" [/font color]He concluded by stating that "the Chilean system is perhaps the first significant social-policy idea to emanate from the Southern Hemisphere." (Newsweek, December 12, 1994).

I have reasons to think that probably this piece got Clinton’s attention and, given his passion for policy issues, he became a quasi expert on Chile’s Social Security reform. Clinton was familiar with Klein, as the journalist covered the 1992 presidential race and went on anonymously to write the bestseller Primary Colors, a thinly-veiled account of Clinton’s campaign.

“The mother of all reforms”

While studying for a Masters and a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, I became enamored with America’s unique experiment in liberty and limited government. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the first volume of Democracy in America hoping that many of the salutary aspects of American society might be exported to his native France. I dreamed with exporting them to my native Chile.

So, upon finishing my Ph.D. in 1974 and while fully enjoying my position as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Boston University, I took on the most difficult decision in my life: to go back to help my country rebuild its destroyed economy and democracy along the lines of the principles and institutions created in America by the Founding Fathers. Soon after I became Secretary of Labor and Social Security, and in 1980 I was able to create a fully funded system of personal retirement accounts. Historian Niall Ferguson has stated that this reform was “the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation. Thatcher and Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare started in Chile.”

But while de Tocqueville’s 1835 treatment contained largely effusive praise of American government, the second volume of Democracy in America, published five years later, strikes a more cautionary tone. He warned that “the American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” In fact at some point during the 20th century, the culture of self reliance and individual responsibility that had made America a great and free nation was diluted by the creation of [font color="green"] “an Entitlement State,”[/font color] reminiscent of the increasingly failed European welfare state. What America needed was a return to basics, to the founding tenets of limited government and personal responsibility.

[font color="green"]In a way, the principles America helped export so successfully to Chile through a group of free market economists needed to be reaffirmed through an emblematic reform. I felt that the Chilean solution to the impending Social Security crisis could be applied in the USA.[/font color]

CONTINUED...

http://www.josepinera.org/articles/articles_clinton_chilean_model.htm

It's like grand theft America.

[Octafish]

2. There are not enough jobs.

Speaking as an all too often unnecessary robot...

[Shandris]

6. And we continue to raise the regulations barrier that must be crossed to make new, small ones.

Which is, of course, intentional. Once the world economic system is fully in place, no one must be allowed to start their own home business. It'd wreak havoc on the populace control mechanisms, because someone could simply become self sufficient. That's the last thing they want where we're headed.

[Octafish]

7. The Underside of Uber

We'll have to sign up and compete for gigs.

Cool beans in the New Feudalism, if we're lucky.

[davidn3600]

5. Education isn't enough now

A degree makes you qualified to apply. But if you have no experience, you have zero shot at getting the job. The employer would rather the job go unfilled. They don't believe in on the job training anymore.