Just a footnote about the evolving "role" of higher ed in the US. The
state of California has been discussing the reform of its higher ed in
recent years. A few years back I watched a televised hearing about this
reform. It was a joint legislative hearing of the education
committees. (In the US education is mostly run by the state goverments) A
bunch of university experts testified, and then several panels of speakers
from "the business community" appeared: mostly entrepreneurs (yuppies all),
and largely from biotech firms. The specific testimony at this session was
about reforming the community colleges. The community colleges were formed
in the US mostly in the 1960s as a democratic impulse to give the common
person a second chance in life, a chance to either learn a trade or to
advance to a full university education, usually through a liberal arts
program. They have been a haven for people whom the system failed in high
school and for immigrants who arrived after childhood and who have just
achieved enough English to be able to benefit from school in the US.
The gist of the experts' testimony was that we need to transform the
community colleges so as to deemphasize the liberal arts and to innovate
new "job training" programs with more immediate payoffs for workers, like
training programs for lab technicians to do lower level quality control
testing for the biotechs. Some of the more yahoo legislators even
fulminated against allowing people who "goofed off" in high school to use
the cc's as places to get a "second chance." In sum, the whole thrust of
the hearing was to transform the cc's into big job training programs for
corporations, job training that would not necessarily be portable for the
workers (like welding, culinary arts, computer repair, etc), but would
emphasize more specific, low-level skills needed by the companies at the
moment. If the biotechs were to move out of the area tomorrow for cheaper
labor, better tax deals, etc we'd have a bunch of semi-skilled workers
unable to sell their skills to anyone but another biotech.
Pete Farruggio
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