Academia: Mind the Gap
Thursday's Child Has Far to Go (So Far That He's Publishing This on Friday)
In a little more than a week, I’m attending a workshop built around the theme of The Future of Work in terms of what that means for liberal education in universities and colleges.
It’s a perennial topic—the Chronicle of Higher Education could practically relaunch itself as The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Future of Work and lose only a small percentage of its usual content.
It’s especially favored as a cudgel to beat higher education over the head (which is probably why the Chronicle features it): ed-tech entrepreneurs claim this is why we should remake higher education according to their designs, right-wing governors and legislatures proclaim they want to get rid of all that icky critical thinking and just train a workforce precisely and specifically for the jobs available today in their states (in Florida, perhaps, they do not want to train anyone to work at Walt Disney World), university presidents who’ve taken on the unenviable task of keeping their institution from failing want to get rid of degrees that aren’t tied to jobs and bring in degrees that are.
As I said a few weeks back, I’m not at all against talking about the relationship between what students in college or university study and what kinds of work they might do once they graduate. Sometimes faculty are adverse about talk of employment as an extension of their general squeamishness about socioeconomic class, which is an avoidance that our institutional cultures share more generally—because among other things, talking about socioeconomic class and educational credentials forces us to talk about our role in producing widening inequality despite our stated intentions to the contrary.
So as I think about speaking to the “future of work”, I am not just going to shut down the conversation altogether. At the same time, I’m really sure what conversation academia shouldn’t be having, which is anything at all that endorses the idea of a “skills gap” being the major issue in the American labor market which can only be solved via changes to the curricular programs of American colleges and universities.
The reason we shouldn’t go that way is first that the skills gap does not exist except in a narrow handful of specific professional niches. I don’t want to start a conversation about an important question with the equivalent of an earnest discussion about where exactly Santa Claus’ house is at the North Pole and what we might do to help him relocate if the polar ice disappears.
Ok, that’s a bit strong, so let’s be clear here about what kind of skills gap does not exist. The classic trope here is to assert that there are concrete specific jobs that employers want to hire for which are not being filled because there are not enough employees with the specific requisite technical skills available to be hired. Where higher education enters the picture is when those requisite skills are represented as requiring a specific credential-granting program of prior training, e.g., that the jobs that are unfilled are jobs which someone could step right into with the correct educational preparation.
Here I’m going to dust off a 2019 whitepaper by the author Ryan Craig that is more or less repeating the claims of his book New U in which he claims that the skills gap is in fact real and the liberals who claim otherwise are wrong, in part to show how tortured the argument in favor of a skills gap can be. (Also it’s pre-pandemic, so we can step a bit around the complexities of the last three years. Though not too much: I intend to pull in a few things we’ve learned from “the Great Resignation”.) Craig here is essentially trying to indemnify employers and corporations from criticism that the problems with the American labor market (and by extension much else in American life) are their fault. I think he ends up revealing that in fact it is their fault and that higher education has stupidly agreed to take the fall for that. For a good while maybe that made sense because the government (federal and state) was essentially subsidizing universities to be the designated martyr for the failures of post-New Deal neoliberalism, but now the subsidy has been withdrawn, so we don’t owe employers any favors.
Craig starts off by saying acknowledging that in fact the jobs that aren’t being filled are arguably entry-level jobs for which employers are in fact requiring prior experience in exactly that job. Right off the bat, higher education is already sort of off the hook: even with internships, externships and all that, in most cases we can’t give three years of specific job experience to a student while also training them. Craig says the reason the employers are leaving the jobs vacant rather than hiring employees with relevant credentials and then training them into the post is two-fold: training is expensive and Millennials (now GenZ as well, I presume) will “jump to another job at the first opportunity”. So let me translate this with some vulgar economics: what this means is that employers want potential employees to assume all the costs and risks of training for employment and they want them to be loyal to the first company to hire them even if the employee accurately assesses that the company is not loyal to them.
What this implies, among other things, is that the unfilled jobs that Craig and his favored sources have in mind are not very important to the companies expressing the need. If they were very important, the companies would pay whatever the market said they had to pay. If the market conditions are that you have to hire entry-level, pay the costs on on-the-job training, and then offer some form of security or incentive sufficient to retain the trained employee, well, that’s it, then. Welcome to capitalism. At least the way it looks in the textbooks. If what Craig means by a skills gap is that universities are failing to educate people who will find a way to work for free for three years to acquire the experience to match the credential and who will be irrationally loyal to an employer who is paying them an entry-level salary and making no promises at all about continued employment, that is the kind of skills gap I would be proud to contribute to. I think for that kind of employee it’s just more efficient to just have a police state or to brutally impoverish people to the point that they’ll stop insisting on a fair deal. (Option #2 might be the way we’re going.)
Craig bundles together quantitative data in vague form with assertions that there are “over a million open positions on indeed.com that pay over $75,000”, that it’s not all low-pay, low-security positions that nevertheless seek substantial credentials or experience. What the hell, I’ll play, in an equally mix-and-match way. I just asked indeed.com for jobs open in Philadelphia right now. (Yes, post-pandemic, not 2019, so with whatever impact that has had.) What I see is a huge number of jobs paying between $28,000-$38,000 a year. Some of them are genuinely entry-level, no credentials or prior experience required, but in that same range are jobs like “Business Office Manager” requiring prior experience and basic-level accounting skills. Go up to $65,000 or more and what I see is: 1) job listings that are pulling a fast one by being in that filter because they’re specifying a pay range that goes from the low 40s to much higher and it turns out you only get much higher if you have a lot of experience, specific credentials and are willing to work way more than 40 hours a week as a salaried employee or jobs that require highly specific post-graduate credentials AND substantial experience.
Craig’s argument is that the unfilled “medium and high-skill” jobs are unfilled because the candidates lack digital skills and because they lack “soft skills”. What digital skills? Primarily, he argues, skills with profession-specific platforms like Pardot, Marketo, Google AdWords, ZenDeskPlus, NetSuite, FinancialForce, Workday and Salesforce. These platforms, he acknowledges, are “really hard”. And as is requisite in business writing, he cites Atul Gawande, with the equally requisite unwillingness to understand what he says. Gawande complains that medical software is impossible to use; Craig says “Well, it has to be, because the tasks it’s doing are really difficult, intrinsically.”
There’s a couple of things I could point out here. One is that Craig is over-specifying these platforms. Pardot and Salesforce, for example, are very similar (produced by the same company). More importantly, what’s he arguing for here? That higher education train people in specific platforms that have often have the lifespan of a mayfly? Marketo is only about 15 years old, it was on its way to being absorbed into Google’s suite of products (thus losing its technical distinctiveness) and then that was paused and the company was bought by Adobe, which will probably increasingly make it Adobe-like. Enterprise software is a pyramid of skulls a mile high: training for facility in one platform through the acquisition of an educational degree that charges substantial tuition would be a super-dumb move for anybody to undertake. The point is to acquire a general education—liberal arts!—that includes understanding broadly how business processes work and how software platforms are generally being used. Which is a point that Craig himself credits, but doesn’t seem to recognize that it makes talk of a “skills gap” that corresponds to educational credentials kind of silly. No medium-sized business is leaving an important management job open because they can’t find someone who has a specific degree that includes verified expertise in NetSuite. They might be leaving it open if the only people they can find are still doing double-blind accounting in a paper ledger, but that takes us back to: a) this is not actually an important job or b) you’re not paying enough for the person who could skill up quickly on the specific enterprise product the business is using or c) the people doing the hiring are the ones with the skills gap because they don’t know how to recognize capable applicants.
Craig goes on to identify the second problem as a lack of “soft skills”, e.g., emotional intelligence, humility, willingness to listen to instructions, and so on. I’ll say that this is another domain where the problem is at least somewhat on the other side, which is managers who are accustomed to managing in a particular way despite the fact that their skill set allegedly includes adaptability and flexibility in relationship to developing the talents and capacities of employees. Recall for example managers in the pandemic who insisted that they couldn’t evaluate whether a remote employee was doing all the work unless they could watch them physically at all times. I think the soft skills shoe is on the other foot there, yes?
What he lays at the doorstep of higher education is “education friction”, which is just a business-writing relabelling for the familiar “professors don’t change what they are teaching fast enough”. Craig writes, “In no other sector of the economy is such outdated thinking commonplace”. In other words, everybody else is ready to constantly overhaul their work processes, skill sets and mission in order to keep up with the newest products offered by Big Tech or the newest shifts in the market; Craig’s view is that professors should be ripping up their curricula constantly to chase the newest software product or the newest fashionable business-jargon doctrine because everybody else does it. My response to that is, seriously? The restaurants I go to are redoing everything on a weekly basis? The health care professionals I see are shifting therapies every couple of months on a fundamental level? Farms—whether industrial-scale agriculture or boutique heirloom growers—are doing everything differently from season to season?
Yes, every business and institution is adapting to changes and seeking opportunities, some of them nimbly and some not. But higher ed does that as much as any other service—the courses we teach, the way we teach them, the reasons we teach, shift constantly. Faculty are perpetually retraining—picking up new skills, reading new scholarship, addressing new pedagogies. Craig has the same problem that a lot of over-enthusiastic “disruptors” do: they assume that changing work processes and learning new tools is cost-free because they put all the costs on the workers. But even a minor shift in an interface of a program or platform I use regularly has a cognitive cost. Like any sensible economic agent, I try to think carefully about when I want to pay those costs in relationship to the benefits I expect to receive. Chasing the latest ed-tech fad demonstrably has a terrible cost-to-benefit ratio. Craig dismisses faculty who conclude that constant retooling to teach the latest specific platform is a bad idea, but in the long haul of digitization, those faculty have been absolutely right. In the first major dot-com boom, we were besieged by Craig’s ed-tech forerunners who all insisted that we needed to redo our entire curriculum to showcase their products and go completely online right away, that residential brick-and-mortar education was over. If we’d listened to them, that would have been the end of things, plus most of the shit they were shoveling at us flamed out and died only two or three years later.
When Craig gets around to what he calls “hiring friction”, he makes more sense to me—but at that point he’s basically endorsing the point that there isn’t a skills gap, there’s a hiring gap. The problem is that he uses this to explain income inequality and the generally bad prospects of young Americans in the existing labor market. It’s all on them, essentially: it’s not wages, it’s not mismanagement of employees once they are hired, it’s not the systematic destruction of public goods, it’s not a taxation strategy that is designed to transfer wealth to the 1%, it’s not the high cost of education, it’s not the systematic transference of the costs of skills acquisition to employees, it’s not the mindless destructiveness of “disruption”. And so on. It’s the fault of higher education, it’s the fault of human resources staff, and it’s the fault of the Millennials, who haven’t learned the soft skill of obediently accepting a raw deal and embracing the labor markets that neoliberalism made as if they are inevitable and natural.
Which is the second reason I don’t want to talk about the future of work in relationship to higher education in terms of a skills gap. That represents an acceptance of a frame job that lets the truly guilty off scot-free. Yes, I want to talk about what work really is with students—and how they can look for the best deal possible. But as in all things, when I work with students, I want to be on their side. I don’t want to be Renfield rounding up new victims for Dracula. If I’m going to talk about their future at work, I want to talk about how they can get the best of a bad lot, not about how it’s my fault and their fault that they aren’t getting the same social contract that their grandparents did.
Image credit: Photo by Kevin Chen on Unsplash
Bravo. Good wishes in turning the tide🙏👍🏼💪🏼👌👏🏽