Higher Education in the Coming Decade
by Martin Carnoy
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Martin Carnoy
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The effects of globalized labor markets
on U.S. education have been profound, and more than ever before, favor
the better educated. Market competition is now on a world-wide scale,
requiring firms to be able to respond rapidly to changes in demand
and costs. As a result, work- places are reorganizing their operations,
shifting to "lean" production methods (just-in-time delivery,
worker team quality control, team deci- sion making) and "lean"
business practices (sub- contracting, outsourcing, and downsizing). |
In turn, this has changed
the skills and knowledge demanded of workers. Workers are gradually
being defined not by the job they hold, but by their "knowledge
portfolio"—the knowledge they have acquired over time by
studying and working. An employee’s expert- ise and knowledge,
rather than his seniority or loyalty to a firm, is becoming the new
job security for workers of all ages. It is what pro- vides better-paid
workers the ability to move across firms and even across types of
work.
These economic-based changes hold important policy implications for
the future of education. Globalization is polarizing the job mar-
ket by eroding the number of middle-paying jobs in favor of high-
and low-paying ones. A four-year college education is almost always
required today to secure a higher-paying job. This change will increase
the demand for higher education in the U.S., and accelerate another
trend—the increasing dominance of the four-year college as the
driving economic force behind the educational system.
Indeed, the 1990s have seen a rapid increase in new college enroll-
ments among individuals from groups that have, historically, been
marginalized during their K-12 education, and who are often the first
member of their family to attend college. At the same time, dropout
rates from four-year colleges average about 50 percent nationwide.
The tendency has been to place blame for this situation on individual
students, or on the failings of the K-12 educational system. This,
despite the fact that we know some colleges and uni- versities taking
students with similar average SAT scores have much higher success
rates, while others have worse ones.
More attention should and will be paid to accountability at higher
education institutions, and particularly their capacity to teach successfully
an increasingly diverse student body. The role of test- ing in higher
education may and probably should also shift to assessing the success
of colleges in teaching various subjects to national standards. It
is also likely we will see more tests to screen prospective college
freshmen, and that these tests will begin to drive the high school
curriculum.
At the same time, as more students from low-income, less-educated
families recognize the importance of a college education in securing
a better paying job, elementary and secondary schools will experi-
ence greater pressure to prepare these students for college.
Martin Carnoy is Professor of Education and Economics at Stanford
University. His most recent book is Sustaining Flexibility: Work,
Family, and Community in the Information Age (Russell Sage Foundation,
2000).
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