My generation,
collectively, has failed to launch in an epic manner. We are living with our parents, perennially
unemployed or underemployed, submerged beneath the rising tide of student loans
without the careers with which to repay them.
Simultaneously, corporations throughout this country, and around the
globe display desperate need for engineers, programmers, and analysts capable
of processing and comprehending the terabytes of data produced by our
technocratic society. We lament with a
despondent sigh, “there are no jobs.” This statement is inaccurate. As grossly insensitive as it may sound, we
ought to be honest with ourselves, “there are no jobs for us.”
We
majored in French medieval literature, 19th century art, music, or
dance. Civilizations are nourished and
enhanced by the arts, by the beauty of the creative expression of the human
mind. However, at a state institution
with 10,000 in its graduating class, there should be 100 such burgeoning aesthetes…not
1,000+. The remaining 900 are worldly,
cultured, sophisticated, and unable to support themselves. Some of us, thinking ourselves pragmatic,
with an eye towards our future wallets, majored in “business.” Countless studies of higher education have
argued that business majors often do the least work of all undergraduates and
display the smallest increases in analytical reasoning and critical thinking
skills between enrollment and graduation.
Industry requires managers, decision-makers, and big-picture thinkers,
but these individuals show an agility of mind which was almost assuredly honed
somewhere beyond the walls of a classroom.
Financial markets require skilled hands directing capital to its most
useful locations…but these tasks demand advanced mathematical and analytical
reasoning…which, statistically-speaking, most often resides in the minds of
engineers, mathematicians, and scientists.
The
term “STEM” fields has become a buzzword, an acronym referring to “Science,
Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.”
These are the fields where young adults are finding employment with comparative
ease and producing legitimate value to society, not to mention finding
themselves able to move out of their parents’ basement. These fields, I would like to posit, possess
a characteristic which distinguishes them from the humanities I so callously
disparaged in the previous paragraph. It
is not their higher-minded pursuit of objective, quantitative truth, nor their
ability to heal the sick or construct the infrastructure of modern society, nor
the problem-solving they teach, which our problem-plagued world demands (though
these statements are factual). It is the
fact that their entryways shut long before college. It is the fact that a depressingly-large
majority of students have lost their train ticket to these fields before they
ever became aware of the tracks.
Malcolm
Gladwell, in a manner far more eloquent and engaging than this essay introduces
a nation of mastery, of the 10,000+ hours required to reach the pinnacle of one’s
field. For certain fields, using professional
athletics as the example, it is worthless to master the techniques at an age
where one’s physical prowess has already removed the possibility of elite
performance. To become a professional
athlete, the high-level training and instruction must begin in elementary
school in many cases. While one can
realistically decide to major in some highly specified, esoteric sect of the
humanities universe during the spring of their sophomore year as an
undergraduate – and emerge with roughly the same training as anyone else who
holds that same degree, STEM fields are a highly distinct animal. One does not decide to study chemical
engineering during their fourth semester in college. At that stage, without years of training in
mathematics through multivariable calculus and linear algebra, courses in
chemistry and physics at the college level, and in this society, some
perfunctory computer programming skills, that door, metaphorically speaking, is
closed. A quick review of that list
reveals that acquiring these skills requires several college-level courses,
each of which demands significant high school preparation, much of which
contains prerequisites from the advanced track curriculum beginning in junior
high. Playing catch-up, given the rising
cost of education, the intellectual gulf between well-prepared and
underprepared classmates, and the need to reach financial solvency at a
reasonable age, is all but impossible.
In
many humanities-based fields, the top 1% find employment in their chosen area,
the remaining group must seek further education or lower-level, unrelated
vocations. In STEM fields, the
overwhelming majority of students do utilize their skills professionally. Despite this obvious advantage, the
opportunity to pursue such subjects is often lost before students have even completed
their adolescence. The statistic I have never seen, yet would love to access is the proportion of
students who are not placed into the advanced track courses in math and science
who ultimately graduate with a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field from a
four-year institution.
These
subjects are intimidating, and too often, students whine that they simply “are
not good in math and science.” Teachers
and parents accept this explanation at face value, allowing their students to
eschew the foundation of skills which our current economy demands. I cannot possibly imagine that thirteen
year-olds covered in pimples and awash in hormones possess the long-term
foresight required to understand the magnitude of their choices. Teachers and parents have an obligation to
their students and our society to keep that door open longer. It is beyond troubling that a generation
cannot find employment because of the skills they did not acquire over the
previous two decades of their lives and now, cannot afford to relive those
years with the benefit of hindsight.
One
century ago, or even more recently, the strength of our bodies and the
dexterity of our fingers manufactured goods and services – for our time and
physical vitality, we were compensated well enough to live comfortably. Now, goods and services are frequently zeros
and ones. The paradigm of trading time spent in
relatively lower-intellectual-demand tasks for pay has vanished. Why then has our educational system failed to
adapt? Species adapt or perish. So too do nations. I fear my generation may have already been
failed by a system which failed to deliver the skills required to sustain our
society economically. We, as a nation,
had better not fail the next one.
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