Trouble is, there's 2 sides to that problem. Not only do we have to work on our junior/community colleges, we also have to work on the HR departments that generate those checksheets. Presumably these requirements started popping up because companies were tired of hiring high school and community college graduates who couldn't do the work, but now that those requirements are in place there would have to be an effort made to change them. Expending that effort provides no value to the companies involved, since all it really does is open them up to the risk that the new crop of 2-year grads aren't as good as they should be.
You are correct. There are more than 1 side to that problem. The change would have to rely on HR departments in corporations to begin to trust the degrees Junior College graduates hold. They are not going to do that immediately, the best we could do would be to start work on building up the JuCos and providing incentives for people to go that route and after a period of several years or maybe an entire generation hoping for a gradual shift toward where we want to be.
But it is better than the alternative. In some states a BA or BS (a previously standard route to an education job) is not enough to teach K-12 anymore, as it does not guarantee the correct skills. Therefore, many states are mandating a Masters in a technical field, or an M.Ed in addition to a Bachelors in a given subject or a Bachelors plus 30 or 36 semester hours at the graduate level. How long before "degree inflation" causes the next generation of teachers to need PhDs?
(And frankly I'd be impressed if we could really fix the junior college situation; if you can't teach the required basic skills in 12-13 years, what good will 2 more do? How do you make those 2 years matter so much to the students that they learn what they couldn't manage to learn in over a decade of prior schooling?)
An interesting question. The only answer I can think of comes in one word: Failure. If a person is not college material, do not want to go to a trade school and barely passed along in high school it is quite likely that a few years working low wage low skill hourly jobs and going nowhere fast may quite likely provide the motivation they need to go back for another 2 years. I see more English and Intro. to Math textbooks in the hands of adults going to night school on the train every evening than I do in the hands of folks in their early 20s. Nothing motivates like a back against a wall.
I don't own a gun; my ancestors were Quakers!
The change would have to rely on HR departments in corporations to begin to trust the degrees Junior College graduates hold.
Trouble is, the only real way to do that is to lower the expected pay required for junior college-eligible positions (or for the government to directly fund internships) because the corps already have what they want at the price they're willing to pay, so why should they increase their risk? No corporation cares that the average worker owes umpty-thousand in school loans; in fact, this may be considered attractive as a worker trapped in fear of debt is less likely to randomly leave (though perhaps more likely to be tempted away by more money).
In some states a BA or BS (a previously standard route to an education job) is not enough to teach K-12 anymore, as it does not guarantee the correct skills.
This has been true for at least 20 years in NJ (and presumably elsewhere) and frankly, given what I've seen of B*-level Math Ed majors the extra work is essential. In a year of grading and 5 years of observation among math students in an assortment of 400-level classes, the Math Ed majors were always the problem students. Most likely to cheat and cheat big*, least likely to get uncheated work done on time, most likely to show up the last day of the semester begging for a passing grade they in no way deserved, least likely to have actually learned even the basics of a course... and these are the people we want to send out to teach the next generation? Even the occasional business majors in Linear Programming weren't as bad. Throw them back, please.
If a person is not college material, do not want to go to a trade school and barely passed along in high school it is quite likely that a few years working low wage low skill hourly jobs and going nowhere fast may quite likely provide the motivation they need to go back for another 2 years. I see more English and Intro. to Math textbooks in the hands of adults going to night school on the train every evening than I do in the hands of folks in their early 20s.
At which point the junior colleges are cast as suppliers of remedial study skills, but I guess that's to be expected. I wonder if such a class offered (or mandated) in high school would help... obviously I don't know about all high schools, but at mine "College Study Skills" was an optional senior-year joke class taught in place of a semester of writing. (Yes, in place of one of the things college students need the most.)
* It was common practice for all the Math Ed majors in a given course to latch on to one of the better students in class, copy that student's work with minimal changes and turn it in as their own. Any time they couldn't find a willing victim, endless complaints about the volume of work ensued... with the actual math majors looking on in confusion since these were not difficult or even time-consuming classes or assignments. While this was a blatant violation of our academic integrity policy, attempts to act on it were blocked since the College of Ed couldn't afford to have an entire year's worth of a major flunk a class together. The professor who actually cared about such things ended up implementing a group work policy which ended up saving tons of grading time since there was 1 paper to grade rather than 15. (The other professor's stated policy was that students could use any resource they could acquire, with the sole exception that you couldn't usae classmates or other people during exams.) If I sound bitter, that would be because I am bitter.
Humorless. Cretinous. What'd you expect?
