VO-TECH U.
learning how to be
employed
Here's an interesting and disheartening tidbit from
a Carol Kleiman Chicago Tribune
column reprinted in today's
Post-Gazette:
This past August, on their first day of class in the University of Dayton's Criminal Justice Studies program, incoming students were told, essentially, that their job search had just begun, and that it was time for them to start marketing themselves and learning how to land their first job. According to Kleiman's essay, all incoming students were told they must develop personal web sites with a resume and picture in their first year. The first-year students were also encouraged to make video resumes.
I do not claim, of course, to be an expert in how best to secure that first job as a Criminal Justice Studies graduate. I don't even know what Criminal Justice Studies are. (Though I do know that the program's web site -- which is as atrociously and inelegantly designed as any a site as I've ever seen in higher education, and which must, with that awful loop of canned music, be making a joke I just don't get -- could not sufficiently explain it to me.) But as I guy who teaches Management Communication at a top ten business school and who has advised many B.A. and M.B.A. students on their way to many, many jobs, I can confidently say that precious few prospective employers give a damn about, much less want to wade through the soupy self-indulgence of, student web sites (except those of graphic designers and web developers), pictures (except those of artists and photographers), and video resumes (except those of visual artists, performers, and designers).
But let's set aside the questionable relevance and dubious practicality of these suggestions, or even the question of how, exactly, they support the mission of a diverse, broadly structured, interdisciplinary program that supposedly encourages students to appreciate a sensitivity to the arts and to view philosophy and religion as a means of human expression (as opposed to, say, simple human employment). Let's grant -- a big wish, I know, but I'm feeling generous this morning -- all of that and allow the U of D CJS people a free pass to the second round of interviews. Because once they get there, I just want to ask them:
Isn't $80,000 and change a bit much to pay for a glorified trade school?
When I was in high school, taking all the honors courses I could, craving knowledge like Wilbur chocolate and always wanting more, my friends and I used to make fun of the kids who hopped the bus every morning and headed off to vo-tech. Truth be told, we made fun of them primarily because they weren't book smart, just as they made fun of us because we were. We were the geeks and the eggheads. They were the tools and the motorheads. We cared about the nobility of higher education, about the accumulation of knowledge; they cared about the necessity of career training, about the learning of a trade, so they could get a job and make a living once they'd scraped by with their high school diplomas. We understood that, and somewhere beneath the derision we probably appreciated it, maybe even honored it, but were certain, at least, that their sort of practicality didn't belong at the colleges and universities to which we'd be heading.
But a funny thing happened in the last twenty years. Those kinds of kids that I was -- who are now the kids that I teach -- threaten to become the vo-techers my friends and I used to scorn and deride. Too many students already see college as little more than a four-year fast-track to lucrative employment. They're perfectly ready and willing to toss aside the arts and humanities like yesterday's (or last century's) news, wanting only to focus, focus, focus and specialize, specialize, specialize, to fit themselves into the perfect, marketable niche that will get them the good offer and the big signing bonus. This is a mindset, in theory, that we who teach and guide and counsel them should be working to suppress. Or at least to soften.
I do, and I know that some of my colleagues do, but all too often many other colleagues and administrators -- like Tim Apolito, Coordinator of Community Relations for Dayton's CJS program, who says that its how they work and market themselves between matriculation and graduation that will be the catalyst for their careers -- feel compelled to bow to the pressures of student demands and expectations, to the students-as-consumers theory that says we give the paying people what they want rather than what they need to learn, and that we measure our success not by the minds we broaden but by the positions we fill.
This is not what college is, nor what it should be, though I fear it's what college will soon become.
In fairness to the folks at Dayton, this problem, this devolution, is hardly unique to their campus. I see it in fits and starts and programs at Carnegie Mellon, and I read and hear about it on plenty of other campuses as well, if not often as proudly promoted or explicitly stated as it is in Dayton's Criminal Justice Studies program. And I suspect it will continue to grow and build and thrive until enough students, enough thinkers, begin to feel cheated by this philosophy and the reductive advice it breeds, which threaten to turn proud and storied universities into just so many vocational-technical schools. Or, perhaps, until they see what I have seen in classrooms and commencements at Carnegie Mellon: that the kids who get the best jobs and find the most financial and intellectual success in their careers are the ones who tried to make themselves the best students and the best persons -- not the best applicants -- they could be.
This past August, on their first day of class in the University of Dayton's Criminal Justice Studies program, incoming students were told, essentially, that their job search had just begun, and that it was time for them to start marketing themselves and learning how to land their first job. According to Kleiman's essay, all incoming students were told they must develop personal web sites with a resume and picture in their first year. The first-year students were also encouraged to make video resumes.
I do not claim, of course, to be an expert in how best to secure that first job as a Criminal Justice Studies graduate. I don't even know what Criminal Justice Studies are. (Though I do know that the program's web site -- which is as atrociously and inelegantly designed as any a site as I've ever seen in higher education, and which must, with that awful loop of canned music, be making a joke I just don't get -- could not sufficiently explain it to me.) But as I guy who teaches Management Communication at a top ten business school and who has advised many B.A. and M.B.A. students on their way to many, many jobs, I can confidently say that precious few prospective employers give a damn about, much less want to wade through the soupy self-indulgence of, student web sites (except those of graphic designers and web developers), pictures (except those of artists and photographers), and video resumes (except those of visual artists, performers, and designers).
But let's set aside the questionable relevance and dubious practicality of these suggestions, or even the question of how, exactly, they support the mission of a diverse, broadly structured, interdisciplinary program that supposedly encourages students to appreciate a sensitivity to the arts and to view philosophy and religion as a means of human expression (as opposed to, say, simple human employment). Let's grant -- a big wish, I know, but I'm feeling generous this morning -- all of that and allow the U of D CJS people a free pass to the second round of interviews. Because once they get there, I just want to ask them:
Isn't $80,000 and change a bit much to pay for a glorified trade school?
When I was in high school, taking all the honors courses I could, craving knowledge like Wilbur chocolate and always wanting more, my friends and I used to make fun of the kids who hopped the bus every morning and headed off to vo-tech. Truth be told, we made fun of them primarily because they weren't book smart, just as they made fun of us because we were. We were the geeks and the eggheads. They were the tools and the motorheads. We cared about the nobility of higher education, about the accumulation of knowledge; they cared about the necessity of career training, about the learning of a trade, so they could get a job and make a living once they'd scraped by with their high school diplomas. We understood that, and somewhere beneath the derision we probably appreciated it, maybe even honored it, but were certain, at least, that their sort of practicality didn't belong at the colleges and universities to which we'd be heading.
But a funny thing happened in the last twenty years. Those kinds of kids that I was -- who are now the kids that I teach -- threaten to become the vo-techers my friends and I used to scorn and deride. Too many students already see college as little more than a four-year fast-track to lucrative employment. They're perfectly ready and willing to toss aside the arts and humanities like yesterday's (or last century's) news, wanting only to focus, focus, focus and specialize, specialize, specialize, to fit themselves into the perfect, marketable niche that will get them the good offer and the big signing bonus. This is a mindset, in theory, that we who teach and guide and counsel them should be working to suppress. Or at least to soften.
I do, and I know that some of my colleagues do, but all too often many other colleagues and administrators -- like Tim Apolito, Coordinator of Community Relations for Dayton's CJS program, who says that its how they work and market themselves between matriculation and graduation that will be the catalyst for their careers -- feel compelled to bow to the pressures of student demands and expectations, to the students-as-consumers theory that says we give the paying people what they want rather than what they need to learn, and that we measure our success not by the minds we broaden but by the positions we fill.
This is not what college is, nor what it should be, though I fear it's what college will soon become.
In fairness to the folks at Dayton, this problem, this devolution, is hardly unique to their campus. I see it in fits and starts and programs at Carnegie Mellon, and I read and hear about it on plenty of other campuses as well, if not often as proudly promoted or explicitly stated as it is in Dayton's Criminal Justice Studies program. And I suspect it will continue to grow and build and thrive until enough students, enough thinkers, begin to feel cheated by this philosophy and the reductive advice it breeds, which threaten to turn proud and storied universities into just so many vocational-technical schools. Or, perhaps, until they see what I have seen in classrooms and commencements at Carnegie Mellon: that the kids who get the best jobs and find the most financial and intellectual success in their careers are the ones who tried to make themselves the best students and the best persons -- not the best applicants -- they could be.
Posted: Sun - January 2, 2005 at 12:08 PM
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Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:51 PM
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