Sunday, September 23, 2007

Dr Harrington meeting

In case you missed it, there was a presentation at the AHS by a Northeastern professor last week on labor trends, who in the economy makes the good money etc.

Generalizing, he presented wide ranging data on education and wage trends in the economy. It was an interesting presentation and very well received. One key point:

* Basic skills competency is a predictor (meaning has a high correlation) to performance in college as well as earning level. This is referring to basic reading, writing and math skills. The obvious conclusion was that there is a high return on investing in these skills in our kids.

What's funny is that this presentation was very similar to those given to me around 25 years ago when I was deciding where to attend school. At the time Auburn had a confusing collection of electives and a myriad of choices for course of study for the HS. You could see that as a good thing but it was my parent's conclusion that they lacked focus and what was needed was an emphasis on core skills. For this reason we chose a private school. Unfortunately money was tight but after the first year the school was very generous in aid (since I put up the grades).

There was a bundle of other data which showed the shift to a service economy away from manufacturing and the relatively high value of technical skills and higher education.

One somewhat surprising trend was the value of work and vocational education. It turns out when kids in the middle teen years work for a year or two they end up making more money and have a higher chance of graduating with a 4 year degree. You can look at the performance of 10th grade students at Bay path in math for evidence of that. The actual MCAS test is not emphasized in the school's curriculum yet they outperform neighboring Oxford for example in math. The theory is that by learning the applied skills the MCAS scores improve as a result without having to resort to special coursework designed for the test alone.

In all I think it was a good presentation, one I heard many times and one of the reasons I decided on a technical career so long ago. I'm glad educators in town were impressed by the data and it's my hope this will affect the curriculum going forward. It's certainly something for the SC to use as a basic resource.

I do think it was somewhat of a sales pitch and self-serving, but this is America after all, everyone's selling something ;).

I would have liked a discussion of how to make tuition more affordable so we can compete with international workers and students elsewhere. There was no mention of imported students and the hand in glove relationship of universities with the H1B program as well as keeping tuition high to line their pockets. Norm Matloff has a lot of interesting stats about foreign grad students and H1B/L1 program.

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