The college-for-all model isn't working
latimes.com
latimes.com
We keep running into this problem where employers think college degrees are more valuable than they probably are. Part of that is impressed culturally, but more than anything we lack better methods of certification in most jobs. We need certification that matters, is widely accepted, and that employers actually trust. It has to be marketed well, and it has to actually produce graduates with up-to-date skills. It's not easy, especially in fields where curriculum must change yearly.
Underlying all of this is a larger, unavoidable change taking place: the disappearance of unskilled work. Computers and machines are slowly taking over every unskilled job, starting at the least skilled and moving upwards to things we used to think of as skilled labor. Taxi drivers and factory workers will hardly exist in 10 years. Construction workers will only supervise machines in our lifetimes. Unless you want to work in a low-paying retail job for the rest of your life, you need to get a degree so you can work your way up some corporate ladder - or so the thinking goes.
Yes and yes I wasted the first two years in college learning High School 2.0 and the last 2 learning technical concepts that people used 5-10 years ago. XHTML, CGI and using tables for layouts to name a few.
The apprenticeship model should be re-embraced.
Generally, you don't want your DBA discovering the 3rd normal form halfway through a project.
Of course, this, like many factors, is both a cause and an effect of this more fluid labor market.
The statistics would quickly show that people with minimal or no education do almost as good, and are willing to work for less, and so they just hire them instead. Or maybe see that people from "lesser" universities are just as good as those from more prestigious ones. Maybe certification agencies would compete on the basis of how well their certification actually correlates with employee performance. Schools or training agencies could compete on a similar basis.
Which is just something many people don’t really care to do. And that’s fine. The problem is trying to get everyone interested in it, denying the fact that many lack interest and aptitude, and then diluting the experience for everyone while saddling the next generation with decades’ worth of debt.
Where the grandparent said "employers think college degrees are more valuable than they probably are," you've highlighted the disconnect between what employers think they're getting from a college grad (certain skills) and what colleges actually do (teach students to think, to learn, to read).
That's not High School 2.0. In fact, High School seems to be the right place for vocational training. It's the pinnacle of state-mandated schooling, and in fact includes vocational requirements. Some schools implement that as wood shop. Others focus so completely on teaching computer skills they become a "magnet school" for that one thing only.
Unskilled work is disappearing and simultaneously employers are demanding more unskilled laborers. The work is disappearing because it's cheaper to have a machine do it flawlessly. The employers don't want skilled labor...labor versus capital all over again.
For a while yet, it may be possible to become really skilled in computing and successfully straddle the divide: make enough money to be comfortable as a skilled laborer. But I think it would be wise for _colleges_ to cross-train all their Science/Engineering students in business.
Colleges (traditionally) focus on the whole person. A person with business skills, connections, and potential funding becomes the new bar for entry. I'm always thankful my professors took the time to do that last part: take us (a team of students) into the real world.
I'd like to argue for the opposite. Since everyone goes to high school, it should be a place to teach people to think, learn and read (that's how it used to be in some European countries). This is where students could explore and find out what they like, as well as read as many books as they can.
After that, college should be for white-collar training. You really do need several years of focused learning on certain topics before jumping in (I don't think you can ever jump straight into medicine, building bridges or designing microprocessors without a few years of reading in advance).
For example, with engineering, an airplane built from your design flies or does not. There's no pretending it flies when it doesn't. Reality cannot be fooled, so one is forced to learn to think critically.
But with liberal arts, the same person can argue both points of view with equal facility - how does one tell which is correct? What good is being able to criticize without a mechanism for determining the correct way? Or even a better way?
The idea of liberal arts is that their study enables one to participate as a full-fledged member of society. Thinking critically about arguments that concern society requires not just checking the validity but also the soundness of an argument. I suppose you really need some understanding of culture and history to make up your mind about many issues of importance to the society in which you live.
In engineering, you learn to discern logical fallacies rather quickly. Insulting your computer (ad hom) won't fix bugs in your programs. Insults in issues of importance to society are the norm, even going to the highest levels.
As a lawyer friend told me once:
1. if justice is on your side, argue justice
2. if the law is on your side, argue the law
3. if neither the law nor justice is on your side, insult the other side
To argue from the other side, the point of liberal arts isn't to make you argue both sides of an issue equally. And telling a good essay from a bad essay can often be easier than telling a good airplane design from a bad one.
(Full disclosure: I'm an engineer and I only took 2 semesters of humanities classes in college.)
The odds are still against you. You will lose opportunities due to credentialism. The best bet is to become better than your peers and be in the top 5% of the talent pool. When you work with someone who really knows their shit, shadow them.
The better bet is to eventually go independent once you know you're more towards the top of the heap. Years ago, a McKinsey subsidiary ultimately ruled me out due to a lack of degree. Nowadays they're a customer and have no problem subcontracting me out, because "I run my own business" and a proven track record is just as sufficient as the degree they otherwise look for.
And it's even worse now.
In the end, I lucked my way through a succession of jobs, due in part to the fact that my chosen career, systems admin, doesn't really have a university career path leading to it, so my personal experience was worth as much as anyone else's.
My recommendation: do lots of projects, contribute to open-source, put a bunch of personal projects up on github (and do them right; document them well and write good code), and apply to forward-thinking companies (startups, etc.). Show that you can do the work and no company worth their salt will care too much about how you learned it.
I need to put a plug in for my alma mater: http://www.rit.edu/programs/networking-and-systems-administr...
A lot of my friends from high school have part-time jobs / intern over the summer at the startups/companies from where around I used to live...
But I don't live there anymore. And I'm kind of hesitant to move back to Sunnyvale (It is the most boring, soul-sucking place on earth) so I guess that doesn't really count for anything.
Meh.
This is base on my experience, but most of them are bad. They lack vocabularies and such that when they try to convey what they're doing or what they want other people to do or hell just to communicate with the team it takes a fucking long time and in the end might not even get anything done. They also want to get shit done without thinking about any other possible solutions or the consequences of their chosen solution.
I've worked under one. From my imperfect memory, he basically ask to make the API to be as good as their competitor.
When I ask more questions to clarify it. The said programmer got frustrated and threw a tantrum. Eventually, I found out the asshole, who lack soft skills, just wanted a async call methods in the api from client to the server.
edit: added most, because I'm sure there are a few exceptions out there.
I think the real difference between the good developers and the bad is more a result of "passion" for the field. If your only care is about getting the job and the salary that comes with it, you may very well spend a lot of time and effort getting to that point, but you probably won't go beyond that. On the other hand, the guys on my team, myself included, are all passionate. Now that doesn't mean "slaves away for ungodly hours" or even that they spend their time working on side-projects. The common-denominator is that we very much enjoy the line of work. We try to be "craftsmen" and not just a desk-bound office rats. Some jobs allow you to get to a point where you just don't have to put forth much effort unless you actively try to be the best. Software development/engineering/<term du jour> is not one of those fields.
The degree is the best effort so far in our society that shows that someone is competance in their field.
I never finished my degree but instead I finished a ton of other projects, businesses and employment that has made me a ton of $$. And I would do it all over again for a fraction of that money because I go to bed at night (reluctantly) thinking about all the cool shit I get to build and program the next day.
Passion is abstract, excitement is visible. If one day you are looking to hire someone and they don't have the academia creds but do have the experience and are pumped up about your company, team, product or project then give them a shot, you wont be disappointed!
Here's a thought: knowing and understanding concepts is more difficult than learning the lingo. Why not just, very respectfully and casually, insert the correct word into the discussion and help the guy pick this stuff up? It's called "teamwork" and it's really quite good at making work (and life) better.
I've worked with too many guys with EE and CE and CS degrees that just totally fall down on the job to believe that a degree is the silver bullet of ignorance that you're suggesting. I think in reality it's about individual drive and intellectual appetite. But that's just my own observation.
I don't believe knowing and understand goes hand in hand.
Computer Science have tons of vocab. If you get rid of all of them then you mind as well spend the whole day doing nothing but describing all the absract concepts.
The reason why we invent vocabulary is so we can ignore the lower nitty gritty details and talk on a higher level and focus on the problems we're trying to solve. I don't need to spend more than sentence or so to describe a singleton. I can just say hey I'm thinking that we should implementing a singleton because it's resource intensive.
Instead hey, let's ensure that there is only one instance of this class because we don't need more than one instance. Even in that sentence, Instance is also a vocab of CS.
>> to believe that a degree is the silver bullet of ignorance that you're suggesting.
I'm not suggesting that this is the silver bullet. But this is an indication that a person have some competent to at least get a degree.
I'm sorry for you. My college experience was very valuable to me (not for the diploma, nobody cares about my diploma, least of all me). I learned a great deal about how to solve problems, how to figure out what was important, how to separate truth from crap, how to learn, and the confidence that I can do it.
Caltech's honor system has also been very formative for me and I've applied it since then with considerable success.
The more I hear about other peoples' college experiences, the more I appreciate how lucky I was to wind up at Caltech.
Several commenters have already noted that the fundamental "fact" here, that certain vocations are experiencing major shortages (the "skills mismatch" claim) is completely false, which it is. The Great Recession stretches across all job fields and locations in the United States and beyond.
Nutshell: this op-ed is from someone who hates broad-based education and wants to bring in a sort of reverse work-training system: you pay them for the privilege of working at various companies, and we call it modern vocational education.
Every time I see people saying "not everyone should go to college" during a non-economic-boom I wish they would start teaching game theory to high schoolers.
My point is that there isn't this magical jobs fountain that people are holding back from the masses, it's that there are large portions of the population that lack skills that are in demand in the work force.
I don't see how this is a controversial opinion.
But what if that rate of pay is more than the new employees are worth to the company, so hiring them would not benefit the company at all? Then it's not a market rate, because market rate isn't just the outer edge of what one side finds acceptable. If both sides don't find the rate acceptable, there's no market rate.
If a "greedy" employer refuses to pay what it takes to hire all the people they need, while their enlightened competitor does pay what it takes to get the necessary additional labor, one of those employers will have higher profits than the other, and the one with lower profits will be pressured by their investors to become more like the other.
That has been going on for centuries, and the result is a "labor shortage" in some areas, meaning companies (that always face competition from other companies) can't get all the labor they want at existing rates and wouldn't benefit from additional labor at higher rates. The problem may well be gradually driving the company out of business, but still, raising their wages would just drive them out of business faster.
I'd still call it a shortage of corn, because I'm thinking of it relative to previous years, future expectations, the causes of the price change, etc. Rent control or earthquakes cause what many would consider a housing shortage, gov't price controls or bad weather create commodity shortages, and sufficiently generous welfare programs (you have to pay a lot more to make it worth working at all) or explosive increases in customer demand (not enough time for labor to learn new skills) can create labor shortages.
From the perspective of an employer, no longer being able to hire people at a wage that makes them worth hiring can be seen as a labor shortage, while from the perspective of a worker, no longer being able to get a job at a wage worth working for can be seen as a jobs shortage, but I agree with you that, especially if the changes are just the long-term evolution of the economy, there comes a point where it no longer makes sense to refer to something that will never come back as a "shortage".
I think we are short technicians, because so many people who would have been happy with two years of technical training and a basic, working class wage after graduation are instead herded into 4-yr bachelor's programs, where they end up dropping out with a few semesters of Nonsense Studies classes and a mountain of debt, qualifying them only for welfare or Walmart. By the time they realize they would have been much better off with a skilled technician job and a working class lifestyle, it's too late. I think if we changed our attitude toward skilled tradespeople, we would almost all be better off. Since we used to do this, and the Germans still do, it's an artificial shortage in my opinion.
On the other hand, I think we're overloaded with PhDs, because so many want the prestige, but the marginal value to an employer of additional specialized education in a specialty other than the job itself falls off so rapidly. Someone who did years of PhD work on turkey feathers is not much more valuable to a drug company than he was when he got his bachelors in biology. For many, the prestige of the PhD will have to be its own reward.
That's like bringing up George Soros whenever you read an op-ed by someone who once worked for the Brookings Institute.
"right-wing Koch brothers organization"
"from someone who hates broad-based education"
It doesn't seem to matter that these right-wing haters are praising an Obama program. It doesn't matter that these haters of broad-based education approve broadening education from the current one-size-fits-all college degree that leaves so many dropouts with a few semesters of useless film studies courses, no degree, no job skills, and enormous debt, to one that offers a much wider array of options for ending up with more value at less cost.
There are many skilled trades that offer much better career options than are available to most film studies dropouts, but there aren't many people getting the training needed to work in those trades, because they are all told that there is only one acceptable career preparation: a 4-year college degree in whatever studies.
Obama thinks this is a problem. The Manhattan Institute agrees and considers his program a step in the right direction.
Yet your main point seems to be a warning to us that, despite the usual reliability of the mainstream media, the source of this editorial is unexpectedly not one of the approved speakers of orthodox political doctrine, but is in fact a heretic, and we would be wise to cover our ears so as not to be deceived, and rely instead on your "nutshell" opinion.
For example, I just finished a Bachelors degree in a STEM field at a relatively middle of the road university and my total education debt comes out just short of $30k.
What we have is not college for all, not even close. We have capitalistic college education; where it costs as much as the market will bear, and the ability of the market is distorted by massive student loans which kids are told they have to get as it is an investment into their future.
College for all would be if college was free to every high school graduate, and costs were kept down by universities being run like places of learning and not capitalistic enterprises focused on football tickets and massive stadiums.
College costs out of control? Only because states are cutting subsidies for higher education and forcing students to pay more.
That said, towards the end there are some good points. It could be argued that there's a public interest in promoting higher education because its necessary for a functional democracy. But if the public abandons this goal and higher education is only for job preparation, then why should the state be involved at all? In that case, state tuition subsidies are really corporate welfare.
Although on-the-job training and apprenticeships are more effective for many jobs, that would mean employers have to shoulder the cost rather than the state.
"Oh it's true, but because of this stupid reason" != "falsehood".
You can't get a $60,000 loan for a $20,000 car, but you can absolutely rack up that much (or more) in college debt, for an education indistinguishable from one at a third of the cost.
With that kind of distortion in the market, why would anyone be surprised at rising tuition?
But in fact, the data shows that state tuition subsidies for public 4-year colleges have declined slowly, except in the years following recessions when states cut their budgets. These years show much more dramatic declines. This is consistent with my hypothesis that state budget cuts are the primary driver of tuition increases.
It's possible that your point still holds, that the availability of federal loans made it easier for states to cut tuition subsidies. But that's a change in the politics of the issue, not a market distortion. Without federal aid, politicians would be more vulnerable to the charge that they're making college less accessible.
Federal loans have obviously not created a tuition bubble, for the simple reason that the cost of a public 4-year education (the price charged to states + students) is essentially unchanged over the last 25 years.
The story may be different for for-profit colleges. If you want to argue that there's a market distortion there, essentially that for-profit colleges are gouging students and the government, I could easily be persuaded. But since only 10% of students are enrolled in these schools, they're unlikely to be the main source of increasing student debt.
Two words: administrative bloat!
We are focusing on our retirement instead, because we believe it's far better to take care of that and not become a burden on your kids just when they're trying to take care of their own families and retirements.
That said, be careful. Student loans offices generally make the assumption that parents will contribute towards their kids' education; if the current status quo does remain at that point (and I hope it doesn't) they may find themselves unable to afford college because they'll be told that you'll be paying for half of it.
Construction and manufacturing have severe labor shortages? I'd love to see a source for that claim. In my neck of the woods, they still haven't recovered from the recession.
I work in the engineering department of a software company and I'm closely involved with recruitment and interviews. I'll tell you this: the vast majority of people (over 95%) we turn down are unqualified, period. Meaning, we wouldn't hire them even at half the salary level advertised for the position. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what we're willing to pay - our salaries are actually very generous and we aren't afraid to pay someone what they are actually worth. The problem is we can't actually find people like that. So yes, from our perspective (250+ person tech company in SoCal), the talent shortage is very, very real.
You get the liberty of guiding their education in a way that most benefits your company and they get to extend their skillsets. Sounds like a win-win.
I didn't say they have to be the complete package upfront. We actually do have comprehensive training programs for new hires, most of which were designed by me. The problem is that people need a certain mix of base level skills and character traits to succeed and excel. Most people we interview don't have those, which means they are unqualified.
Software developers aren't (typically) stupid. They have a reasonable idea of the value they provide the company. My estimation is that almost every company under-compensates their engineering staff. I doubt yours is an exception.
Because we do very rigorous analysis of why successful employees are actually successful. We know what it takes to perform well at each job function.
>>And what makes you think your salaries are "very generous?" Lot's of companies think their salary/benefits packages are "very generous" when they're anything but. Without context your post is a giant meaningless assertion.
Lots of websites aggregate salaries by position and geographic region, so we know the numbers. We also have very good benefits. For instance, our 401k program is a dollar-for-dollar match up to 15% of salary, which is extremely rare.
Software developers (supposedly) aren't stupid. Applicants for software development positions on the other hand...
Partly both, but also missing a qualified applicant often costs far less than making a bad hire.
The ratio of decent hires to bad hires needs to be as high as possible. In comparison, the percentage of qualified applicants thrown out almost doesn't matter (unless it gets to something truly absurd like 90%). (Really it does matter, just not compared to making bad hires. Interviews and delays are still expensive, just less so than failing to get new employees up to speed.)
Interviewers that make bad hires are terrible. Interviewers that turn away good hires are merely bad.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/skills-dont-pay-t...
Tell me, Ege, what salaries are advertised at the following URL? http://jobs.laserfiche.com/Jobs?dep=engineering
I can't find any.
With that said, what is a shortage? Is there a shortage of Ferraris because I cannot afford one, or am I just too poor to consider owning one? Is there a shortage of developers until every developer is working for minimum wage so that the poorest of poor companies can afford them too?
If demand gradually increases, both quantity and price will rise steadily.
If there is a shortage, price first rises sharply with little or no increase in quantity and then falls with a significant increase in quantity.
But...approaching the edge case, do you think you would see more qualified candidates in your applicant pool if you advertised & offered a $1m/year package for the positions? Have you tried advertising the positions at double (or triple) the compensation to see if that changes matters? If you didn't test this, how do you know that the applicant pool has nothing to do with what you're willing to pay?
I'm here in Atlanta, and I can cite examples of people leaving for SF because their expected compensation goes up by a triple-digit percentage (sigh, candidates ignore costs but that's a different story). This effect changes the applicant pool in SF, perhaps boosting comp by 100%+ would work for your company locally? Certainly poaching talented employees gets easier when you offer a raise of $100k to join your firm.
Put another way: why would employment be different from other supply/demand markets where price matters, even if the price being asked is potentially distasteful to the buyer (see TSLA, AMZN, TWTR, FB, NYC apartments, or the flavor of your choice)?
(1) You're company maybe an undesirable place to work. In Fresno, CA there are couple self described big-name software firms that fancy themselves "local google". Only willing to hire the best and brightest as it were. But sadly for them, the best and brightest aren't cutting it for them. They verbatim claim the same thing you are now, good salaries, but no one coming in for an interview is worth it. The real truth is that the word has gotten out: their products stink, they treat their employees like children, and their competitive salaries are not that competitive in the larger market. The so called "best and brightest" just avoid their front door.
(1b) Just highlighting something in part 1. You are getting what you are paying for and that means you are not paying well.
(1c) Your other employees suck. I don't want to work at a place where people are rude or incapable or working in teams, or simply bad at their jobs. It makes my experience worse. Whenever an interview goes well, I always ask to meet the rest of the staff, if only just for a second. To see what they are like.
(2) Your interview process is flawed. Assuming (1) is provably untrue, then it might be time to take a good look at the interview process you are employing. I've been through so many interviews where it was clear that the (wo)man doing the interview was simply looking for someone to solve exactly one problem, or the name a specific function, or the input format for a function in a given language, or for me to suggest a specific solution(and no other), etc.
Worse still, the moment you cannot answer the question or suggest that a simple Google search would help produce a more ideal solution, or lord forbid simply suggest that an alternative solution might be better, there is this shift in perceived power. It almost seems like the interview process can be an adversarial means of verifying that the interviewer is indeed smarter than the interviewee. At this point during such "skills test" interviews, I politely tell the interviewer that I'm not the candidate they are looking for and conclude the interview.
(3) You haven't gotten the word out. How many people really know that your company is looking for someone (1, 10, 100)? Are you really getting the message out to the greater engineering community. Perhaps you are only reaching a single subset, and that subset is not skilled in what you are looking for.
The funny part is the only people who will agree with you are other hiring managers. Everyone else will say you aren't paying enough or some other excuse. They are never sifting through the resumes or sitting through the interviews.
If we ever stumble across a qualified candidate, we make it happen. We just can't find very many qualified candidates.
I would like to see asked, of these people who can't find employees, is how much they've had to increase their salary offers to fill positions.
Because my anecdotal experience is that the people who can't fill positions are essentially looking for the higher-quality, more-modest-salary 'deals' that were more common in 2008/2009. And they're simply not in any hurry to hire anyone at all, so the disappearance of such deals results in continually-open-positions, rather than increased offers or decreased requirements.
Salaries cannot be increased ad-infinitum. Even an extraordinary candidate's potential contribution can add so much value, since it is constrained by the way it fits in the business (and ultimately by the market for the product/service your team is helping to provide).
Requirements cannot be decreased arbitrarily either. The relationship between skill and value added is non linear, and may fall rapidly into the negatives below some threshold (it takes more time for a mentor to teach a rookie how to do things than to do things himself, borderline incompetent employees make costly mistakes, etc).
So, we are basically in a situation where a market cannot sustain itself (Paul Graham wrote about this in one of his essays, the example he used is how this same forces drove out the existance of butlers). So, in this sense, I believe shortages of labor are very real.
As we're not remotely approaching either end of that envelope, I'm not too convinced that any hard limits are coming into play.
I mean, we're not talking about whether anyone can hire couriers to write web services for six figures. We're talking about whether employers are willing to hire people with 5 years of experience with Technology X at X% more than their last comparable hire, as opposed to waiting around for the posting-perfect-match outlier with the requested 10 years experience, but who'll accept essentially the same wage as that last 5-years-experience hire.
[1] Much of that might have been arguably unsustainable, but not all. And again, we're talking about degrees and trends: are offers going up at all? Are employers budging on requirements at all?
Also, the unemployment system is basically designed for them. If you work for someone and get laid off between projects, you still get paid. The other path is going out on your own.
It's gotten a good amount better, but the jobs still aren't steady enough for everyone to be employed full-time. Aside from data centers, there's not a ton of construction going on.
This is why education costs so much nowadays and the product is so poor. Everyone has the right to pursue learning. But, these folks aren't owed anything because they've sat through enough classes to earn a BA.
What's not working is the college administrative model.
They should not be giving out these student loans so easily.
Simply put, not everybody is equipped to handle an academic education (in fact, a small minority truly are). At the same time, the vast majority of work being done today in the US in almost any field (including the majority of software development) really ought not be considered "academic" work--it's essentially vocational already. One doesn't need--and shouldn't be required to have--a college degree to be employable in a web app shop or for most development (or other) roles.
The following may be an unpopular sentiment, but I truly believe that the focus on "college-for-all" just frustrates people who are talented in ways that are not academically inclined and, frankly, consumes resources unfairly for those who are. All parties are worse off for it.
What we need is less focus on conflating "academic education" with "education", and the result of that is less focus on "college-for-all."
I'm talking about the way going to a university integrates you with a ton of strange, weird, different people. How there is a tremendous amount of information and culture that is absorbed, either by directly learning it or simply by osmosis. The 'by osmosis' thing might be a bit of an assertion, but I think that most people who've been to university can probably relate to the concept.
In my opinion that adds a lot of value to a society. I know these are not original ideas, and it wouldn't be nice to live in a highly educated society where absolutely nobody has work, but I wouldn't immediately discount the value that is added by sending the masses through university. As explained by numerous people here, this strategy is clearly broken as a method of certification and job training. Does that mean that we should do a 180 and reserve anything beyond vocational training for the Marxes, Shakespeares, and Feynmans? I think not. I'm not suggesting that people here are promoting that idea, just illustrating that moving in that direction might destroy a lot of value that's not as plainly seen as one's student loan balance (something I can certainly relate to...) or the national unemployment rate. Maybe I'm just being young and naive.
As a university drop out I may be biased but I do believe that 'education for all' is a horribly misguided premise which persists because of the practicality of cheap childcare it provides (!)
I believe that vocational education is pretty flawed too...
I fail to see the value in qualification X if everyone can get it. All qualifications seem to be an exercise in desire and discipline... and this is why it doesn't work. IMO.
It works fine for serious and competitive fields like medicine and dentistry, but for the vast majority of fields out there a degree isn't worth much at all.
I can, and maybe have, written your dissertation from your textbook with no lectures... and I will do just fine.
Smart guys will drop out and succeed because of the same reasons they drop out, not in spite of it... just a shame so many drop outs are probably dropping out because education is not for them - or possibly university or vocational education is not right for their entire field.