In other news from the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, apparently, despite extensive rhetoric about education and the workforce, American colleges don’t do a terribly good job preparing students for employment. According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
American colleges are only “moderately responsive” to changes in the labor markets, according to a new working paper by three economists.
The study, whose preliminary results were presented on Monday at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, found that some academic programs, such as computer science, appear to be highly responsive to labor-market trends, while others, like medicine and dentistry, are largely unaffected by changes in employment opportunities.
More specifically, when an industry needs more workers, students do earn relevant degrees. But there is a huge lag, sometimes as long as seven years between the time when the industry first needs more workers and when the credentialed workers appear. As a result, according to the article, “employers look elsewhere to fill jobs, such as hiring skilled workers from abroad.”
According to the paper presented at the meeting:
Policy measures may include a central corpus of funds for creating slots in specific specializations in institutions of higher learning; or special subsidies for more responsive institutions. If the US wants to continue to foster specific occupations in the domestic marketplace, one solution is to lower barriers to the creation of new specialty schools, or to create additional incentives for existing institutions to increase enrollment.
In short, if America needs new workers, it makes sense to create an easy way for American universities to produce those workers, quickly. The market doesn’t operate fast enough to meet the country’s economic needs.
