PDK International | Phi Delta Kappan: Bracey V88 N1 Sep 2006

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RESEARCH: The High-Skills Hoax

By Gerald W. Bracey

FOR MANY years now, Dennis Redovich and I have been screaming about what we might call the "high-skills hoax" -- the notion that everyone must have high skills. Redovich runs the Center for the Study of Education and Jobs in Wisconsin and the U.S.

It's not that we don't recognize a civil rights issue in the debate -- everyone should have the opportunity to develop the skills to land a high-paying job. However, we understand the law of supply and demand, and we know about what jobs are actually being created. In fact, if everyone became highly skilled, the wages of skilled labor would fall, and the unemployment rates for skilled workers would rise, a condition conducive to social unrest.

Most new jobs, though, continue to be in the low-paying service sector. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics issues its 10-year job creation forecasts, the number of new jobs for retail sales clerks alone approaches the number for the 10 fastest-growing jobs combined. At present, the number of people with bachelor's degrees is just about right to fill the proportion of jobs requiring them, and that proportion is not projected to increase much in the near future. Producing a great many more college grads will . . . well, here we are again, back to supply and demand.

Parallel to the claim that we will need more skilled workers is the claim that there is a mismatch between jobs and the skills of workers: workers don't have the skills that employers demand. We have argued against this, too.

To date, our laments have gone for naught, but now we are joined by two well-known researchers at two well-known organizations: Paul Barton of ETS and Michael Handel of the Economic Policy Institute. Maybe now someone will take notice. Barton put together a summary monograph, High School Reform and Work: Facing Labor Market Realities, while Handel penned a small book, Worker Skills and Job Requirements: Is There a Mismatch?

Indeed, there is a mismatch between young workers and what employers want: the workers are young, and employers don't want young people. Those who conducted one study using employer focus groups concluded, "We were surprised at just how much animosity there is toward young people in the employer community. In the focus groups the response was almost scatological."

To ameliorate this situation, we must find a means to get around Hodgkinson's Law of Demographics, which I just named for demographer Harold Hodgkinson. Hodgkinson observes that 10 years from now everyone will be exactly 10 years older. We need to find a way to grow 26-year-olds in 18 years. (Twenty-six is about when young people with high school diplomas are old enough to be hired into jobs that might eventually pay a living wage -- itself not a precise statistic.) Says Barton, "Employers, other than those in industries that rely heavily on teenagers, do not want to hire high school graduates until they are well into their 20s, irrespective of how well they do in high school" (emphasis in original). My guess is that the teen-laden businesses don't want to hire them either but have no choice.

The skills deficit of young workers is often presented as a cohort effect: it is today's youths who are found particularly wanting. (The first Bracey Report in 1991 actually carried the title "Why Can't They Be Like We Were?" This was a lyric from the 1960 musical Bye Bye Birdie: "Why can't they be like we were, perfect in every way? Oh, what's the matter with kids today?") Handel and Barton see it instead as an age effect. Handel observes that employers have been complaining about young workers for decades but that the complaints don't follow the kids into adulthood. "As workers age and shoulder more adult responsibilities," Handel says, "they grow out of casual work attitudes and adjust to -- or are socialized into [conditioned into? brainwashed into?] -- the workplace norms of the jobs they consider worth keeping."

It's worth noting here that the quintessential mediocrities in this nation were members of the senior class of 1983. They received their diplomas a mere two months after A Nation at Risk warned us about that "rising tide of mediocrity." Today, these seniors are 40 and bear substantial responsibility for making the U.S. the most globally competitive of the 117 nations ranked by the World Economic Forum. And the class of 1983 scored lower than today's students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the SAT, and the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. But now they're 40, and it's their turn to complain about the skills of today's graduates.

Handel's chapter examining test scores of various kinds concludes that they don't mean much. He finds the correlation between Gross Domestic Product and adult literacy scores to be virtually zero -- even when Sweden, an outlier, is removed from the analysis and even when the GDP is adjusted for hours worked. Handel also makes a salient point about what tests measure:

The tests are intended as measures of functional literacy, but completing paper-and-pencil exercises in a solitary context [is] not a realistic model of how most people actually function. In everyday life, people interact with others and can ask them for clarification or assistance when they find something confusing, while this is not permitted in most test situations.

I would also mention that people who do not speak English as a native language can often get by in real life, including school, because school is usually less linguistically demanding than a test. Teachers seldom try to make fools out of students. Tests, at least multiple-choice tests, always do. Items on a multiple-choice test must have certain statistical properties, and attaining these properties requires, in part, that test-takers be tricked into choosing wrong answers a substantial proportion of the time. One study that Handel reports examined how immigrants taking a test scored compared to all U.S. students taking the test: immigrants were at the 17th percentile of the total group, virtually an entire standard deviation below the mean score. Sorting through the distractors presented by a test is a more subtle and difficult language task than coping with the real world.

Some argue, Handel notes, "that individuals may display greater skills performing tasks in natural settings such as at work, where problems are embedded in more familiar, meaningful, and often social contexts. People also have greater internal motivation to develop proficiency in real-life situations." This helps explain the phenomenon of people "growing into" a job that they might have initially found very difficult and that demands more complex thinking than the tests suggest they are capable of.

But test scores don't really count for much with employers anyway. Numerous surveys over many years, Barton advises us, find employers looking for what have come to be called "soft skills." Employers reject applicants for hourly jobs mainly because of inadequate basic employment skills, such as attendance, timeliness, attitude, work ethic, and so on. Sixty-nine percent of employers said poor basic employment skills were the deciding factor in rejecting applicants, while just 32% cited inadequate reading skills and 21% cited inadequate math skills. Someone should point this out to Bill Gates, who told the nation's governors in 2005 that he was "terrified for our work force of tomorrow." His reference points were international test scores.

Conversely, when you ask employers what they look for in candidates they might hire, they say attitude, communication skills, previous work experience, recommendations from current and previous employers, industry-based credentials, and years of completed schooling (but they don't ask to see a diploma). Only then do test scores come into play and then only the scores attained on tests given as part of the job screening. A similar study asking employers what they considered most important in young entry-level applicants yielded similar results: employers wanted people who seemed serious about work and eager to get the job, who seemed bright and alert, who seemed courteous and personable, who seemed to have the ability to learn quickly, who had a neat appearance and dressed appropriately, who had good reading ability and ability with numbers, and who had a record of achievement in school. The percentage of employers who cited these qualities fell from 65% for "seemed serious" to 7% for "a record of achievement in school."

Looking back at his chapter on tests, Handel states, "It is difficult to determine precisely the skills workers have." Unfortunately, "it is even more difficult to know the skills employers require them to use at work." The chapter on this issue leads Handel to conclude that there might have been a modest increase in required skills in recent years, but certainly any such increases are not rising faster than in the past. I would note that high skills are often invoked in connection with job requirements for "Information Age" or "global marketplace" jobs. But for the users of any technology, technological advances usually make life easier, not harder. A secretary where I once worked was ecstatic in 1988 when I replaced her IBM Selectric III with a PC and word processor. And how in the world did I conduct research before Google?

Well, if we don't know what skills people have or what skills they actually need on the job, then it's harder still to know if there is any mismatch between workers and work. Handel looks at a few proxies. First, using readability formulas, he examines the difficulty levels of school and job texts and the ability of students and workers to handle these levels. The match is close. That is, job and school texts have similar difficulty levels, and workers are able to read at the necessary levels, whether the workers are professional, mid-level, or blue collar.

Employer surveys are another proxy for the fit between workers and jobs, but, as I noted above, they might not reflect the actual skill levels employers need as much as the "soft skills" they value and their hostility toward youth. In one study, employers argued that cognitive skills had declined for recent graduates, a contention not supported by NAEP trends. In another study, 48% of employers reported high school graduates deficient in cognitive skills, but only 6% provided any training. Many readers will recall that both the SCANS Report of 1991 and the Sandia Report of 1993 found that, in comparison with European and Asian firms, U.S. businesses provided little development for their least-skilled workers, reserving about 90% of all funds for those already highly skilled.

In the 1970s, many theorists worried that American workers were "over-credentialed" -- they had more education than their jobs actually demanded or could use. Work in America, issued by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1973, worried about how to make work more satisfying when job complexity fell short of workers' levels of education. Ivar Berg's 1970 treatise, Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery, included data indicating that investment in education was vastly overrated and that the workers rated most productive were seldom the best educated.

By 1983, everything had changed. "These deficiencies [in high school graduates] come at a time when the demand for highly skilled workers in new fields is accelerating rapidly," said the authors of A Nation at Risk. Could such a revolution in needed skills have occurred in so short a time? Barton and Handel are highly skeptical. And so are Redovich and I.

GERALD W. BRACEY is an associate for the High/Scope Foundation, Ypsilanti, Mich. His most recent book is Reading Education Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered (Heinemann, 2006). He can be reached at gbracey1@verizon.net.