The High School Diploma: CUI BONO?

The value of the educational institution has been under fire for at least the last quarter of a century. Certainly, as far back as the Seventies, I remember representatives of major corporations, such as IBM, declaring that they really did not care what (if anything?) new hires had learned in college (or high school). If they were good enough to be hired, the first thing that would happen would be that they would be put through the wringer of a series of internal training programs. Regardless of any skills they had upon arrival, it was only after those training programs that they would be viewed as productive employees for IBM (or other corporations with a similar philosophy).

This was one of those dirty little secrets that you only learned once you entered the "real" world of work. However, in the United Kingdom the Gordon Brown administration has decided to pull this secret out into the sunshine, at least according to a Wiki News item, which appeared on Net News Publisher:

The government of the United Kingdom has given corporations like fast food chain McDonald’s the right to award high school qualifications to employees who complete a company training program.

Two other businesses, railway firm Network Rail and regional airline Flybe, were also approved. The decision was made by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which oversees the national curriculum.

McDonald’s said it will offer a “basic shift manager” course, which will train staff in marketing, customer service, and other areas of restaurant management. Completion of this course will be the equivalent of passing the GCSE, the standard exam taken at age 16, or the Advanced Level, taken at age 18.

Network Rail plans to offer a course in rail engineering, while Flybe is developing a course involving aircraft engineering and cabin crew training. Passing Flybe’s course could result a university level degree.

Putting aside any reservations I may harbor over reading unsigned content on Wiki News, it is still worth entertaining these paragraphs as a hypothetical and then asking what they say about educational institutions, because what they basically say is what IBM was saying 25 years ago: The world of work cannot count on those institutions to provide basic knowledge and skills for being a productive worker. This, in turn, provides an even more chilling corollary: The only real value that educational institutions provide is that they delay the entry of "fresh blood" into the job market, giving the older employees more of a "grace period" over which to establish their own productivity and value.

The other side of the story is represented by Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, quoted as saying:

We are unsure whether those institutions would be clamoring to accept people with McQualifications.

I am sure that Ms. Hunt and her colleagues all appreciate the negative connotation of that last word; but, if McDonald's can actually be accredited with providing the equivalent of a high school diploma, then they know better than to let name-calling hurt them. My guess is that they can pass this accreditation test, because it is in their best interest to do so, just as it is in Flybe's interest to train their employees to the level of an undergraduate degree. Thus, what has long been a tacit vote of no confidence in educational institutions has now become explicit, at least in the United Kingdom.

Rather than inventing new epithets, however, Ms. Hunt might have done better to address this situation in terms of a short-term solution to a short-term problem that has long-term consequences. If this report is true, then we must read it in the context of a premise that I have explored from time to time, which is that all knowledge has a "half-life," by which I mean that, like radioactive materials, it loses its potency over time. The question is not one of whether or not knowledge "decays" but one of how rapidly or slowly it decays. A training program designed to meet immediate needs is likely to have a very rapid "rate of decay," in which case the real question is, "What happens to the worker when what has been learned in training is no longer valuable?" If the business has a commitment to "life-long learning," then that would require a training curriculum, which would not only be more extensive than that of any undergraduate program but would also be in ongoing flux, reflecting changes in the need for knowledge over time. IBM used to try to do this sort of thing, and I have no idea if they still do it. My guess is that McDonald's does not do it. I would not be surprised if the McDonald's philosophy is that, when the value of training has decayed below the level of productivity, one simply dispenses with the "obsolete" worker and replaces him/her with a new hire run through a new training program. Thus, the long-term consequence of this approach is likely to be an increase in unemployment as the job market fills up with people unable to compete for new jobs, not necessarily because they cannot be trained in those new jobs but because it is cheaper to hire and train candidates far younger than they are (which is why my eyes tend to roll up when I hear John McCain go into one of his speeches about the value of retraining).

Then, of course, there is the more dire long-term consequence, which is that intimate relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. If this story really is valid, then we can rest assured that educational policy makers, whether they be Republicans or Democrats, will be giving it considerable scrutiny. After all, there is no political affiliation associated with the motto, "Desperate times call for desperate measures." The consequence we should fear is that the United States will choose to go down the same path; and this can only aggravate all the problems surrounding the "desperate times" of not only educational institutions but the world of work itself.