As those of us gathered for the retreat soon learned, college
readiness scores and completion rates are at all time lows. We are living in an
age when skilled manufacturing jobs and better jobs in general are going unfilled
by the tens of thousands. A generation ago, nearly 75% of employed Americans secured
good jobs by having a high school diploma or less. But as of 2007, 59% of
employed Americans needed more education than this and the number is projected
to reach 65% by 2018. *
Traditionally, community colleges in our country have served
as bridges, either to four-year colleges or to skilled employment directly. But
today these institutions now find themselves under-performing. And why? Because America’s entire
education system is under-performing. As the consortium’s organizers began to
outline, the problem of gross educational underachievement can be attacked from
several angles, including the legislation of seemingly basic expectations such
as are mandated by the new “common core curriculum” requirement, which brings reading
and writing back into the educational process.
Mandating literacy is a start, but there’s another approach that
can help connect the dots a lot faster, and that’s looking at the problem from
an understanding of marketing, branding, and organizational change.
Were we to begin at the beginning, effective marketing (value
creation) would compel the education system to think-forward its product (better
educated students) at every level, but the system fails on this fundamental first
step. During the consortium, we learned that secondary education is focused on
adapting to the product (failing students) coming out of elementary education;
that post-secondary education is focused on the product (increasingly failing
students) coming out of secondary education; and so employers are being asked
to take in and train people who are not equipped in the most fundamental of ways:
The majority of today’s applicants can’t communicate, collaborate or problem-solve;
and they can’t learn on the job, because they did not learn in school the
things that are essential to further learning on the job.
The startling revelation here is that America’s education
system is lousy at marketing. If you are a manufacturer trying to grow in the real
world without ongoing, market-based value creation (as many, smaller, second
generation industrial manufacturers are still learning), you will sooner or
later become irrelevant to the marketplace and go out of business. This
however, has not been the course of a system propped up by tax dollars and a
culture of dis-ownership.
Having failed at marketing, the American educational system
has consequently failed at branding (value definition). When you look at most
any community college or 4-year college admissions brochure from the
perspective of an employer, what you see is not value definition, not a path to
employability, but a line card of courses leading to course certification and
ultimately a degree. Hence, what the system values and measures is not the
ability of the student graduate to become highly employable, but the student
graduate’s ability to achieve passing scores to get a degree.
Which leads us to the process of organizational change,
change that can only come about when educational leaders recognize the roles marketing
and branding must play to bring about specific changes at every level, changes
that must focus on making each level relevant to the next.
The challenge looms large, both for the American education
system and for the industrial manufacturing sectors the education system is
supposed to support. We are talking about the need for seismic new changes that
will be painfully challenging to institutions that are accustomed to doing what
they have always done, because for them effective marketing, branding and
organizational change all require a reverse new way of thinking:
Forward-thinking.
* Carnevale, A. P., Smith, N.,
& Strohl, J. (2010). Help wanted: Projections of jobs and education requirements. Washington, DC: Georgetown University, Center
on Education and the Workforce.
jb
www.centrifuge-now.com
