[lit-ideas] Re: education
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2011 14:34:59 +0900
I think part of the confusion we are experiencing is due to failure to
distinguish between top-tier MBA programs whose goal is to produce
executives, for whom cultural polish, as well as strategic thinking and
analytic skills are assets, and undergraduate business programs further
down the food chain, whose graduates' historically largely clerical jobs
are being eliminated by digital technology and/or off-shoring. We are, as
right-thinking folk of a liberal disposition, inclined to see all students
as equally likely to benefit from liberal education. We live, however, in a
world where winner-take-all is the rule. Grooming winners and training
losers to fill some minimally useful niche require different forms of
education. One may wish that they didn't but they do.
I do not at all believe that this is the way the world should be. To make
equal opportunity as close to equal as humanly possible, through
high-quality education and healthcare provided to all as a matter of right
seems to me an ideal worth fighting for. Whether the battle is winnable in
a world where market-fundamentalist economics are grounded in a
neo-Calvinist view of humanity (a few blessed, mostly damned) is, I fear,
open to question. Whether it is winnable in a world where, ever since the
invention of writing, scribe and ruler have worked hand in hand to exploit
the rest, whatever the ideology said to govern economic affairs, is very
much open to question.
John
On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 2:04 PM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I wrote, in reply to Andy, earlier
>
>
> You cannot have read any of the links I provided (I provided too
>> many, and apologize) without seeing
>> that my point was *not* that there are fewer business majors than in
>> former years (I don't know if this is
>> universally true or not), but that 'businesses' themselves are beginning
>> to prefer, and to hire, liberal arts
>> majors over business majors who are increasingly less adaptable to change
>> in a 'corporate environment,'
>> *and*, that MBA programs—which are themselves becoming less valued—are
>> now urging those considering
>> studying for the MBA, to get a liberal arts education first.
>>
>
> then Andy wrote
>
>
> I concede the issue. I'm sure you're right.
>
>
> John McCreery thinks that Andy may have conceded too quickly, and wrote
>
>
> I would not give up so quickly. Consider the possibility that what
> businesses want in a workforce depends on the kind of business. Assume for
> the sake of argument former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor
> Robert Reich's classification of jobs in *The Work of Nations. *Reich
> argues that there are, at the end of the day, only three broad categories
> of jobs: repetitive physical labor, personal service, and symbolic-analysts
> (knowledge workers). Repetitive physical labor is, except for the fast food
> industry, truck drivers and other geographically constrained segments,
> off-shored to where labor costs are lowest. The predictable result is more
> people trying to move into personal services, driving down wages in that
> segment as well. The symbolic-analyst segment is where a few talented
> people can still make out like bandits.
>
>
> I'm not sure what 'personal service' means: language (mathematics) tutors;
> copy-writers for hire; hotel clerks/maids; servers in restaurants; interior
> decorators; personal shoppers...? Not all of these things can be done
> offshore, granted, no more than working as a long-haul truck driver or
> railroad engineer can be. I'd have thought that as we were talking about
> the prospects of liberal arts graduates outside of academia, it would have
> been fairly clear that we (originally Andy and I) were talking about
> whether 'businesses' of the symbolic-analyst sort were in search of people
> trained in accounting, promotion, recruiting, 'office management,' and so
> on, and not in search of liberal arts graduates. (I believe Andy also said
> that more employers—of a certain sort—were increasingly looking for people
> with MBAs.)
>
> I tried to show, with various references, that they were not, and that,
> moreover, that these days, a number of MBA programs recommended that
> potential applicants get a liberal arts degree before applying.
>
> Clinching argument: two of my former thesis students are successful wine
> makers, south of Portland, in the Willamette Valley
> <http://www.winesnw.com/will.html> <http://www.winesnw.com/will.html>,
> and Richard Danzig, '61,
> was Secretary of the Navy, under Clinton.
>
> John concludes
>
>
> My sense is that the case for businesses looking for liberal arts
> instead of business majors is largely limited to the symbolic-analyst
> segment. Liberal arts graduates of places like Reed (of which, by the way,
> my ever so sagacious spouse is a graduate) do well in this segment.
> Graduates of community college or second or third-tier state university
> business programs don't.
>
> The tricky bit these days for business majors is that while they fall
> out of favor with businesses substituting automation for traditional
> white-collar paper pushing, the alternatives in the repetitive physical
> labor and personal service segments are largely what they were trying to
> escape with their degrees. Their better options may include, for example,
> military service and the acquisition of the specialized skills required for
> health care, complex equipment maintenance, or bodyguard personal service
> careers.
>
>
> I've paid my manual labor dues with over four years of servitude at the
> big Weyerhaeuser integrated (Kraft paper, finished lumber, plywood, etc.)
> complex outside Springfield, Oregon. This mill closed in 1989, because it
> was built for old-growth timber—gigantic logs—and not for those attenuated
> sticks one sees nowadays.
>
> Robert Paul,
> signing off this topic
>
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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