The Gold Standard | The two-year plan

When President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union address that, by 2020, “America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world,” the entire chamber erupted in applause.

However, according to a new study by the Pathways to Prosperity Project at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, the common consensus of making the college degree the measure of success is shortsighted.

The study reached conclusions that challenged the cherished conventional wisdom of pushing as many students as possible into four-year undergraduate programs. This customary ideal emphasizes the need to have a higher education in order to compete in the future global economy.

The perhaps heretical but stunningly innovative process pushed by the Pathways to Prosperity Project focuses less on four-year programs and instead emphasizes two-year collegiate paths that can be supplemented with apprenticeship programs in work environments.

Why the shift in mentality? For many students here at Penn, it’s hard to envision an academic upbringing that emphasized anything besides attending college.

We’re surrounded by students that will all likely compete for the most sought-after jobs, which require advanced degrees and more years of education than one can count on fingers and toes.

With a multi-billion-dollar endowment and a heralded academic reputation, Penn can and should do more to help students who aren’t seeking four more years of education. No, it shouldn’t suddenly transform into the local community college, but we can take certain strides to better the preparedness of the American workforce heading into the next decade.

Penn should offer scholarships, special programs, associate degrees and apprenticeships for students who wish to study for two years and then head off to join the workforce. If Penn and its peers sit on the sidelines, perhaps the Ivy reputation wins in the short term, but we lose as a country in the longer term.

The Harvard study has many facts to support this type of reform, and they are eye-opening — to say the least.

Of the 47 or so million job openings estimated to be available between now and 2018, about 14 million of these positions will go to those with only two-year associate degrees or occupational certificates.

The data is based on extrapolations of the fastest-growing industries. Those sectors — healthcare, construction, manufacturing and natural-resources — are primarily dominated by “middle-skilled” labor, which includes nurses, dental hygienists, construction managers and electricians.

It’s not as if getting that bachelor’s degree is an inferior achievement, by any means. However, to focus on getting all high-school students into four-year college programs is missing the point, said Robert Schwartz, academic dean at Harvard and co-author of the report.

“For an awful lot of bored, disengaged kids who are on the fence about completing high school, they need to see a pathway that leads them to a career that is not going to require them to sit in classrooms for the next several years,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg.com.

At the heart of the study lies a conundrum. If a high-school student doesn’t particularly show an interest in continuing down an academic path, should he or she be given an opportunity to be placed on the fast track toward real-world work experiences? Don’t know-how and familiarity with complex machinery outweigh an attempted understanding of Aristotle’s Law of Reason for these students?

As the study details, the job explosion in the next decade won’t be narrowly restricted to high-achievement, degree-oriented industries. There will be a uniquely strong demand for these middle-skilled positions that every office, corporation and sector rely upon in order for smooth business operations.

Penn can forge a way forward that prevents the nation from neglecting the needs of the bored-by-Aristotle segment of the labor force. The future demands it.

Brian Goldman is a College junior from Queens, N.Y. His e-mail address is goldman@theDP.com. The Gold Standard appears every Monday.

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