{"id":798,"date":"2006-12-07T07:15:43","date_gmt":"2006-12-07T11:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=798"},"modified":"2006-12-07T07:15:43","modified_gmt":"2006-12-07T11:15:43","slug":"whoops-we-undermined-it-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=798","title":{"rendered":"Whoops! We undermined it again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This morning&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/insidehighered.com\">Inside Higher Education<\/a> edition has a <a href=\"http:\/\/insidehighered.com\/news\/2006\/12\/07\/poll\">Scott Jaschik article<\/a> reporting on an American Council on Education-commissioned <a href=\"http:\/\/www.solutionsforourfuture.org\/site\/DocServer\/Global_Competitiveness_Executive_Summary.pdf?docID=641\">poll on American attitudes about higher education<\/a>&nbsp;(PDF). There are at least two major findings, one that&nbsp;the poll report by&nbsp;consultant <a href=\"http:\/\/www.winstongroup.net\/\">The Winston Group<\/a>&nbsp;highlighted: U.S. residents now believe that the primary motivation for companies&#8217; shifting operations overseas is because of cheap labor, not because of greater skills (i.e., the educational attainment in other countries). As Jaschik notes, &#8220;it seems that call centers in developing nations have made more of an impact on the public than have Ph.D.&#8217;s from those countries.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The finding that Jaschik finds buried at the end of the report is equally important: a clear majority (64%) of those polled see the primary purpose of a college education as &#8220;get[ting] a good job after graduation&#8221;&nbsp;(from the report). This confirms in a very concrete way the sense of historians and sociologists that human-capital rhetoric has colonized the consciousness of most people about the purpose of education&#8230; but it&#8217;s probably less a matter of creating ideas than solidifying what David Labaree has argued is an historical&nbsp;tendency for the individual-mobility purposes of education to undermine collective goals. <\/p>\n<p>This focus on individual mobility&#151;the private purposes of education&#151;has trumped education reform rhetoric that focuses on human capital from a collective standpoint&#151;&#8221;We must reform so we can be competitive!&#8221; Students and their parents are skeptical of the human-capital arguments in a global sense and more worried about local competition in a job market, what Lester Thurow and others have called the queueing consequences of education. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This morning&#8217;s Inside Higher Education edition has a Scott Jaschik article reporting on an American Council on Education-commissioned poll on American attitudes about higher education&nbsp;(PDF). There are at least two major findings, one that&nbsp;the poll report by&nbsp;consultant The Winston Group&nbsp;highlighted: U.S. residents now believe that the primary motivation for companies&#8217; shifting operations overseas is because [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-cS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}