Merging Education and Labor into a Department of Education and the Workforce, proposed as part of a government overhaul, could encourage a smarter approach to preparing young people for adulthood, writes Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, in the Washington Post.
In the past, vocational education “led students to be tracked, based on race, class, and gender, into low-skilled and low-paying jobs,” he writes. So our K-12 system became a one-track “college-for-all system.”
But almost half of high school graduates don’t get a college certificate or degree by age 26, and they are left wandering the labor market with nowhere to go.
. . . Before the 1980s, the age at which young adult workers made the median earnings necessary for independence and family formation was 26. That has risen to 34.
Carnevale envisions a streamlined system in which, starting in high school, students would get:
1. Required career counseling that assesses individual talents, interests, values and personality traits and ties each of these to alternative occupational pathways.
2. Firsthand exposure to alternative occupational pathways through internships and other applied learning opportunities.
3. Work experience to cultivate basic employability skills such as conscientiousness and collegiality in diverse workplaces.
4. Access to certificates and industry-based certifications, thus improving postsecondary access and affordability.
“Straightening the path from education to work would be an intergenerational gift to the future workers and employers of America,” concludes Carnevale.
Others are dubious. The Labor Department primarily regulates, while the Education Department primarily awards grants, Vic Klatt, a former Education staffer, told Education Week. The combined agency “would be a bank, a K-12 educator, a college educator, an OSHA regulator, a training administrator, a mine safety expert … It’s all these things amalgamated into one, which just makes you scratch your head a little bit,” said Klatt, who is now a principal at Penn Hill Group, a government relations organization in Washington.