Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Bloomberg’s Plan for Reskilling America: The Quid without the Pro Quo

The Intercept usefully preports Michael Bloomberg’s proposals for higher education, focusing on plans to upgrade workforce skills along the lines desired by employers.  Here’s the selection they excerpted that covers this, worth reading carefully:


There’s a lot here that would be useful to businesses located in the US if they want to take advantage of it: money for vocational degrees geared to business needs, improved credentialing for these degrees, and support for internships and similar on-the-job training programs.  As the language of the press prelease makes clear, businesses would play a determining role in deciding what is worthy of being learned, how instruction and work experience would be carried out, what criteria would be used to ascertain skill acquisition, and how credentials would be standardized for use in an economy where workers primarily move horizontally across employers.  Some of this is based on a partial reading of the German apprenticeship system, where businesses work closely with education and training institutions to promote similar types of skills.

So far so good.  At the risk of being labeled a billionaire’s stooge, I think all of this is worth doing.  Societies need lots of abilities that aren’t found in books, and lots of people are more oriented to this type of learning than the standard-model higher ed classroom.  Let’s do it.

But delivering an improved American workforce to business without delivering business to the American people is pure exploitation.

Consider again how Germany does it.  Most of the workers who go through the apprenticeship system are unionized.  (How does Mike feel about that?)  Unions are nearly coequal partners in establishing, overseeing and updating the apprenticeship system, like it used to be with the skilled trades in the US when the construction sector was mostly union.  Large firms in Germany are required to allot half (minus one) of their supervisory board seats to worker representatives; smaller firms get most of their funding from public and cooperative banks which set limits on how exploitative they can be.  All firms have works councils with jurisdiction over issues like work organization and skill.  In other words, public policy in Germany does most of what Bloomberg is talking about, but it does the other half too, ensuring that the use of skills by business is at least somewhat responsive to workers’ interests.  In addition, enlarging worker and public influence within the firm makes it more likely workers will be viewed as assets and not just costs, so employers will be true partners in these public-private partnerships.

And in my view, Germany doesn’t go far enough.  There should be a requirement that all firms that draw on publicly subsidized skill development also emplace publicly-appointed educational professionals in supervisory positions, either on the board or in top management.  Businesses need to contribute to other social goals too.  This is not just a matter of being regulated so they won’t do egregious harm, necessary as this is, but also taking positive steps to solve pressing social problems.  There should be representation of environmental, regional, social equality and other interests on boards as well, something the nonprofit sector has experimented with for decades.  Like Germany we should promote public and cooperative finance and then adopt reforms to make these bodies more democratically accountable than they are over there.  Finally, steps should be taken to gradually socialize ownership of corporations above some threshold size; I have sketched an approach here.

Bloomberg wants Americans to serve business interests.  That would be fine if business interests also served Americans and were accountable to them.

UPDATE: David Leonhardt, who I've disputed in the past, has a column in today's NY Times endorsing Bloomberg's higher ed proposals.  What I wrote before still stands.

16 comments:

  1. Superb essay, superb.

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  2. Well said, Peter. It appears that at least some business support for tax-paid job training is motivated by a desire to depress wages by creating an oversupply of labor at all educational levels. Excerpted from something I wrote in 2013:

    For plutocrats and employers, declining wages is a feature, not a bug. "They want taxpayers to train their workers so they don't have to, and they want labor costs to keep going down. They are apparently not even embarrassed by this assault on American workers. Lumina Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded a study at Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce [link] to calculate how many more college graduates the US would need to turn out in order to drive down the college-versus-high-school wage premium from 74% to 46%! That's the goal—reduce the value of a college education by churning out an even bigger glut of degree holders. Even the study's authors question whether it will be feasible to get more Americans to complete college when they have to pay/borrow more as the incremental value of the degree is declining."

    http://www.realitybase.org/journal/2013/2/9/education-the-false-god-of-economic-recovery.html

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  3. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=madI

    January 30, 2018

    Real Hourly Earnings in Manufacturing for Germany, France, United Kingdom and United States, 2007-2018

    (Indexed to 2007)

    Notice the difference between Germany and even France and the United States and United Kingdom.

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  4. "Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded a study..."

    I can find no such study or record of such a study being funded by the Gates Foundation. Without specific evidence, I do not believe that the Gates Foundation would be involved in such a described self-defeating study. Please set down the evidence, if there is any.

    Please set down the evidence, or the claim should be withdraw. Gates work is expressly meant to increase well-being through education.

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  5. "That's the goal—reduce the value of a college education by churning out an even bigger glut of degree holders...."

    I believe this is false, and it is certainly offensive.

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  6. "That's the goal—reduce the value of a college education by churning out an even bigger glut of degree holders...."

    Thinking further, this is absolutely false and offensive.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "Anonymous said...
    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=madI

    January 30, 2018

    Real Hourly Earnings in Manufacturing for Germany, France, United Kingdom and United States, 2007-2018

    (Indexed to 2007)"

    Interesting graph. That real wages in the UK had declined was something that Simon Wren Lewis often noted in blog posts a few years ago. It was useful to see an update. The US is doing a bit better but not that great - a point often made over at Econbrowser. The progress in Germany is at times noted on the economist blogs but this is an international comparison that should be mentioned more often.

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  8. Dear Anonymous,

    Here is the link: https://1gyhoq479ufd3yna29x7ubjn-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/undereducatedamerican.pdf Section 2 is the most pertinent.

    I'm sorry the link I provided seven years ago contained a spurious 9 after "www" and has in any event rotted away.

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  9. Anonymous – I’m not sure where Myth Buster is getting his spin but I did find the press release which does not quite say what Myth Buster is spinning:

    https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Press-Releases/2008/12/New-Initiative-to-Double-the-Number-of-LowIncome-Students-in-the-US-Who-Earn-a-Postsecondary-Degree

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  10. “They are apparently not even embarrassed by this assault on American workers. Lumina Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded a study at Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce [link] to calculate how many more college graduates the US would need to turn out in order to drive down the college-versus-high-school wage premium from 74% to 46%! That's the goal—reduce the value of a college education by churning out an even bigger glut of degree holders.”


    Now that Myth Buster has provided a proper link to the Gates Foundation discussion, everyone should read it as I do not think Myth Buster is properly interpreting what the policy agenda is doing. Yes more college graduates might change the ratio of skilled worker wages to unskilled worker wages. But that does not mean the ratio would fall because the numerator simply fell. Let’s take a simple example. In nation A, skilled workers receive $17.40 an hour while unskilled workers receive $10 an hour. In other words, this 74% premium. In nation B. skilled workers still receive $17.40 an hour while unskilled workers receive $12 an hour – a 45% premium.

    My point is simple – a lower premium does not necessarily mean we are depressing wages. Rather it could be we would increase the wages for the less fortunate.

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  11. Not to pile on but having a more educated work force be described as an "assault on American workers" strikes me as something you might hear at a MAGA hat wearing Trump rally. Yea - Trump benefits politically from having more stupid people out there. Which likely explain his assault on our commitment to education. But the Gates have nothing to do with Trump's real agenda!

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  12. The authors had found that by 2005 the college-to-HS wage premium had risen to 74%, which in their opinion was too high. They wrote that the aim should be to reduce that premium to 46 percent by increasing the supply of college grads. From page 23 of the report:

    "If we agree that this 74 percent premium is too high—both because it is a signal that the economy is underproducing college graduates and because of its contribution to wage inequality—the problem becomes judging what level would sufficiently addresses both issues. We settled on a Bachelor’s degree to high school wage premium level of 46 percent for three reasons:

    • This was the average premium rate for a Bachelor’s degree over a high school diploma from 1950 to 1970 in the United States.

    • Forty-six percent represents a 10 percent rate of return for each of the four years of college attendance (compounded), high enough to still make borrowing money to attend college a good investment.

    • This level of wage premium is consistent with the premium level in many other industrialized countries with more educational attainment, including Australia, Finland, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom (see Figure 5).

    We believe that workers should be rewarded for their efforts and hard work in college, and we believe that 46 percent strikes the proper balance between an appropriate return on their investment in postsecondary education and the importance of shared prosperity to stability and fairness in our society.

    The remaining question is, what it would take to bring the wage premium down to 46 percent? The answer goes back to supply and demand. Until the economy’s demand for workers with postsecondary education is met, the wage premium will continue to rise or not come down appreciably. That means producing more workers with postsecondary credentials."

    Readers here are, of course, free to disagree with the authors, but that is what they wrote, and they were funded by Gates and Lumina.

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  13. I appreciate the correct study link, and the clarifying and explaining comment from PGL, and have the study carefully agree completely with the important remarks by PGL.

    The point of increasing education and productive skill levels is to provide for added well-being for workers, not to make highly educated or skilled workers less productive and less valuable and to undermine worker well-being. Look to the emphasis on education and training in China and notice the dramatic increase in real incomes. The Chinese emphasis will only continue.

    I am grateful for the post and the study and comments.

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  14. Mythbuster may be quoting the study now but note he cannot justify the extreme claim Mythbuster made based on anything in their paper. We are not questioning the analysis. We are questioning the dishonest spin invented by Mythbuster all by himself.

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  15. PGL,did you realize the following language in my last comment was not my language but was quoted from page 23 of the report?

    "The remaining question is, what it would take to bring the wage premium down to 46 percent? The answer goes back to supply and demand. Until the economy’s demand for workers with postsecondary education is met, the wage premium will continue to rise or not come down appreciably. That means producing more workers with postsecondary credentials."

    Did you notice that the caption for Section 2, to which I referred in an earlier comment is, “High wage premiums indicate that we need more college-educated workers”?

    Chill.

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  16. It’s working. An excess of recent college grads is driving down their wages and forcing about half of them into jobs for which no college is required. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-14/in-hot-u-s-jobs-market-half-of-college-grads-are-missing-out

    For the first time in decades, recent college graduates are more likely to be out of work than the population as a whole, according to the New York Federal Reserve. And for the lower-earning half of college grads, the wage premium is shrinking fast.

    . . . .

    But in recent years, while high-school graduates have seen a sharp pickup in earnings, the lower-earning half of college graduates haven’t -- and the gap between them is now the smallest in 15 years.


    To Peter’s point, while a lot of low-wage jobs are being created, there are not enough good-wage jobs to absorb the bottom tier of college grads.

    More than four in 10 recent graduates are working in jobs that don’t usually require a college degree, the New York Fed says. And roughly one in eight is working in a field where typical pay is around $25,000 a year or less.

    The economy is creating a lot of jobs like that -- and it’s expected to create even more. In the occupations that are forecast to grow fastest over the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- from home care to restaurant cooks -- typical salaries range from $24,000 to $26,500.

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