There was a reply to my comment on Paul Krugman’s Op-Ed. (See Krugman Relying on Flawed Data on “Skills Gap”) It asked an excellent question. Here is the comment and my reply.
Comment:
“Then, of course, we would see employers preferring those who received a degree when it still was an education.
But we don’t see that – we see a market preference for people in their ’20s.
Were degrees never “education”, even back to the ’70s”? Please explain this disconnect.”
My reply: (I don’t think it will appear on the NY Times page.)
Degrees once did represent an education. This is from my post Opinion Piece in NY Times on Higher Ed:
“See the excellent book “Academically Adrift” where it is documented that studying has decreased from 25 hours a week in 1965 to 13 hours now. Critical thinking improvement, over the first two years, has gone from one sigma to less than .2 sigma.”
With these changes, I suspect the decrease in learning in high school has grown even faster. In general, high school teachers don’t learn, or improve their thinking skills, in college. It seems to me that the lower the level of the learner, the more important are the skills, in content and thinking, of the teacher. You can read more in my category University Education Dumbs Down High School
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