Charles Murray’s new book, “Real Education,” is now out. Murray is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, known for taking on issues that some prefer to gloss over. From the AEI summary of the book:

Ability varies. Children differ in their ability to learn academic material. Doing our best for every child requires, above all else, that we embrace that simplest of truths. America’s educational system does its best to ignore it.

Half of the children are below average. Many children cannot learn more than rudimentary reading and math. Real Education reviews what we know about the limits of what schools can do and the results of four decades of policies that require schools to divert huge resources to unattainable goals.

Too many people are going to college. Almost everyone should get training beyond high school, but the number of students who want, need, or can profit from four years of residential education at the college level is a fraction of the number of young people who are struggling to get a degree. We have set up a standard known as the BA, stripped it of its traditional content, and made it an artificial job qualification. Then we stigmatize everyone who doesn’t get one. For most of America’s young people, today’s college system is a punishing anachronism.

Hal Tarleton, editor of the Wilson (N.C.) Times, wrote about Murray’s arguments the other day, noting North Carolina’s mistakes on vocational education. From his column, “College Isn’t for Everyone“:

North Carolina’s community colleges started out as vocational training centers but have morphed into stepping stones to four-year degrees. They teach the academic courses needed for transfer to the university level and have dropped the “technical” name as an outdated remnant of an industrial age that no longer exists.

Meanwhile, employers are complaining that they can’t find the skilled workers for their factories and service jobs.

Judging from the description of the book, Murray does more than complain, offering substantive proposals for educational reform and improvement.

More…

• An interview with Murray in EdNews.org
• Review by George Leef, Pope Center, “Questioning the Paper Chase“

From The Star-Tribune, Pittsylvania County, Virginia:

Danville Community College and Luna Innovations Inc. have entered into a partnership to provide nanotechnology technician training to Southside Virginia residents.

The partnership is being funded through a three-year, $638,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

“This funding will help develop a curriculum that will not only provide students with technical skills, but includes hands-on experience in using scientific instruments,” said Dr. Kent Murphy, chairman and chief executive officer of Luna Innovations. “The new program will aid in building a workforce that will be ready to work in this promising new technology field.”

Headquartered in Roanoke, Luna opened its nanoWorks division in Danville in 2005 in a former tobacco warehouse that has been renovated into an ultramodern 24,000-square-foot manufacturing and research development facility.

Here’s the joint Danville Community College/Luna news release.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit often posts links about this or that breakthrough in nanotechnology, all interesting and encouraging.

But when you get to the point of training technicians, well, that tells you the technology has definitely advanced beyond theory and R&D to the practical,  commercial level.

P.S. Some of those Instapundit links:

• MAKING HYDROGEN FUEL with nanotechnology…….
• MORE TARGETED CANCER TREATMENT using nanotechnology…….
• CONTRASTING U.S. AND EUROPEAN APPROACHES to nanotechnology and related issues. I have some related thoughts here…….
• HARVESTING SOLAR ENERGY with nanotechnology…….
• TREATING CANCER WITH NANOTECHNOLOGY: “In a study with breast cancer in mice, a nanotech cancer therapy suppresses tumor growth with minimal side effects. Taking advantage of the fact that the blood vessels in tumor tissue are leakier than in normal……
• TURNING WASTE INTO ETHANOL, using nanotechnology…….
• KILLING DEADLY HOSPITAL BACTERIA with nanotechnology…….
• THE PUBLIC WEIGHS IN on nanotechnology for human enhancement. I say, bring it on. I need all the enhancing I can get…….
• NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Optimizing drug delivery with shaped nanoparticles…….

From an Anchorage Daily News profile of Todd Palin, the husband of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Republican candidate for vice president.

White-collar jobs in law, education or health care are typical among the current crop of first spouses, but Palin spent nearly 20 years as a blue-collar employee in the oil fields of the North Slope. And every summer he heads west to his birthplace in Dillingham to work the Bristol Bay commercial salmon fishery from his property on the Nushagak River.

A lifetime of manual labor in the state’s two largest and most physically demanding industries is helping Palin carve out his role as Alaska’s first spouse, or “first dude,” a nickname he has in common with the Kansas governor’s husband, Gary Sebelius.

Like other first spouses around the country, Palin has been asked to champion an array of causes or institutions since his wife took office in December.

His favorite is steering young Alaskans toward stable jobs in the oil and gas industry. It’s a singular choice among his counterparts, whose pet issues include schools, public health, domestic violence, poverty or the arts.

It’s great to see any person in the public eye pushing industry as a good place to build a career.

George Leef of the Pope Center for Higher Education reviews Charles Murray’s new book, “Real Education.” Both critique a four-year baccalaureate program for being more a credentialing mechanism than one that maximizes talents or rationally reflects the needs of the economy. From Leef’s review:

Consider a young man who is at the 70th percentile in language and mathematical ability. He is easily a good enough student to get into mid-level universities. As far as his “people skills” go he is average, but in small motor and spatial skills, he’s at the 95th percentile. The fellow could go to college and get a degree that would put him on track for a management job – where he probably wouldn’t rise far because he’ll be competing with many others who have better skills.

On the other hand, he could become an excellent electrician. If he were to do that, he would probably earn substantially more than if he became a manager and also enjoy far greater job security. Moreover, there is the important matter of personal satisfaction. Our young man will probably have far more of it in a career where he can see tangible results every day and quite possibly become his own boss.

Conclusion: “(G)uidance counselors and parents who automatically encourage young people to go to college straight out of high school regardless of their skills and interests are being thoughtless about the best interests of young people in their charge.” Murray has that exactly right. We need to break out of the mindset that you can’t be a success in life unless you have a college degree.

Murray is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. AEI’s web page for his book includes an intriguing plug for the book from Tom Wolfe:

Charles Murray is one professional contrarian who cannot be written off–not since his first book, Losing Ground, led to a complete restructuring of America’s welfare system. At first Real Education, with its plan for identifying ‘the elite,’ may strike you as an elaboration of his hotly contested views on IQ. But suddenly–swock!–he pops a gasper: a practical plan for literally reproducing, re-creating, a new generation of Jeffersons, Adamses, Franklins, and Hamiltons, educated, drilled, steeped, marinated in those worthies’ concern for the Good and Virtuous with a capital V–nothing less than an elite of Founding Great-great-great-great-great Grandchildren.”

Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute argues that certification of accomplishments, knowledge and skills is a more rational educational approach than the four-year, B.A. default. From the Wall Street Journal, “For Most People, College is a Waste of Time“:

The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.

Outside a handful of majors — engineering and some of the sciences — a bachelor’s degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

The essay in today’s Journal comes from Murray’s new book, due out next week, “Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality” (Crown Forum).

(Hat tip: George Leef)

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, “Industry, government need to invest in job training“:

In a building that once housed the boiler and machine shops of a Duquesne steel mill shut down a quarter century ago, U.S. Steel Corp. is training workers for a career in a modern mill.

“The training is much more extensive and more high-tech, and there is a lot more done (training) before a person ever steps onto the plant floor,” said Lisa Roudabush, general manager of U.S. Steel’s Mon Valley Works, which includes the Edgar Thomson Plant in Braddock, Irvin Plant in West Mifflin and the Clairton Coke Works.

Others interviewed are Debra Brinney, training manager; Dave Nickle of Uniontown, a maintenance worker and mechanic; Lee Taddonio, president of the SMC Business Councils in Churchill; and Daniel A. Krinock, president of Pace Industries Inc. Airo Division.

VW News Release:

Volkswagen Group of America Announces It Will Produce Cars in Chattanooga; Decision Marks Company’s Ongoing Commitment to North American Market
Company will invest $1 billion and bring about 2,000 direct jobs to tri-state area

The announcement punctuates observations made below about Maryland, workforce and CNBC’s “Top States for Business.” According to CNBC’s ratings, although Tennessee was 21st overall in state ratings, when it came to workforce, it ranked an admirable No. 5.

Yes, of course, means more than it just being a right-to-work state. As Stefan Jacoby, President and CEO of Volkswagen Group of America, commented: ”This area has a deep base of well-trained labor, with excellent engineering and manufacturing programs at the universities and technical colleges.”

Volkswagen includes the plant as a major step in its business strategy for the “dollar region.” We interpret that as saying the exchange rates, dollar vs. Euro, make it smart to build facilities in the United States.

Quite a striking chart sent by our friends at the California Manufacturers & Technology Association, advocates for improved and expanded vocational education. We’ll put the e-mail from Gino DeCarlo below…

 

On Friday, California’s “Big 5″ leaders tasked with negotiating the details and terms of a potential State Budget were hand-delivered this letter from the Get REAL coalition asking them to finally put words into action after eight years of unacceptable high school dropout rates (20 California high school students dropout every hour), decreasing real-world relevance in our classes and a growing need for technological and hands-on workers.   The letter requested that any future Prop 98 education funds growth be prioritized to at least fund a meaningful amount of career technical education (CTE) for our high school students.

[Above] is a chart showing exactly why real CTE prioritizing and action is needed.  For the past eight years, politicians have offered rhetorical support and latent action that did nothing to increase our high school students’ exposure to valuable career technical education programs.  This chart tells every reporter, legislator, manufacturer, student, parent and teacher all they need to know to understand the necessity of serious CTE reforms in California.

From the Sioux Falls Argus Leader:

Officials from Angus-Palm, a Watertown-based maker of cabs and cab components, know the challenges of growing its work force. Since the first of the year, the company has added 50 employees at its Watertown plant, giving it about 450 workers, said Gary Stone, a company vice-president of operations.

But Clark Breitag, Angus-Palm human resources director, said the company has had to step up attendance at job and career shows to get enough workers.

Breitag’s comments came during a manufacturing workforce summit sponsored by the South Dakota Department of Labor and the South Dakota Chamber of Commerce. Gov. Mike Rounds spoke, as did the Manufacturing Institute’s Peggy Walton.

This morning the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition (CASEnergy Coalition) released a new white paper, “Job Creation in the Nuclear Renaissance.”

Hosted by CASEnergy’s co-chair, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman (with Gov. Engler, right), the event at the National Press Club highlighted the potential jobs creation that will result from a nuclear renaissance. As the news release summarizes:  

• Each nuclear plant provides 400 to 700 high-paying jobs.
• Depending on construction methods, each new reactor could require as many as 4,000 workers per project at peak periods.
• According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the median annual salary for nuclear engineers is $82,900 — approximately $8,000 more than all other engineering disciplines except petroleum engineering.
• Each of the country’s 104 reactors generates an estimated $430 million a year in total output for the local community, and nearly $40 million per year in total labor income.

More materials…

• Fact Sheet: Economic impact of U.S. nuclear plants
• Executive Summary: CASEnergy white paper “Job Creation in the Nuclear Renaissance “
• Download the full report: “Job Creation in the Nuclear Renaissance”
• View signatories: Full list of supporters in a foreword to the white paper

 
Remarks by the speakers (.mp3 files):

• Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE).
• NAM President John Engler.
• Mark Ayers, president, Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO.
• Gilbert J. Brown, Ph.D., professor and coordinator, Nuclear Engineering Program, University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
• Lisa Stiles, project manager, Strategic Staffing and Knowledge Management, Dominion Nuclear.
• Michael Kurzeja, vice president, North American Young Generation in Nuclear.