Among industrialized nations, the United States has one of the worst systems for moving students from high school to the workplace, Secretary of Labor Robert Reich told his audience at a special assembly. This lack of a school-to-work transition is especially damaging, he said, in light of the widening gap in wages between college graduates and other workers.
Over the past 15 years, the earnings and benefits of college-educated people have gradually improved, while the wages of people without college degrees have declined strikingly, Reich said. "If you just have a high school degree, you are on a downward escalator relative to your cohorts."
This earnings gap is fueled by two forces: technology and global markets, Reich said. "If you're well-educated, technology is your friend. It's a tool to expand your problem-solving capacities," he explained. "On the other hand, if you do not have a good education, technology is rapidly replacing you."
Global markets are having a similar effect. "If you're well-educated, global markets work to your advantage: they expand the demand for your problem-solving activities," he said. Workers who are not well-educated, however, must compete with millions of people around the world, most of whom are "eager to work for a small fraction of your prevailing wage."
Unlike the United States, some other countries are not allowing these forces to "fracture their work forces quite as sharply" into the upwardly and downwardly mobile, Reich said. He cited the former West Germany and Japan as examples.
Germany, Reich said, has an apprenticeship system that features a curriculum developed collaboratively by schools, businesses, and labor unions. The student's program "ends in a certificate of mastery and a job, enabling that person to continuously learn on the job." In Japan, companies tell high schools they will hire a certain number of their graduates who have achieved a certain level of proficiency; then they give these new workers continuous on-the-job training. In both countries, average wages are high, Reich said.
"What you see in Germany, Japan, and many other nations," he emphasized, "is much more collaboration among educators, the business community, and others with an interest in reaching the goal" of helping students become successful workers.
To best prepare students for future jobs, schools should teach them learning-to-learn skills, Reich said. "What young people need desperately are the tools to learn how to learn on the job." Students should know how to identify problems, experiment, and work collaboratively, he said.
"Ideally, students ought to learn these learning-to-learn job skills in a way that relates them to the real world, so they can test them and practice them and apply them," Reich said.
The need for change is urgent, Reich said in closing, because the two separate economies we are breeding in the United States "are very dangerous for the future of this country—even if we were not wasting a lot of precious minds."