{"id":847,"date":"2013-09-12T23:18:00","date_gmt":"2013-09-12T23:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2013\/09\/more-on-college-educated-secretaries-more-or-less.html"},"modified":"2013-09-12T23:18:00","modified_gmt":"2013-09-12T23:18:00","slug":"more-on-college-educated-secretaries-more-or-less","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2013\/09\/more-on-college-educated-secretaries-more-or-less.html","title":{"rendered":"More on college-educated secretaries (more or less)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

So reader \u201cwm13\u201d commented, in response to my post on college-educated folk working non-college-education-requiring jobs, that<\/p>\n

It depends what people mean by \u201crequire.\u201d We hire a lot of paralegals, who do general clerical work (until they quit to go to law school, usually). Nothing they do requires anything more than reasonable literacy and organizational skills, and I\u2019m sure that, say, Laura Ingalls Wilder (or I) could have performed the job on the day we graduated from high school. But we only hire college graduates, because it\u2019s the only way to ensure quality. (Indeed, we have found that the best procedure is to offer a salary that attracts middle-of-the-class Ivies and\/or top-of-the-class others. It\u2019s worth the extra $5,000 to have an Ivy grad versus a community college grad.) So the job \u201crequires\u201d a college degree in order to be hired, although none of the job tasks \u201crequires\u201d anything you learned in college.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course,\u00a0I\u2019m curious about the statement than an extra $5K per\u00a0year attracts the\u00a0Ivy grad vs. a\u00a0\u201ccommunity college\u00a0grad\u201d\u00a0so maybe the commenter considers a two-year\u00a0degree as sufficient but four years as preferable, or maybe he meant non-selective state college?<\/p>\n

And it would seem to me that Ivy grads would be un<\/em>desirable if there\u2019s such turnover due to departures for law school, and you really need someone with substantial experience, rather than constantly training new hires.<\/p>\n

But he says that hiring only college grads is the \u201conly way to ensure quality\u201d \u2014 and I think we\u2019ve got a chicken-and-egg situation here.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0a situation in which there aren\u2019t many established paths outside a four-year degree, it\u2019s a very rare qualified high school student who doesn\u2019t choose that path.\u00a0 In principle, it should be possible to, say, earn a two-year degree and prove oneself through employment and a mix of other activities (demonstrating organizational skills through community involvement, writing skills by authoring local news pieces, etc.), but it\u2019s a fairly risky endeavor outside of unique situations (maybe such as a \u201cgap year\u201d abroad?) that means\u00a0a young person is unlikely to pursue this route.<\/p>\n

And as long as there aren\u2019t many people with \u201creasonable literacy and organizational skills\u201d and\u00a0who are able to demonstrate to a prospective employer that they\u2019re well-qualified despite the lack of a degree, employers themselves won\u2019t be able to break out of the \u201ccollege grad = quality\u201d trap.<\/p>\n

What to do?\u00a0\u00a0Ideally, we could in the long-term, transition to a model where\u00a0students, for example, pursuing a paralegal or other white-collar job that\u2019s reliant on communication skills and general intelligence but not specialized STEM knowledge, study for two years, solidify their writing skills in particular,\u00a0and then undertake an \u201capprentice\u201d type program \u2014 that is, an internship, but without the requirement to pay college tuition, and with a modest stipend.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

But how we get from here to there is a huge unknown.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So reader \u201cwm13\u201d commented, in response to my post on college-educated folk working non-college-education-requiring jobs, that It depends what people mean by \u201crequire.\u201d We hire a lot of paralegals, who do general clerical work (until they quit to go to law school, usually). Nothing they do requires anything more than reasonable literacy and organizational skills, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nMore on college-educated secretaries (more or less)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So reader "wm13" commented, in response to my post on college-educated folk working non-college-education-requiring jobs, thatIt depends what people mean\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2013\/09\/more-on-college-educated-secretaries-more-or-less.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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