May 29, 2014--The $ of a College Education

Back in 1976 I wrote a book about the history and then current state of higher education--Second Best. The "second best" referred to how the system favored the affluent at the literal expense of the less fortunate.

One chapter was devoted to the financing of colleges and universities, especially the redistribution of assets from the working poor and lower middle class to the upper middle class and wealthy.

Studies that I cited showed that since the system disproportionately encouraged the enrollment and graduation of these latter students, tax money and other forms of assets flowed upward from those at the bottom to those at the top. The best evidence at the time showed that college graduates over their lifetimes earned about 50 percent more than those with only high school diplomas and even "some college," with some college including community college students who never went on the earn bachelors degrees.

I hoped the book, which was widely reviewed and discussed, would contribute to the debate about this unfairness and contribute to efforts to close these gaps in educational attainment and economic outcomes.

But from recent evidence it is clear that I and many others were less than effective.

This may come as something of a surprise since there is so much casual talk currently, supported by anecdotal stories, about how recent college graduates can't find jobs and are therefore moving back home, holed up again in their old bedrooms.

Friends have been telling me for years that they know this brilliant young person who graduated with honors from Georgetown or a talented student from the University of Michigan who has been looking unsuccessfully for work for the past three years. Or had to take a part time job.

From this one might suspect that the income gaps at least have narrowed and that unemployment among college grads would have risen.

But a recent study cited in the New York Times by the Economic Policy Institute, using Labor Department data, shows that the unemployment rate among college graduates is only 3 percent (while for those with "some college" it is more than 25 percent) and that the earnings gap is even more pronounced than in the past.

Five years ago grads earned 89 percent more than non-graduates, ten year ago it was 84 percent more, back in the early 1980s it was a 64 percent premium, and as my research showed it was "only" 50 percent more in the mid-1970s.

On the other hand, the most recent data reveal a shocking 98 percent advantage in earnings for college graduates when compared to those with either a high school diploma or a year or two of college. This translates to $1.0 million more in earnings over a working lifetime.

It may be true that a percentage of employed college graduates feel they are underemployed or are working in fields that do not align with their interests or aspirations; but the anecdotes, which confirm predetermined presuppositions about the state of things, do not represent the truth.

The truth however, is mixed--it is good news that college graduates are doing so comparatively well (though it is not good news that the average graduate is $25,000 in debt); but it is little comfort to think about those falling further and further behind. That was true in 1976 and, sadly, it is even more so today.

February 25, 2014--Two Young Friends

I have two young friends, recent college graduates, who were hired by Google to do significant work.

Both are liberal arts graduates with just BA degrees; and, since I know next to nothing about what kind of work is available for art and communication major types at a place such as Google, I wondered what the H.R. folks there might have had in mind when they made lucrative job offers and what they might have seen in my friends to inspire them to hire them.

This wondering is in the context of knowing many more senior friends--people in the 50s and 60s--who are frustrated that they have not yet achieved the levels of success they feel qualified for, prepared for, perhaps entitled to in their own careers. These older friends, in search of explanations for their own self-defined lack of success tend more to look askance (I'm being nice here) at these newbies than at what they bring, or do not bring to cutting-edge companies and organizations. These older friends often fail to look within themselves to discover their strengths and limitations and, in doing that, figure out what they, even at 55 or older, might do to make themselves more viable, more competitive.

I've been wondering about this for some time and haven't been able to figure it out. I know that's in large part because I too am feeling "aged out."

Then there was help from Tom Friedman's column in Sunday's New York Times in which he extensively quotes Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President of People Operations (I love his title) at Google.

In case you missed the Friedman piece, here is some of what Bock shared with him--

G.P.A.'s are worthless as a criteria for hiring. We also found that they don't predict anything. Good grades certainly don't hurt. [But] there are five hiring attributes we have across the company. 

If it's a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical. For every job, though, the number one thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it's not I.Q. It's learning ability. It's the ability to process on the fly. It's the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. 

The second is leadership--in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you the president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? 

We don't care. What we care about is when faced with a problem and you're a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what's critical is to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power. 

What else? Humility and ownership. It's feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in to try to solve any problem--and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. 

Without humility you are unable to learn. It's why research shows that many graduates of hotshot business schools plateau. Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don't learn how to learn from it. 

They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it's because I'm a genius. If something bad happens, it's because someone's an idiot.What we've seen is that people who are successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They'll argue like hell. They'll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, 'Here's a new fact,' and they'll go, 'Oh, well, that changes things; you're right.' You need a big ego and a small ego in the same person at the same time. 

The least important thing we look for is expertise. If you take someone who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn, and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as a H.R. person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who's been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go, 'I've seen this 100 times before; and here's what you do.' 

Most of the time the nonexpert will come up with the same answer because most of the time it's not that hard. Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, but once in a while they'll come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.

Now I am beginning to understand why Google hired my two liberal-artsy friends. What Bock describes is just how I think about them.