What Are We Preparing Young People For? Technology and Work
Last updated: Saturday - June 28, 2008
I have argued elsewhere and repeatedly that one of the great tragedies of the accountability-standards-high-stakes-testing movement is that the movement grows out of a benighted concept of what education can be—not education for the development of individual talents and life-long, worthwhile interests, but education for competition in a high tech, globalized economic race. And so math and science courses are crammed down students' throats for the sake of the American economy. But few question whether the supposed high tech jobs these students are supposedly being prepared for will materialize and if they do whether the courses will prepare them. When Bill Gates, the richest (or second or third richest) person in the world, says the schools need to concentrate on preparing students for the high tech economy, few will question his authority, even if his riches owe more to his victories in court than his prescience.

So along comes a fresh report from the Center for the Study of Jobs & Education in Wisconsin and United States, which in the past and in this new report refuses to bow to conventional wisdom.

Wisconsin Projections of Employment 2006 to 2016: Education and Training

By Dennis W. Redovich June 2008

The great numbers of high paying jobs of the future that are claimed to require college graduation and high academic skills for all high school students are a hoax. The majority of the jobs of the future in Wisconsin and the United States are low or average paying jobs that require short term or moderate-term on the job training and do not require high-level academic skills in any academic areas, particularly in higher mathematics. Technology makes jobs simpler not more difficult and makes workers more productive. The great majority of the jobs of the future are the same jobs of the 20th Century with new technological tools making these jobs easier to do. The jobs of the future in Wisconsin in 2016 are essentially the same jobs in existence in 2006. A majority of jobs in 2016, about 52%, are projected to require short term on the job training or experience (less than a month) or moderate length on the job training, experience or education (one to twelve months).

Dennis Redovich
Center for the Study of Jobs & Education in Wisconsin and United States

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