The college entrance examination in 2018 has ended, and 9.75 million candidates have left the examination room. The next stop for many people is the university. The importance of entering a good university for young people is well known. However, with the news of "the hardest employment season in history" appearing in newspapers every summer, people’s doubts about university education are also increasing.
The mismatch between the needs of enterprises and the quality of job seekers is one of the biggest questions about the value of university education today. When Yu Lizhong, the president of nyu shanghai, was teaching at East China Normal University, he once met an entrepreneur who laughed at college students like this: "I hired a college student who can’t use the copier or send faxes. Why do we need such a person?" Yu Lizhong responded, "No university, no major can train the talents needed by an enterprise. Anyone’s development must be in the job to truly meet the requirements of the post. "
In fact, as early as 1979, Randall Collins, a famous American sociologist, found that the content of university education was not determined by technical requirements, and most skills (even the most advanced skills) were learned at work or through informal networks. In addition, the relationship between students’ school performance and career success is weak, which also means that the training of practical work skills in schools is extremely ineffective. So, is it really useful to go to college?
In the book "Diploma Society", Collins tells us that in a diploma society with "inflated academic qualifications" (meaning that as more and more people get higher degrees, the demand for education level in jobs is also rising), education actually creates artificial obstacles for social mobility; However, for those young people who want to engage in mental work and occupy a better position on the social ladder, entering the university is probably still the best choice they can make. This is because education level is an important means to distinguish managers from manual workers. People may not learn any practical skills in universities, but universities, as an important place to accumulate cultural capital, still give college students the cultural resources they need to engage in white-collar work.
Collins first used data to show that modern society is not strict with the ability of many jobs, and most organizations can spend less than three months retraining their employees. Moreover, formal education is rarely used in retraining, and even if it is used, 90% of institutions can complete it within three months.
When the ability — — More specifically, it is job skills — — When it is not the decisive factor of employees’ quality, employers must turn to other aspects to determine who is more suitable for them. Therefore, the importance of normative control is highlighted, that is, whether employees conform to organizational goals and values and are loyal to the organization is an important criterion for employers to select talents. Many research evidences show that employers will use education as a means to choose employees with middle-class characteristics, and they tend to think that dropouts who have not completed the orthodox education track are unreliable and lack satisfactory personality and behavior.
In a survey of organizations in California in 1967, Collins found that employers rarely take the initiative to lower the requirements for employees’ education level unless there is an extreme shortage of labor, and once this requirement for education level is established, it will only increase. For example, employers use education to regulate and control the selection scope of job seekers, which is an important reason for the popularity of business administration degrees — — It is found that although employers generally doubt the value of business school education for practical work, they also tend to think that business school education represents college students’ willingness to do business and basic business values.
Therefore, Collins pointed out the status relationship between education and occupation. Education itself reflects a certain group culture and shapes a certain group’s sense of belonging. When this group culture and sense of belonging are consistent with the requirements of employers, the value of education is very high. The importance of prestigious schools is formed in this way: when the students trained by elite education of prestigious schools conform to the culture and values of elite occupations, more and more graduates of prestigious schools will begin to control elite occupations, which in turn strengthens the connection between elite schools and elite cultures. Therefore, we can see that domestic graduates of 985, 211 and double first-class universities have become the hot cakes in the eyes of employers, and foreign Ivy League graduates have their own aura of "winners in life" and are proud of the job market.
Even if your requirements for finding a job are not so high that you are not discouraged by top employers in the industry, as long as you want to do mental work comfortably in the office, a college degree is to a large extent something you must get. Collins found that there is a promotion gap between unskilled and service jobs, technical jobs and foreman jobs. "Employers generally believe that manual labor and non-manual labor (as well as clerical jobs) are closely isolated from each other, although there are broad opportunities in these two categories."
"Culture can shape a person’s self-image, set emotions, reshape the past reality and create new reality at the spiritual level." Collins wrote in the book. According to Max Weber, cultural resources are the foundation of relational communities, which have a set of shared symbols and ideologies, and help people who have these things in common to establish relationships. In the workplace, cultural resources may refer to job requirements, corporate culture and values, market insight, industry experience and so on.
Cultural resources can be produced through daily interaction (for example, gaining some industry experience in work and practice) or through specific organizations — — The school is such a professional cultural production organization, and it is often able to produce new cultural forms with ease. "Partly because the competition for the control of cultural production organizations and internal crisis will take its products in a new direction, and partly because its members will absorb culture full-time and consciously, which makes them form more sophisticated skills."
In Collins’ view, schools are particularly important for the formation of a new organizational structure, which not only helps to establish the traditional gentry class in China, but also helps to establish the professional field in contemporary America. As a formal cultural production institution, the importance of school is that formal culture can make individuals who have nothing in common establish contact at a relatively fast speed. The key here is whether there is some universal criterion to measure individual value quickly. Therefore, the formal cultural production organization needs to make its cultural products become a measurable currency similar to the unit of value. In the context of schools, this is the source of achievements and diplomas. They appear as a summary of the quality of cultural products (students) and give individual value in a quantitative way. Collins pointed out that the value of this currency also fluctuates with the change of supply and demand, so we see that more and more people are sighing that "it is difficult for undergraduates to find jobs" — — When the number of undergraduate graduates goes up year by year, the value of the currency of undergraduate education obviously goes down year by year.
It is worth noting that the emergence of the "white-collar" class is even closely related to the education diploma. In industrial society, the maturity of machine and organizational art can make everyone live comfortably with relatively little physical labor, which means that simple physical labor can no longer meet the employment needs of most people in the whole society. Those who agree with the technical control theory believe that technological progress has promoted the vigorous development of mental jobs, while Collins believes that the fallacy of the technical control theory lies in its misunderstanding of the premise of occupational differentiation in industrial society. He said that many jobs labeled as "mental work" are actually "idle jobs" based on simple work, in order to alleviate the political pressure brought by people who want to work.
"White-collar" jobs are far from real material production, and their output is difficult to be measured by objective standards. Therefore, professional and technical degrees fill the gaps in standards, subdivide the field of mental work more and more professionally, and create more and more jobs. Collins said, "Therefore, the expansion of the cultural market can make more people rely on ‘ Politics ’ Department (‘ Idle department ’ ) life, they obtain material products through the ruling structure rather than the production structure itself. "
As early as the end of the 19th century in the United States, educators pointed out that orthodox school education is not beneficial to the cultivation of vocational skills, and systematic vocational training should be used to cultivate talents needed in the workplace. After the end of the Civil War, American society rapidly industrialized. Calvin Woodward, a graduate of Harvard University and dean of the Vocational and Technical College of Washington University in St. Louis, opened a handicraft labor training high school to replace the traditional vocational-independent education system. At the beginning of the 20th century, the promoters of vocational education began to set up separate secondary vocational and technical schools and projects for the working class. However, vocational education has never been successful.
One of the reasons has been pointed out in the previous article — — Since vocational skills can be acquired at work, what is the value of school education that only provides pure vocational skills training? The more important reason is that students are opposed to replacing middle-class cultural education with handicraft training, because the latter can bring them social mobility and improve their social status.
In Collins’ view, the education provided by a university is not designed to cultivate practical skills, but its importance lies in its power to issue diplomas, and people are eager to obtain the status symbolized behind diplomas. Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, Harvard University and other universities have successfully passed the crisis when people questioned the value of traditional education. It is precisely because they changed the curriculum and introduced many courses in science, modern language and literature, social sciences and vocational fields outside the classic courses, and claimed that they could cultivate political elites with liberal arts knowledge and public manners.
For students, this has become the most important motivation to enter the university. What they value is not the experience provided by universities, but the social experience that universities can bring and the possibility of joining cultural elites. Collins even pointed out that the social culture of universities plays a key role in attracting students: "University culture undertakes the function of bringing together middle and upper class children;" The feelings generated in university activities make them friends, and finally they go to the right marriage. " In fact, the famous Ivy League originally refers to the sports league of eight private universities in the northeast of the United States, but today, it has become synonymous with excellent academic level and social elite.
"By constantly telling the public that education can lead to elite status and by providing opportunities for social mobility, universities attract most people in the crowd who can get the opportunity to enter the elite." To a great extent, it is a serious misunderstanding of the existence of higher education institutions to require universities to popularize vocational education, because if only skills training is emphasized, universities will lose their main value — — Get cultural capital and join elite groups — — The danger.
From this point of view, in the foreseeable future, we will still live in a diploma society and have no choice.
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