Education for Jobs

Report Outline
Education and Changing Job Market
Academic Vs. Occupational Instruction
New Directions for Career Education
Special Focus

Education and Changing Job Market

Unemployment Amid Scarcity of Skilled Workers

Vocational education—training for the world of V work that does not require a bachelor's degree—has long been considered the stepchild of American education. The stepchild has emerged during the past few years to become a subject of increasing public concern. Sidney P. Marland Jr., U.S. Commissioner of Education, had good reason to call vocational training the No. 1 priority in education. A recent study by the Department of Labor indicates that by 1980 about 80 per cent of all jobs will require less than a bachelor's degree but very few will be available to the unskilled. It is estimated that over 40 million of the 46 million students now in school will not graduate from college. Without some kind of vocational training, many of these young people will be unable to find work.

Even a college degree offered no assurance of a job in the year 1971 and, according to numerous forecasts, job prospects would remain dim in several professions for years to come. Professional journals and the popular press told of overcrowding in many fields and of large numbers of new graduates being left unemployed. Even holders of advance degrees were not immune from these conditions. The Ph.D. was no longer a meal ticket, especially in teaching and engineering, two of the professions hardest hit by changes in the job market. These changes were being wrought by such diverse factors as uncertainty in the national economy, a slippage in the rate of population growth, and a large outpouring of graduates in the past decade.

“At a time when there is a glut of Ph.D.'s, and perhaps 65,000 engineers are out of work,” Business Week observed, “many jobs cannot find people.” “This year …only about 38 per cent of the jobs for sub-professional health workers will be filled by trained people. By 1980 the nation is expected to be short 400,000 such workers, trained or not. In the next four years, some 1.5 million more secretaries will be needed, the number of people employed in certain computer fields should double, and such comparatively new areas as pollution control will increase the need for technicians.”