Because the sub-baccalaureate labor market contains so many different types of occupations, it would have been impossible to examine all of them; and asking employers and education providers about their employment practices and programs in general terms would have led to overly vague responses. Therefore, we decided to concentrate on six occupations/occupational areas, typical in many respects of those in the sub-baccalaureate market and widely represented in the occupational offerings of most community colleges and area vocational schools. These six--electronics technician, machinist, drafter, accountant, business occupations, and computer-related occupations--include several occupations that have been part of vocational education virtually from its inception (including machinist, drafter, and business occupations) and several that are relatively new (electronics technician and computer-related occupations); several that predominate in manufacturing (electronics technician, drafter, and machinist) and therefore have been susceptible to the general decline in manufacturing in this country, and several that are not especially allied with manufacturing (accountant, business occupations, and computer-related occupations); several that are highly gender-segregated (electronics technician, drafter, machinist, and certain business occupations[11]), and several which are more integrated (accountants and computer-related occupations). All these occupations have been changed by technological advances, particularly those associated with computers. The changes in machining and drafting, which have become quite different from the occupations for which vocational education traditionally prepared students, provide good examples. Each of these occupational areas, with the possible exception of business occupations, requires certain specialized knowledge and therefore is appropriately included in a study of sub-baccalaureate labor markets. By design, we did not include any health occupations--an important area within many community colleges and technical institutes and a large component of the sub-baccalaureate labor market--partly because health occupations have been extensively studied (especially by Hudis et al., 1992) and partly because they are heavily regulated--unlike virtually all the other occupations of the sub-baccalaureate labor market. (This regulation leads to labor markets we term "organized" or "codified," discussed in "The Providers of Education and Their Connections to Employers" section of this document, with distinct characteristics and some clear advantages.) While the selection of any six occupational areas is to some extent arbitrary, these six are fairly representative of the spectrum of occupations in the sub-baccalaureate labor market.
However, there are substantial ambiguities in the specific jobs at the sub-baccalaureate level within each of these broad occupational areas--ambiguities which are not always clear to students and which can also generate a mismatch between what education providers teach and what employers use:
Increasingly, drafting seems to be handled by temporary agencies because the use of drafters is highly variable. In many firms that hire their own drafters, it is quite common to hire only a few. To some extent, the advent of CAD systems means that engineers, designers, and architects can do some of their own drafting, reducing the need for a separate category of drafters who convert rough sketches into finished and correct drawings. As one personnel manager for a highly sophisticated manufacturer stated, "The pure draftsmen are now a dying breed."
If you're in accounting and get an A.A., you're not going to be an accountant. The accounting world down here is strictly B.S./B.A. If you graduate here in accounting, you're going to work in one of the smaller firms and you're going to be a high-class bookkeeper.
The aura of professionalism surrounding the title "accountant" is therefore misleading; at the level we analyze, most people in accounting positions are clerical workers with some knowledge of accounting practices and spreadsheet programs, often doing routine data entry. A few employers referred to individuals at this level as paraprofessional accountants or "para-accountants," and one community college provides two distinct programs, one for paraprofessional accountants and one for financial accounting that is articulated with a baccalaureate accounting program.
We call ourselves computer science, but we're really more computer information science. . . . We have more of a data processing, MIS [management information service], IS [information services] type orientation. . . . We're sending people to such fields as insurance, banking, [and] finance with computer skills.
As in the case of accountants, the positions normally considered computer programming now require baccalaureate or even graduate degrees,[12] and it is virtually impossible to be hired as a programmer from a community college.[13] Other positions that might be filled with a two-year degree--computer operators, for example, who used to operate mainframe computers and mount tapes and handle computer cards and batch processing--have all but disappeared.[14] Some computer instructors inform their students about this development; as a faculty member at Rosefield City College reported,
I have tried to stress to students that a two-year degree is nice . . . but don't be surprised if somebody with a four-year degree beats you out . . . You had better plan on getting a four-year degree.
Indeed, many students in community college computer programs start with the intention of eventually transferring to four-year colleges.
The PC [personal computer] has decimated the middle management rank, whose sole purpose was to supervise ten or fifteen clerks. That job doesn't exist anymore. So, I don't know what someone with an associate's degree in business management would do with it.
As a result, managerial positions normally require a baccalaureate degree or are filled by individuals who acquire extensive experience within a particular firm. As the director of training for a large Cotooli firm mentioned,
I think the majority [of vocational institutions] are falling into the trap of preparing their students for jobs that aren't out there. . . . The two-year schools that are producing people trained in business management, accounting--whatever--are competing [with four-year graduates] directly, and I think they'll lose every time without something else behind it--experience or the opportunity or what have you.
We suspect, then, that the majority of individuals in community college business programs go into secretarial[15] and clerical positions or entry-level positions like bank tellers[16] or into relatively low-level managerial positions like office manager for very small firms.[17]
In sum, the combination of hiring preferences, the range of sophistication among education and training programs, the fact that most truly professional occupations now require baccalaureate degrees, and the fuzziness in some occupational areas (especially business and computer-related occupations) means that the six occupational areas we chose for extensive analysis are often ambiguous. As we will see in greater detail in subsequent sections, community colleges and technical institutes often prepare individuals for lower-level positions than students might imagine or prepare them for occupations where employers do not typically hire directly from educational institutions. The result is often a mismatch between the titles of educational programs and the realities of the sub-baccalaureate labor market.
[11] While business occupations as a whole are not particularly gender-segregated, particular business specialties are. Managerial programs tend to be dominated by men while women predominate in the secretarial and clerical programs and in the lower levels of business occupations which have less upward mobility.
[12] On the elaboration of the computer field and the development of hierarchies, see Greenbaum (1979).
[13] Arnold (1988) studied the 1981-1986 graduates of a community college in the Palmdale area and found that they experienced difficulty in finding entry-level programming jobs without experience. Several individuals hired into programming jobs reported that they had passed through a window of opportunity that was being closed by increasing reliance on B.S. and M.S. programmers. The most consistent predictor of salary was computer-related experience, confirming once again the importance of experience. She speculated that community college graduates were being squeezed out of programs into "sub-programming" jobs--a possibility that, about ten years later, has clearly taken place.
[14] One exception is a large computer processing operation in the Rosefield area which requires associate degrees in computer science for its technicians.
[15] Even the numbers of secretaries have been reduced by the PC revolution as letters have been replaced by electronic mail and managers do their own typing and as computers generate reports that secretaries used to complete.
[16] The personnel director of a credit union in Rosefield reported a substantial surplus of individuals with two-year business management degrees; in his firm, they were hired only as tellers.
[17] One manager of data analysis in a large Cotooli firm has previously been head of a business department in a proprietary school and claimed that their students had no trouble finding employment. However, the director of training later confirmed that the firms hiring the students were tiny--typically less than ten people, had no prospects for advancement, and were going out of business at a great rate. Once again this anecdote clarifies that information about initial jobs can be misleading; stability and upward mobility are crucial.