This country has often turned to formal education to improve its economic conditions--to eliminate poverty, redress inequities, enhance overall economic growth, and increase our competitiveness. The recent national reports bemoaning the decline of the American economy have been part of this much longer trend of emphasis on schools and colleges reforming before the country can become competitive or shift to a "high-wage equilibrium."
Such claims on schools and colleges are almost certainly exaggerated because they fail to address the many other causes of economic rise and fall--including the role of business decisions, international flows of capital and investment, the influence of our national deficit, the relatively small role of government in directing economic policy in this country, and the influence of American culture on the propensity to save and invest. To blame formal education for the decline of our economy or to emphasize the reform of education as the key element of economic recovery is at best misleading and at worst a romantic fantasy that might improve education but fail to enhance economic conditions at all. Given the many other influences on economic growth and competitiveness, some modesty about the claims made for and against schooling seems appropriate.
Still, even without exaggerating the claims about education's influence, on its own terms formal schooling plays an important role. Individuals look to education as a mechanism of their own personal advancement, and the educational institutions serving the sub-baccalaureate labor market--community colleges and technical institutes, area vocational schools, a few adult schools, and some proprietary schools--have been particularly important for a broad range of individuals seeking entrance into the labor market. These institutions have also been more flexible than four-year colleges, responding to the need for retraining for those switching occupations, upgrade training for those needing new skills, and remediation as well as initial training for the sub-baccalaureate labor market. Employers, too, have counted on the schools for at least some of the skills they require. When the relationship between schooling and employers works well--for example, in what we have termed "organized" labor markets like health occupations or in the co-op programs of Cotooli--the congruence between education providers and employer requirements and the benefits to students and employers alike suggest an ideal that serves all those involved.
We can, then, judge the effectiveness of sub-baccalaureate labor markets simply by asking whether they work well in their own terms, in fulfilling the expectations potential employees and employers have. In this section we summarize the evidence from the previous sections and end with a series of recommendations intended to address the most obvious problems within the sub-baccalaureate labor market.