Our method involves interviewing providers of sub-baccalaureate education--that is, the supply side of the market--and employers, the demand side, in four specific labor markets.[8] In this way we could check the information we received from one side with representatives from the other. For example, if a community college electronics program claimed to have an active advisory committee and a good reputation among employers, we could ask employers of electronics technicians in the same community about the local college, its advisory committees, and their tendency to hire from the college. Because the sub-baccalaureate labor market is so varied and contains so many occupations, we concentrated on six specific occupations/occupational areas (described later in greater detail): electronics technician, machinist, drafter, accountant, business occupations, and computer-related occupations.
The providers of education whom we interviewed included community colleges and technical institutes (or technical colleges), both of which generally offer two-year associate degree programs as well as shorter certificate programs. In some communities--particularly in the city we call Frankton--area vocational schools are also active in providing shorter-term vocational education for adults (as distinct from their programs for high school students), so we interviewed individuals in area vocational schools as well. In general, we did not interview providers of secondary vocational education because enrollments in these programs have dwindled (Clune et al., 1989) and because they have moved away from intensive and job-specific preparation. However, in one community--Cotooli--the high school programs are viewed by employers as important contributors; so there, we did interview secondary providers of vocational education.
In each institution, we interviewed the dean of occupational education partly to get an overview of the institution's occupational offerings, then we interviewed the heads of the departments containing programs in our six occupational areas to get more detailed information about educational programs, local employment opportunities, and the subsequent placement of students. We usually interviewed several instructors within these programs, especially when a department head was unable to provide much information or when a particular instructor was recommended as being knowledgeable. In addition, we interviewed the head of any placement office within these institutions to assess other mechanisms of connection with employers. In all, we interviewed seventy-four educators in eighteen different institutions. We asked these providers of education about the backgrounds and intentions of their students, the nature of their programs, their connections with employers, the nature of the local labor market in the six specific occupational areas, and the common hiring and promotion practices. The questionnaires used are reproduced in Appendix A, which provides other information about the interviews.
In each of the four communities, we interviewed a sample of employers who were likely to hire substantial numbers of individuals in the six occupational areas we emphasized, starting from lists of local employers provided by Chambers of Commerce, employer associations, and local departments of economic development. We also included firms mentioned by employers as important sources of hiring. We tried to interview at least four employers for each of the six occupational areas (and, of course, some employers hired substantial numbers of individuals in several occupations) and to include a range of small to large employers. In each firm, we typically interviewed an individual in charge of hiring--usually a director of personnel in larger firms and a person with varying responsibilities in smaller firms. In addition, where there was a lower-level individual with responsibility for hiring in specific occupations--a foreman or supervisor, for example--we interviewed that individual. Within the four labor markets we examined, we interviewed a total of 152 individuals in 113 firms. The questions we posed (again reproduced in Appendix A) included those about hiring and promotion practices, skill requirements and trends in the nature of occupations, formal and informal relations with local providers of occupational education, and perceptions about the quality of education and training.
Several problems affected our interviews with employers. One was the difficulty of determining appropriate individuals to interview since people at different levels of a firm (e.g., personnel managers versus supervisors) have varying and often inaccurate information about hiring practices and job requirements. A more troubling and pervasive problem involved the accuracy of information we received from employers about hiring standards and job requirements. We asked about hiring practices, promotion policies, patterns of internal mobility, and the like--all empirical questions to which precise answers would require analyzing personnel files but for which we had to make do with the guesses and estimates of our respondents with their inevitable biases and problems of recall.[9] Fortunately, over a relatively large number of employer interviews (slightly over 150), the responses tended to corroborate one another and clear patterns emerged, giving us substantial confidence that our major conclusions have not been distorted by the limits of interviews.
It proved difficult to interview small employers--those with less than one hundred employees--because they hire in any specific occupation so infrequently that there is no regularized practice or policy to report and the information available from interviews is scanty. Despite the fact that small employers seem to account for much of the hiring from community colleges and technical institutes, our sample of employers is biased in favor of medium-sized and larger employers. In addition, the period of our interviews--1991 and 1992--was a recession in most of the country, particularly in manufacturing. Many firms had not hired any new employees in several years, and their responses about hiring practices therefore reflected their recollection of what they did in better times or what they thought they would do when conditions improved. We suspect that the sub-baccalaureate labor market is especially susceptible to the business cycle--as we examine more closely in the first section of this document, "The Characteristics of Sub-Baccalaureate Labor Markets"--so responses from employers might be quite different in boom times.
In each labor market, we attempted to interview a third type of individual--individuals who are neither employers nor providers of education and who might have a broad and unbiased overview of the local labor market. These general respondents might be officials of city or county agencies, especially economic development agencies and service delivery areas of the Job Training Partnership Act, the staff of local Chambers of Commerce or local coordinating agencies, or academics with special knowledge of local conditions. We found only eleven such individuals; there are very few people in an institutional position who have a broad overview of local labor markets.
This conclusion highlights one of the most difficult aspects of studying sub-baccalaureate labor markets. Markets are, in many ways, abstractions. They result from the interactions of many demanders (employers, in this case) and many suppliers (educational institutions and their students), but each participant experiences only a small part of the market and can therefore describe only a small piece of it. Most of the employers and the providers we interviewed do not think of themselves as operating in a market: They describe their experiences as transactions--hiring a specific individual, finding a particular job, placing students with a specific company--isolated from the other participants in the market. Occasionally, employers will refer to competitors who can lure their employees away by offering higher wages; but, otherwise, there is little sense that markets operate with many participants influencing employment outcomes, wage rates, and the like. To describe an entire market, then, it becomes necessary to synthesize the responses of many participants, each of whom has a very incomplete picture of the market--the approach we have taken through multiple interviews.[10]
Most interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed. The statements from educators and employers we include in this report are therefore direct quotes. We quote individuals when they represent a wider spectrum of opinion and not (unless mentioned) when their views are idiosyncratic.
[8] This method draws upon an older, institutional analysis of labor markets (e.g., see Berg, 1970, especially Chapter 4 reporting on interviews with employers; Diamond & Bedrosian, 1970; Gordon & Thal-Larsen, 1969). As labor economics has become increasingly theoretical and quantitative, this kind of institutional analysis has all but disappeared from economics. However, it has reappeared in part within sociology, which is more hospitable than economics to case studies, interview methods, and other qualitative approaches. However, much of the literature within sociology (particularly within the sociology of occupations) tends to examine the structure and evolution of particular occupations rather than the relationship between formal schooling and access to occupations.
[9] Some questions we posed--for example, about promotion policies and earnings--require quantitative analysis to answer definitively. Unfortunately, many employers fail to keep adequate data about their hiring practices, so more precise information is not available. Other issues--for example, the kinds of skills most required on the job--would require ethnographic analysis of the kind Darrah (1990, 1991) has performed, which are enormously time consuming. A thorough examination of any one workplace would therefore require interviews with managers and supervisors, analysis of employee records, ethnographic observations, and interviews with workers. To do this across a sample of firms and across labor markets would be overwhelmingly expensive and time consuming.
[10] Of course, the other way to describe a market is to concentrate on the results as is typically done through the statistical analysis of wages and earnings, employment levels, and trends. However, as mentioned before, this approach ignores the details of what demanders and suppliers do; in economists' terms, it focuses on the reduced-form effects of demand and supply--wages and employment--and neglects the components.