Se encuentra disponible a partir de febrero el Informe preparado por la Universidad de Harvard titulado PATHWAYS TO PROSPERITY. MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF PREPARING YOUNG AMERICANS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY.
Bajar el Informe aquí 2,5 MB. Más abajo –después de las conclusiones– ver comentario.
Las conclusiones del estudio son las siguientes:
The American system for preparing young people to lead
productive and prosperous lives as adults is clearly badly
broken.
Failure to aggressively overcome this challenge will
surely erode the fabric of our society. The American
Dream rests on the promise of economic opportunity,
with a middle class lifestyle for those willing to work
for it. Yet for the millions of young Americans entering
adulthood lacking access to marketable skills, the
American Dream may be just an illusion, unlikely ever
to come within their grasp. If we fail to better prepare
current and future teens and young adults, their
frustration over scarce and inferior opportunities is likely
to grow, along with economic inequality. The quality
of their lives will be lower, the costs that they impose
on society will be higher, and many of their potential
contributions to society will go unrealized. This is a
troubling prospect for any society and almost certainly a
recipe for national decline.
As President Obama has said, we now need every young
American not only to complete high school, but to obtain
a post-secondary credential or degree with currency in
the labor market. Most Americans now seem to have
gotten the message that a high school education is no
longer sufficient to secure a path to the middle class.
As we have noted, college enrollment has been steadily
rising over the past decade. The problem is completion:
nearly half of those who enroll leave without a degree.
While the economic returns to “some college”—a
category no other country uses in calculating higher
education outcomes—are greater than those for young
people with only a high school diploma, they vary widely
depending on family background. Because of family
connections and social networks, a middle-class student
dropping out of a selective college is much more likely
to find his way into a decent job than a working class
student dropping out of a less selective urban university.
However, a young person of whatever background who
leaves community college after completing a one-year
occupational certificate program—also counted in our
“some college” category—may earn more than many
students who complete a four-year degree program.
As the recent OECD reports suggest, other countries
manage to equip a much larger fraction of their young
people with occupationally relevant skills and credentials
by their early twenties. Consequently, these young
people experience a much smoother transition into
adulthood, without the bumps and bruises so many
of our young are now experiencing. The lessons from
Europe strongly suggest that well-developed, high
quality vocational education programs provide excellent
pathways for many young people to enter the adult
work force. But these programs also advance a broader
pedagogical hypothesis: that from late adolescence
onward, most young people learn best in structured
programs that combine work and learning, and where
learning is contextual and applied. Ironically, this
pedagogical approach has been widely applied in the
training of our highest status professionals in the U.S.,
where clinical practice (a form of apprenticeship) is
an essential component in the preparation of doctors,
architects, and (increasingly) teachers.
When it comes to teenagers, however, we Americans
seem to think they will learn best by sitting all day in
classrooms. If they have not mastered basic literacy and
numeracy skills by the time they enter high school, the
answer in many schools is to give them double blocks
of English and math. Northern European educators, by
contrast, believe that academic skills are best developed
through embedding them in the presentation of complex
workplace problems that students learn to solve in the
course of their part-time schooling. These educators also
focus on helping students understand underlying theory
–not only how things work, but why.
This philosophy isn’t simply about learning: it’s also
about how to enable young people to make a successful
transition to working life. What is most striking about
the best European vocational systems is the investment,
social as well as financial, that society makes in
supporting this transition. Employers and educators
together see their role as not only developing the next
generation of workers, but also as helping young people
make the transition from adolescence to adulthood. If we
could develop an American strategy to engage educators
and employers in a more collaborative approach to the
education and training of the next generation of workers,
it would surely produce important social as well as
economic returns on investment. Let us embark on this
vital work.

Breve comentario del Chronicle of Higher Education:
Harvard Report Calls for Focus on Job Training, Not Just College
February 2, 2011, 2:00 pm
Not everyone can or should go to college, so job training should get as much attention as the conventional path to a college degree, according to a report released today by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The report, “Pathways to Prosperity,” says Americans “place far too much emphasis on a single pathway to success: attending and graduating from a four-year college,” but only 30 percent of young adults attain that goal. The report also notes that of the 47 million American jobs expected to be created by 2018, only one-third will require a bachelor’s degree. One solution, the report says, is to place stronger emphasis on career-focused education and apprenticeships. The report also urges employers to expand opportunities for work-based learning by high-school students.
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Comentario de JD Hoye, President, National Academy Foundation (NAF), en el Huffington Post, Posted: February 2, 2011 04:47.
Pathways to Endless Possibilities
It should be clear by now that a high school education is not enough to prepare students for success in today’s workforce, let alone tomorrow’s. Many students will go on to four-year colleges, many more will receive other types of post-secondary credentials. For far too many, without guidance, may not make it past high school, and their career options are bleak. So what’s the solution? How do we prepare all students for life after high school?
A new report from Harvard Graduate School of Education, entitled “Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century” outlines several successful models for career and college readiness, both stateside and internationally. What each initiative has in common is the practice of work-based learning. Learning on the job and from professionals allows students to try on different careers and industries to decide what they do and do not like.
Early exposure to the working world is key, and I know for many people it conjures up images of turning students into corporate robots. I’ve heard it throughout my career in connecting education and businesses, and I’ve seen it in the comments on my previous posts here. The truth is quite the contrary. By providing clear pathways to major occupations and industries, students have the guidance to make informed decisions and feel confident in knowing what steps they should take to position them for a successful career.
Seventeen-year-olds chose which colleges and programs to apply to or what kind of technical college they will attend. How does career education limit their ability to make these decisions? Do we apply this logic to any other kind of education? Does letting students learn Spanish mean we are crushing their ability to realize their potential in Mandarin? The research (on work-based learning or foreign language study) definitely doesn’t bear out these conclusions.
At my organization, the National Academy Foundation, one-third of students end up in the industry they studied at their career academy, meanwhile 85 percent of NAF graduates are in a professional career in any industry. These young people have had the benefit of understanding how what they are learning in high school connects to the world beyond; they’ve honed teamwork, problem-solving and communications skills and then tested them in their internships; and they’ve formed relationships with business professionals who want to support them on their chosen path.
We need to help young people uncover their individual motivations and career desires and define the steps toward attaining them. I agree with President Obama that we need to make schools places of high expectations, but without changes in how we support students’ fulfillment of those expectations, that is all they might be. Our touchstone value, “the American dream,” the ability of all people to carve out the life they most desire, is what we reject when we deny the next generation the right to explore.
We must expand the possibilities of students who might otherwise not know how to get from point A to point B. The idea is simple. Give students the opportunity to learn hard and soft skills in a real world setting and they can take these tools with them wherever their career takes them. Not all students will know what they want to do in high school, but if we give them the opportunity to explore early, they will have a better chance of being on a pathway to prosperity.
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