Quote of the Day
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
Jonathan Swift
Mismatch of College Graduates and Businesses?
One of my daily Wall Street Journal emails yesterday featured an interesting discussion of tech companies griping about the unqualified college graduates that they are hiring: certain professional surveys suggest less than 10% consider their new hires well-qualified, and 40% find the newbies as deficit in certain business skills and technical expertise. Just to provide a context, some of the functional skills being referenced (database, systems analysis, and technical architecture) have been addressed by my MIS discipline (generally housed in business schools), while other more machine-oriented technical skills have been covered more specifically in computer science disciplines (e.g., Java programming, operating system/security software, etc.). I haven't taught in nearly 20 years (and to some extent things undoubtedly have evolved since then, just like while I taught, the survey MIS course went from focusing on COBOL assignments to PC applications), and there is some blurring between the disciplines; for example, I did teach COBOL programming as a graduate fellow and once as a professor, but one should realize that COBOL is an acronym: "COmmon Business Oriented Language". There are also some nuances among universities; for example, Illinois State has had an applied computer science department which is/was separate from the business school.
I have to say that my observations aren't necessarily representative of relevant discipline professors and schools nationally, and certainly one could argue the relevance of my comments.
It's not the role of a university to do technical training. Most companies deploy differing technologies (hardware, software, etc.) I'll give a simple example in this regard. When I was on the UWM faculty, the university did not have a business-preferred IBM mainframe environment. The School of Business wanted to reach out to businesses, so the way we approached that was to focus on IBM PC environments. Our students thus did not have exposure to relevant JCL (job control language) skills, and one of the fights I had with the business school was I wanted my students to have exposure to the new COBOL standard, which provided structured programming constructs. At the time, the business school had licensed Microsoft COBOL (and Microsoft did not upgrade their compiler to the 1985 standard, at least by the time I left UWM). I chose a textbook which came with a bundled COBOL-85 compiler on floppy disks. [I had tried to work through Microsoft, but after talking to multiple clueless Microsoft sales personnel whom assured me they had the latest and greatest, I finally got someone to concede there was no imminent upgrade to the 1985 standard.] I was getting heavy pressure from the business school administrators not happy with having spent money on licenses I wasn't going to use, and none of the PC lab assistants were familiar with the new standard. As I've mentioned in recent posts, change is hard, and if you do something innovative, you are going to run into resistance from colleagues, administrators, and students.
When I taught undergraduate database management at UTEP, I ran into a similar resource issue and found a textbook which came bundled with XDB relational database software.
In my case, I had no contacts with local businesses and IT shops, but being naturally interdisciplinary, I had always cast a wide net, and I regularly scanned trade publications. I was always looking at new textbooks, even though it would have been a lot of easier to reuse a textbook and lecture notes. For example, I had always suggested to my undergraduate students to consider one of the major consulting or IT services companies (e.g., IBM, Deloitte, EDS, Perot Systems, etc.) One year when I decided how I was going to teach my graduate student analysis course, I came across a relevant volume from Andersen Consulting, so I chose that. I didn't really get much feedback from the students, but just before I left UWM, I got an unsolicited call from a recently admitted PhD candidate, whom was an IT manager at Wisconsin Bell. He mentioned that he was sorry to hear that I was leaving, because he had heard some good things about my systems analysis class and had been looking forward to taking it.
I mentioned before in this blog that I also got voted down by the senior IT faculty at UWM when I attempted to suggest work experience in the IT area or industry as an optional but recommended consideration for the PhD program. A lot of my interest in documentation and human factors in information technology was inspired by my prior work as a programmer/analyst.
It's difficult to respond to the practitioner criticisms. I don't see a university as being a technical training institute, e.g., preparing a COBOL-85 programmer or training an XDB DBA. I've written an article where I discussed Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives and provided an example instantiated from an IT perspective (e.g., using COBOL); as a professor I was particularly focusing on higher-order skills and abilities. For instance, I wanted students to conceptualize structural program design using the Ryan-McFarland microcomputer COBOL-85 compiler being used to provide hands-on context. I specifically created assignments focusing on key program types, e.g., control break programs. Of course, in a more ideal scenario, I would have a reasonably complex, real world project where students work within a team environment with the milestones and deliverables (not to mention people issues: at UTEP, I had to deal with a headache where the student project lead intentionally locked one of her colleagues out of the system). There are practical problems; for example, in more metropolitan areas where I've taught, I would get a heterogeneous group of students, many of whom have never written a computer program before. I would have some computer science students whom could do my program assignments in less than an hour and business school students whom couldn't do it in 12 hours, literally on the verge of tears.
I don't want to make this commentary a critique of the places where I've taught, and my observations may not be general or relevant, say for a residential college where most students score in the top 10% of their SAT/ACT. But in many universities professors are given a lot of latitude for how to teach a course, and I've worked in departments where my chairman was not an MIS professor. At UTEP, there was this one lecturer whom taught a data structures course without assigning a single computing assignment (and in fact failed to cover basic concepts, like linked lists). I quickly found myself having to restructure the course where 90% of the students didn't know the course prerequisites. Another faculty member knew what was going on (because his students were griping they had to do computer assignments while this teacher's students didn't) but never told me or the chair what was doing on. In some colleges, professors "own" their courses and there is a certain territoriality.
But I sometimes wonder if the managers may also have unrealistic expectations or may be too picky; as a nearly 18-year professional Oracle DBA (and a former senior principal at Oracle Consulting), I will find myself screened out of gigs on a chicken-or-the-egg basis for a specific knowledge/skill, e.g., real application cluster technology.
More Ranting About Public Sector Compensation
If you go to certain websites, you may see the following claims:
The federal sector is growing at its fastest pace in decades. Over the past two years total federal civil service employment has increased 10%, an additional 182,629 workers...The federal government employs approximately 2 million federal workers plus 700,000 Postal workers...Average annual salary for full-time federal government jobs now exceeds $79,197... The average annual federal workers compensation, including pay plus benefits, now exceeds $119,982 compared to just $59,909 for the private sector according to the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis.
I've read synopses of other controversial comparisons including a Center of Excellence for State and Local Excellence study by UWM economists. This one argues that, controlling for a number of factors (age, experience and education), state and local employees make just over 10% less and when you factor in benefits it's about 7% less. Another one based in California argues about 6.4% less salary in the public sector but about 2% higher in total compensation. On the other hand, the BLS survey from late 2009 tells us total compensation for public sector workers is $39.60 to $27.42, roughly 35% higher salaries and 69% higher benefits.
How do we account for the differences? Well, first of all, CATO shows that average government compensation increases have outpaced the private sector for the past 3 decades. Second, the average public sector employee works significantly fewer hours per year (e.g., teachers during the summer months). Third, the typical pension employer contributions paid are less than are needed to shore up deficient pension funds. Fourth, as Andrew Biggs explains, retiree health benefits are not included in BLS statistics being used by the studies in question (and few private sector companies offer them) and depending on the state this amounts to 8 to 12% compensation not being included in these comparisons.
There are a variety of other factors not included in the progressive studies. Let me give an example from my own experience. I've found myself in situations where the clients aren't willing to pay an all-inclusive rate I was making 15 years ago; they feel that in this market they can get it (e.g., given H1B's). The most often asked question I get asked these days has nothing to do with my experience or degrees but whether I am legally authorized to work in this country. (Let's just say when I argue in this blog for robust immigration reform, including expanded visas from India and elsewhere, it's not necessarily from my own self-interest. I'm also not blind to the fact of the game playing some employers make to document they can't find a worker. I could match 16 of 17 criteria they document, and they'll say, of course, wow, that 17th criterion was the most critical one... I remember when I was in Chicago several years back I once put in for a position in Michigan, never heard from the company in question, and when I followed up, these people reported to authorities they had talked to me! So let's just say when I wrote the first segment above, I have a healthy dose of skepticism. I was in a Rockville project meeting of 15 people where I was the only white male.)
Going back to the point, I have made one or 2 attempts in the past (after I left academia) to join the public sector, and it didn't work out. No sour grapes, but the point was that compensation wasn't an issue (in fact compensation was never discussed in the process). You have to look at things like exceptionally low turnover relative to the private sector; if people were being undercompensated in government work, you should expect higher, not lower turnover. That tells you all you need to know about the progressive self-congratulatory studies cited at the beginning of this commentary. I have worked on city, county, state, and federal contracts over the past 18 years, and I can tell you that the best technical people and managers I have worked with are in the private sector.
Political Humor
A woman in New York celebrated her 105th birthday this week by gambling at a casino. It’s a little different than the way she usually gambles — by going to sleep. - Jimmy Fallon
[Feeding the machine, pulling the lever, and watching yourself go deeper and deeper into debt... And that's just a New York Democrat at the voting booth...]
The latest rumor is that Moammar Gadhafi is calling other countries to find a place to live in exile. So far, only Chile has offered to rent out an empty mine. - Jay Leno
[Even the Boy Scouts don't want Qaddafi pitching his tent next to theirs...]
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Bee Gees/Andy Gibb, "An Everlasting Love". Another hit for the youngest Brother Gibb written by big brother Barry and backed by the big brothers.
