Gainful employment is the challenge for all of us

A new report on the future of work concludes, "In the eyes of many students and their parents, higher education is tied to a job.  And yet the world of work is poised to undergo a number of dramatic changes over the next 10 years.  This report explores the future job market, reinventing college career services, and higher education's role in the workforce."

For many recent college graduates --- not to mention their less fortunate contemporaries who haven't attended college --- the future is now... no need to look out to the next decade.   For example, unless and until America joins the rest of the Western world in providing a single-payer healthcare system, our younger generations by and large will continue to pay through the nose for second rate coverage or do without altogether.  This is true of employees and freelancers alike.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published a series of stories recently regarding the limits of what colleges are able to do for our young people.  One story points out that in the heart of Trump country, poverty, addiction and low expectations work against the efforts of local community and four-year colleges.  Another notes that in Michigan's car-manufacturing region, high school grads today earn less than their fathers and grandfathers.  It goes on to say that the Obama Administration bet heavily on community colleges to retrain these young workers.  The auto industry itself has been bailed out time and again by Uncle Sam.  But outcomes so far have been mixed at best.  Yet another story notes similar efforts by community colleges in coal country, also with mixed results.

The overall message seems to be that we in higher ed are in an uphill fight to turn the tide that has swamped many workers' boats.

I just sent off to my publisher the manuscript for what will be my 21st book (full disclosure: two were self-published on Amazon), titled Riding the Fifth Wave: A Survival Guide to the New Normal in High Education.  (Yeh, it's the same as the name of this Blog.)  In it, as the title suggests, I analyze the paradigm shift that has occurred in our industry and I offer some suggestions on how to ride the wave to the shores of success instead of drowning in the tsunami of change.

Our survival and our success in large part depend upon how successful we make our students.  As the new report and the three stories cited above demonstrate, the "Fifth Wave" isn't threatening to drown only unprepared colleges and universities.  It is threatening to wash away the American middle class and sweep our younger generations back to the economic conditions of the first half of the 20th century.