But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.–Jonah Lehrer

Lehrer’s recent article on the decline effect, where initially strong and robust results shrink over time, has caused quite a stir (see here, here, here, and here).  It’s similar to Freedman’s Atlantic profile of Ioannidis in that it identifies some allegedly deep problems in the structure of science.

As both Lehrer and Freedman note, the fight for funding, the bias against null results, the drive for more publications, a desire for personal glory, and conflicts of interest all make the practice of science quite a bit different from how it’s usually portrayed.  Both, however, also note that there may be something fundamentally amiss here.  These relatively straightforward explanations only go so far.  It appears we can’t quite determine what’s really going on, and Lehrer’s subtitle asks: “Is there something wrong with the scientific method?”

I think it’s important to remember that the scientific method (TSM) was first used to solve what are, conceptually at least, fairly simple questions.  Planetary motion, as beautiful, intricate and awe-inspiring it may be, is solved by high-school students every day before lunch recess.  After all, it’s just giant balls circling each other.  Even quantum mechanics and relativity can be described almost perfectly with existing mathematics, and it’s usually first taught to college sophomores.  Penicillin was discovered in a petri dish, where we can reliably control most variables.  And so on.

None of this is meant to diminish Newton, Einstein and Fleming, or to trivialize their accomplishments.  They were geniuses, and we are forever indebted to them.  But it appears to me that what we consider the canonical scientific accomplishments were often fairly discrete questions.  If you can effectively use mathematics (as you can in much of physics), or if you can control all the relevant variables (physics, molecular biology), the problem is tractable.  But determining the effect of Vitamin E on public health is a different beast altogether.  After all, what we call health is really a combination of traditional medical science, economic status, level of stress, culture, pollution, and who knows what else.  TSM may never be able to disentangle all these effects regardless of how many perfect, unbiased studies we run.  From Freedman’s article:

But even if a study managed to highlight a genuine health connection to some nutrient, you’re unlikely to benefit much from taking more of it, because we consume thousands of nutrients that act together as a sort of network, and changing intake of just one of them is bound to cause ripples throughout the network that are far too complex for these studies to detect, and that may be as likely to harm you as help you.

And so asking what’s wrong with TSM kind of misses the point.  There’s nothing really wrong with it.  It’s that TSM, this crowning achievement of human intellect, the best tool ever developed to investigate the natural world, may just not be as powerful as we want it to be. Even if we disclose conflicts of interest, release all collected data (not just the pretty ones), publish more null results, and quadruple funding, some problems will be beyond our reach. There are ultimately some things in heaven and earth not dreamt of in our philosophies.

I often learn that that ideas I thought were original actually aren’t–someone else got there years or even decades earlier. In 2015 Andy Rotherham chastised education reformers’ shallow definition of diversity, which excludes students who weren’t good at school:

Yet for all the attention to diversity, one perspective remains almost absent from the conversation about American education: The viewpoint of those who weren’t good at school in the first place. Of course there are people in the education world who were not good students, or didn’t like their own schooling experience. But for the most part the education conversation is dominated by people who not only liked being in and around schools, they excelled at academic work. The result is an over-representation of elite schools and elite schooling experiences and little input from those who found educational success later in life or not at all.

My recent post is thus just a few years late.

Andy may not know this, but he has deeply influenced my thinking. When I first started learning policy in my spare time, he graciously responded to my emails and recommended a couple books that changed how I thought about politics. He didn’t have to respond, and I’m still grateful that he did.

And so it is with a bit of chagrin that I criticize these two sentences:

So shuffling poor students into vocational education is seen as good for them on the assumption most won’t be college material anyway. This is seen as admirable realism rather than a kind of prejudice.

I know it can be a bit nit-picky to isolate a couple sentences in an essay I otherwise agreed with. But I think they illustrate how much the academic approach to learning undergirds our thinking.

Even though Andy recognizes that most students are not full time, and that they zig and zag through their education (rather than going straight from kindergarten to a BS at 22 like most yupsters in education reform), and that we need to create more schools that cater to the different ways people learn…he still belittles the idea that moving off the college pathway may be the right move for some. His end goal is still to get people to engage in the academic approach to learning that colleges specialize in. He just wants to create different pathways to get to that goal.

But that’s the wrong goal. College matters now only because we’ve created an economy that often requires it to enter the middle class. We should be fighting this paradigm, not figuring out different ways to strengthen it.

Whether or not they can succeed in college, most people wouldn’t voluntarily choose to sit in a classroom for several hours a day. We shouldn’t force them to suffer through it if it’s not absolutely necessary.

Which again brings me back to the idea of a working track.* Vocational schools are viewed negatively in no small part because they are designed for those who aren’t good at school. The way these things play out in America, that means in practice they’re also designed for the poor.

Such schools would have a very different image if middle-class kids who want to work in sales, marketing or engineering were also attending them. Those are vocational jobs too!

We ultimately need to expand the idea of a vocational school and shuffle even more kids down that path. I fear we won’t really change its image otherwise.

* Testable prediction: Within 3 months, I’ll learn that some professor in Iowa wrote his 1959 dissertation on the working track.

In an over-qualified labor market, employers will fill the “highest” jobs with those who have the “highest” credentials. Since over-schooling means there are too many workers who are highly educated, some of these workers are necessarily allocated to “mid-level” jobs. This process is repeated  for those with mid-level qualifications, where, since there are not enough mid-level jobs, many are forced to compete for low-level jobs. – Quoted in Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education 

An email exchange with Oren Cass made me want to answer a few questions for myself: Why should we even try to reform how college works? Won’t focusing on college detract attention from the “other half” students who most need a vocational path?

I’ve hinted at the answers to these questions in some of my other posts. But, mostly to help me clarify own thinking, I thought I’d try to summarize. In order of decreasing importance, here’s why we should include college in these discussions:

1. Credential inflation: As the quote at the top illustrates, credential inflation will eventually infect all jobs. We’ve already reached the point where file clerks need a college degree. I worry that at some point we’ll require everyone have some college education and there will be no true blue collar jobs left, a situation both Cass and I want to avoid. And so we have to fight the education obsession head on.

2. Higher ed is ignored: I’ve been working through (and enjoying!) Oren Cass’s book. While I find his overall framing and analysis novel, the notion of a vocational track itself isn’t that new.  Presidential candidates routinely call for more of it. But all these essays and public exhortations imply that the academic approach to learning (aka college) is perfectly fine for white collar workers. I disagree. Many college students would benefit from a greater work emphasis, and it’s a neglected line of analysis.

3. Forming a broad coalition: From a purely strategic standpoint, we have a better chance of rethinking education with as broad a coalition as possible. Since most kids in college want a job at the end of the day, it would be politically wise to include them. A work track does a better job on that point, and I suspect it would get more buy-in than a CTE track. I concede, however, that I am making an empirical claim that might be wrong. While my personal bias says a work track would be more effective in helping push the reforms both Cass and I support, it might not be. It’s possible that a large coalition would only detract attention from the CTE students who need the most help.

4. Devaluing the idea that education is intrinsically good: Regardless of whether a work frame is a more effective political strategy, I think it’s important to support it for philosophical reasons. There seems to be this widely held belief that education has some intrinsic worth. Beyond ~10th grade, I’m not sure it does. Work is more valuable for both individuals and society, and that’s what we should collectively promote.

A genuine commitment to [an] inclusive society requires a willingness to shape institutions to that end, even when doing so is for the benefit of others or when it creates tension with other values – Oren Cass

As a conservative who’s written extensively on diversity, I appreciated Cass’s emphasis on creating an inclusive society. In higher education, diversity and inclusion understandably focuses race, gender, sexual identity, etc. It’s common to hear phrases like: “An institution built by and for white, cis-gendered males has to be redesigned if we want it to be welcoming to women, minorities, etc.”

Although I may quibble with how diversity programs are implemented (intellectual and viewpoint diversity should be a bigger component), in general I sympathize with those arguments. I’m married to a professor of engineering, and so I appreciate how corrosive sexism in academia can be.

But at least with gender, many administrators recognize changes need to be made and have some ideas on what to do. Not so with Cass’s “other half”–students who might be better off on a vocational track. They are rarely, if ever, included in diversity dialogues. Unfortunately, they probably won’t be anytime soon.

For all the changes in higher education over the centuries, it still has the same basic premise: the only way students learn is for a professor to teach them in a classroom setting. I call it the academic approach to learning.

Sure now we may have the occasional project-based course, and many professors also do try to use practical case studies in their teaching. And some majors may require a few semesters of work to graduate.  But all of these examples still exist within the paradigm that learning primarily occurs in a classroom. Even majors like engineering or accounting rely on the academic approach.

This approach, needless to say, works best for those who enjoy formal learning, advancing scholarship, and pursuing knowledge for its own sake: i.e., academics. More than a particular race, gender, or sexual orientation, academia was designed by and for academics. The neglect of non-academics is the major inclusivity deficit colleges face.

But meaningfully changing this property would negate colleges’ reason for being and undermine their own existence. If learning can meaningfully happen outside a classroom, then why would we need colleges?

Which is why higher education will never be able to truly welcome vocational students. They almost always need the opposite of what colleges offer–practical experience rather than academic knowledge. Institutions that catered to them wouldn’t look anything like higher education as we know it.

Even stronger, institutions that catered to students who just want a job wouldn’t look anything like higher education as we know it. It’s not just vocational students who are short-changed by the academic approach to learning. The overwhelming majority of students who simply want to work are poorly served by this model.

Which brings me back to the idea of a working, rather than just vocational, track. Almost all students need practical experience over academic knowledge. That’s what we need to be pushing. My next few blog posts will go into a few concrete examples of how the academic approach fails students even in engineering and business.

Oren Cass has a couple essays out that previews arguments he’ll expand on in an upcoming book. He discusses many of the themes I’ve touched on: the purposes of education, skills and job success, education standards, and the fact public education should cater to different types of students.

I sum up Cass’s core argument as: the US education system’s strong bias to college attendance does a profound disservice to the overwhelming majority of students. We thus need a vocational / Career and Technical Education (CTE) track: “We need a pathway to prepare young men and women for productive participation in the labor force that relies less on academics and more on concrete skills and real-world experience.”

As much as I love this point, my main criticism is that Cass doesn’t take this line of reasoning far enough. It’s not just CTE students that need less academics and more concrete skills. All students do. I’ve made similar points myself in the context of science literacy and education.

A separate CTE track doesn’t address the disturbing trend where many white-collar jobs–from receptionists to doctors–require more education than needed. That’s the problem we need to fix–we’re overeducating across the board, not just the kids who ultimately end up as welders or hospital techs.

A vocational-only track will also probably worsen the “cultural imperative to push more people into the college pipeline” because–regardless of pay–the CTE track is where blue-collar workers would end up. And however much my peers praised Geoffrey “All Jobs are Worthwhile” Owens for working at Trader Joe’s, the ugly fact is that we in the educated elite don’t want our children to end up in blue-collar jobs. We’d ensure that CTE never becomes “co-equal.”

So instead of a CTE/college binary, I propose the working track and the college track. The working track would still offer “close partnerships between school systems and employers that get students in the workplace, earning money and industry credentials, while they are still completing their formal education.” But these partnerships and credentials would be for jobs in sales, marketing, engineering, as well as CTE.

Any non-college educational track would enjoy much more support if it included white-collar work and appealed to children with a range of career interests and cognitive abilities. Since people like Cass (and me!) are ultimately talking about overhauling how we think about education, we should aim for as broad a coalition as possible.

I’m going to flesh out this argument over several blog posts. But I’ll basically be expanding on what Cass wrote, and trying to explain why I think almost all jobs ultimately come down to “concrete skills and real-world experience.” That is: most jobs have a very strong vocational component, a fact our educational system should acknowledge.