THERE'S MORE THAN WORKPLACE DEVELOPMENT. King Banaian reacts to the Conference Board's report on workforce preparation by the high schools and higher education.

As someone said to me after lunch, what kids are missing is the fourth R: the real world. And what employers seem to be doing is hiring college graduates with hopes that they've received that fourth R. And in the real world, one thing you can't have is inflated grading. When we do this, we are kicking down the road the problem with a lack of professionalism and work ethic that's lacking in the high school graduate.

Which, presumably, the high schools could do for everybody rather than relying on the community colleges and the liberal arts faculty to do for some.

Professor Banian goes on to expand on some remarks I made in a different context (my riff on the Conference Board is a variation on one of my usual themes.)

While a "coreless curriculum," as Stephen puts it, is a real problem, what we really want in these students is that work ethic along with the ability to work together, to speak clearly, and to be able to solve problems and think critically.

If there's some other way to deliver that than a classical curriculum centered on the Great Books, I'm fine with that. But good luck finding one.

I'm not sure which collectivity that "we" refers to. That work ethic begins at home (and to some extent it's over-rated: some people can give the impression of being busy and accomplish nothing and some people can sip coffee from 10 am to noon and still produce La Cenerentola and William Tell -- without thinking about the Lone Ranger!) The ability to work together and to speak clearly: begins at home, learned in kindergarten? Solve problems: sometimes that's the application of an algorithm. Critical thinking: define a different kind of problem or ask if there mightn't be a different approach to the situation or make connections among diverse solutions to seemingly unrelated problems. That's where higher education used to come in. According to the dean at Anonymous Community, it still does.

Back at Proprietary U, students frequently asked me why they had to take Gen Ed classes (such as mine). I responded that your technical skill gets you your first job, but your communication skills get you promotions. If we academics don't want the rest of academia to follow the Wal-Mart/Rio Salado model, we need to start making a serious case about the economic value of actual education, taught by actual educators.

To which I add: at a content level worthy of performing at the highest level. I stand to benefit by such an emphasis, as do the students and the employers. Researchers who follow cohorts of college graduates over entire career paths have discovered that holders of so-called practical degrees tend to do a little better at landing those first jobs, but holders of liberal arts degrees are over-represented relative to their proportion of all degrees in the corner offices. Perhaps that makes sense: the practical degree, like a proper high school degree, equips the holder to identify and solve a number of routine problems without having to be walked through every step. The liberal-arts degree equips the holder to grasp the wrinkles and consider the unconventional approach that works because it's analogous to something that happened in a very different setting.

(The "Rio Salado" method focuses on applied problem-solving of the lower order kind. As the dean puts it, "The underlying assumption of the Rio model seems to be that education is training, and nothing more. It can be reduced to standardized modules that anybody can deliver at any time. If education really is just training, then who needs full-time faculty?" To which I must add, why does the military need senior non-commissioned officers? Why does the backshop need an experienced master mechanic?)