BSN programs and liberal arts: IHE article

[polly_mer]

A pathway to stability is what many people in the US had until recently. 

In the small town, you got a job with the factory, hospital, or k-12 school and you were fine for your entire working life.  It may not have been the best job in the world, but you showed up regularly, played by the rules, and you could have a modest house, food on the table, and free time with family and friends.

That's no longer true in all the dying towns where the main employer has closed, the k-12 schools are dying from lack of enrollment (the second big employer), and the hospital closed (the third big employer in town). 

On one of these threads recently, Wahoo asserted that liberal arts graduates aren't destined to be baristas.  That's particularly true in towns too small to have more than one coffee shop, especially when the one coffee shop is family-owned with only three non-family employees.

The problem in many places is the feeling of always having to hustle and not having enough stable jobs for everyone. 

If the job can be done just as well by a novice with any college degree, then why pay a premium for experience or a specific degree?

If the whole town dies and you don't have knowledge, skills, or experience that are valuable enough for someone to pay you to relocate for a job, what do you do?

[apl68]

Matt Reed has another entry: Why do so many people want to be nurses.

Reed's comment about the demand for a cosmetology program reminds me of a comment my own barber once made:  "Half the little girls in town who don't know what they want to do for a living go to [the local beauty college] to learn to cut hair.  They don't realize how hard it is to open your own shop and build your own clientele."  The market for hair stylists is permanently flooded because there's only room for so many, and yet, such is the lack of imagination among youths looking for a career, there are legions who can't figure out what else to try to be.

A broader education would help this situation somewhat because it would help youths to have enough skills and enough imagination to be aware of a greater number of possibilities.  Girls might be able to think of a career to try for besides cutting hair.  Boys might imagine a future that goes beyond a lifetime of playing video games and getting high.   

Although that still wouldn't solve the problem that polly notes in truly depressed communities where there simply isn't much employment of any kind left.

[marshwiggle]

If the whole town dies and you don't have knowledge, skills, or experience that are valuable enough for someone to pay you to relocate for a job, what do you do?

It's not clear how the economy can be changed to fix this. The jobs that can be done remotely that are lucrative are highly specialized. Jobs that can be automated will eventually. (I don't think there's any point to a Luddite revolution to try and return low-skill manual labour jobs that have been automated; it just can't last.)

Some small communities have managed to carve out unique niches to survive; Elliot Lake was a mining community that rebranded as a retirement community because real estate was very cheap. But, by definition, those have to be unique, so each community has to "work out their own salvation with fear and trembling".

[Wahoo Redux]

A pathway to stability is what many people in the US had until recently. 

In the small town, you got a job with the factory, hospital, or k-12 school and you were fine for your entire working life.  It may not have been the best job in the world, but you showed up regularly, played by the rules, and you could have a modest house, food on the table, and free time with family and friends.

That's no longer true in all the dying towns where the main employer has closed, the k-12 schools are dying from lack of enrollment (the second big employer), and the hospital closed (the third big employer in town). 

On one of these threads recently, Wahoo asserted that liberal arts graduates aren't destined to be baristas.  That's particularly true in towns too small to have more than one coffee shop, especially when the one coffee shop is family-owned with only three non-family employees.

The problem in many places is the feeling of always having to hustle and not having enough stable jobs for everyone. 

If the job can be done just as well by a novice with any college degree, then why pay a premium for experience or a specific degree?

If the whole town dies and you don't have knowledge, skills, or experience that are valuable enough for someone to pay you to relocate for a job, what do you do?

One of the big reasons small towns are dying is because people are getting degrees and leaving.  No one has to be a barista in the family coffee-shop if they can get a job in the big city.

And, for specific communities, losing the small college is going to be further devastation. 

This fella makes the impossible, quixotic argument that we should move government offices and prestigious universities out into the countryside to reinvigorate rural America.

[polly_mer]

Oh, I have no answers for what society can do when we have more people who need good jobs than good jobs to be done.  That's a problem that's been looming and been ignored in many quarters.

That's another annoyance with the original article: the caretaking jobs that will remain unautomated aren't ever going to pay big money in general because there's not enough money in the world for a job that a normal intelligence middleschooler can do with some explicit training.

On preview, the brain drain doesn't help, but there's a big problem with moving to the city and getting paid too little to be middle class as well.

[mythbuster]

As I alluded to up-thread, many people THINK they want to be a nurse (or a doctor, lawyer, vet etc). But they don't have a realistic understanding of what these jobs are.
     When I was in high school, I thought I wanted to be a vet. So I worked at vet's office for several years. What I learned in doing that job is that self-employed small animal vets spend more time worrying about kibble sales than the animals they care for. This experience, as well as several summer internships in research, led me away from the vet school route, and towards research science.
    Prospective students NEED these types of hands on shadowing experiences to give them a sense of what the job is really all about.  Which gets us back to the training capacity of the hospitals.
    Nurse burnout is in part because of lack of understanding of the realities of the job. It's also about the ridiculous patient load the average floor nurse has. If they fixed the patient load, many nurses would stick around longer.

[apl68]

On preview, the brain drain doesn't help, but there's a big problem with moving to the city and getting paid too little to be middle class as well.

That's one reason--besides cultural considerations and a desire to stay near to family and friends--why some people want to live in the smaller places if they can.  Had I stayed in the big city where I began my library career, I'd surely be making more than I am now.  I'd also be paying twice my monthly mortgage payment to live in a one-bedroom apartment.  Or living an hour's commute away to save on housing.  No thank you!

If I moved to New York or LA I'd doubtless be making more still--and very possibly living in my car.

[Wahoo Redux]

If I moved to New York or LA I'd doubtless be making more still--and very possibly living in my car.

There are plenty of places not NY or LA.  We actually have two public librarian friends, both married in two-income couples, living in one mid-sized and one enormous Great American cities.  They both live comfortably in bedroom communities and commute. 

From the article:

Education is a public good. When we treat it as the personnel office of the economy, it's easy to forget that.

As a public good, it is inherently, inescapably, political. That doesn't mean "partisan," necessarily, but it does mean that it both reflects and enacts some collective priorities over others. The term "republic" comes from the Latin res publica, meaning "public thing." A public thing like a community college has to participate in the life of the republic. It can't not. Reducing a public thing to a constellation of private goods is missing its reason to exist. We support education as a duty to the future. We need to rethink the economy for the same reason.

I don't blame students for wanting degrees that lead to good jobs. That makes sense. I blame the rest of us for allowing an economy to make the paths to stability so narrow that the few identifiable pathways to stability get overcrowded.

[polly_mer]

IHE published a letter to the editor regarding disability and nursing programs: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/07/23/fear-and-decision-making-nursing-discipline-letter

I will mark this post of mine opinion since I don't have much additional information.

It seems like the author of the letter is less concerned with ensuring a solid population of highly qualified nurses and more concerned with representation of all checkbox groups.  That seems to ignore the problems of already not having enough resources to go around.  Adding more people who will need additional resources (possibly forever to do the job) doesn't seem to fix the nursing shortage in the community or the problems with not having enough slots in the training programs.

[pgher]

IHE published a letter to the editor regarding disability and nursing programs: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/07/23/fear-and-decision-making-nursing-discipline-letter

I will mark this post of mine opinion since I don't have much additional information.

It seems like the author of the letter is less concerned with ensuring a solid population of highly qualified nurses and more concerned with representation of all checkbox groups.  That seems to ignore the problems of already not having enough resources to go around.  Adding more people who will need additional resources (possibly forever to do the job) doesn't seem to fix the nursing shortage in the community or the problems with not having enough slots in the training programs.

While I can't disagree with what you wrote, we need to be careful about saying there's not enough slots to accommodate different populations. If someone is disabled in a way that prevents them from succeeding in the relevant career, then I'll concede your point. However, we don't allow places with limited parking to not bother with handicapped spots. We no longer allow colleges to exclude Blacks because there aren't enough slots and Blacks require additional resources. (It seems to me that this anonymous author is trying to solve a different problem than either of the other articles addressed. They just saw an opportunity to add to an ongoing discussion, tangential though their point may be.)

[polly_mer]

IHE published a letter to the editor regarding disability and nursing programs: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/07/23/fear-and-decision-making-nursing-discipline-letter

I will mark this post of mine opinion since I don't have much additional information.

It seems like the author of the letter is less concerned with ensuring a solid population of highly qualified nurses and more concerned with representation of all checkbox groups.  That seems to ignore the problems of already not having enough resources to go around.  Adding more people who will need additional resources (possibly forever to do the job) doesn't seem to fix the nursing shortage in the community or the problems with not having enough slots in the training programs.

While I can't disagree with what you wrote, we need to be careful about saying there's not enough slots to accommodate different populations. If someone is disabled in a way that prevents them from succeeding in the relevant career, then I'll concede your point. However, we don't allow places with limited parking to not bother with handicapped spots. We no longer allow colleges to exclude Blacks because there aren't enough slots and Blacks require additional resources. (It seems to me that this anonymous author is trying to solve a different problem than either of the other articles addressed. They just saw an opportunity to add to an ongoing discussion, tangential though their point may be.)

I didn't get from the letter a viewpoint like 'let's be sure we have the educational equivalent of parking slots and ramps'.  I was much more picking up a vibe like 'rah, rah, everyone should get to try and who are you to say that the blind, paraplegic can't be anything they want?'

One of my continued frustrations now is trying to get people to focus on the solutions that will solve the problems (e.g., enough elementary/middleschoolers on track to actually be ready for college so they can successfully major in engineering and related fields) instead of just picking at those who point out the lack of qualified people in the pool who have given checkbox characteristics.

I've spent enough time with really inclusive environments and a variety of workplaces to have a finely tuned BS detector for those who aren't in touch with the reality of reasonable accommodations being different for the classroom parts of school and the day-to-day work place.

Even the parking slots argument doesn't work if the day-to-day job is mostly hiking to the remote parts of the installation where trails cannot be built since the point is the undisturbed wilderness.  Standard test accommodations related to time and quiet seem at odds with most front-line nursing jobs day-to-day,

[marshwiggle]

If someone is disabled in a way that prevents them from succeeding in the relevant career, then I'll concede your point. However, we don't allow places with limited parking to not bother with handicapped spots.

I was sort of thinking this way, but noticed something strange in the article.

Perhaps the most disturbing implication is the marginalization of underrepresented populations, especially students with disabilities. If a supervisor at a clinical site perceives a student's needs to be burdensome, it may impact that person's willingness to accept additional students from the institution. Similarly, accommodations for third-party examinations may be more difficult to control and monitor than accommodations for instructor-developed assessments, leading to fear of a negative impact on pass rates. In dire need of clinical placements and good pass rates, administrators may feel torn between what is right and just for individual students and what will sustain the program.

What struck me about the first highlighted sentence is that the concern of a student's needs being preceived as "burdensome" could lead to unwillingness to hire, not someone with that disability, but someone from that institution. Given the other two highlighted sentences, it occurred to me that the issue may really be grade inflation; specifically, if an institution with low pass rates tries to fudge by labelling lots of students as having "learning disabilities", and then being really generous about "accomodations", their students' weaknesses would show up in clinical evaluations. That would explain why it would deter accepting students from that institution in future.

[polly_mer]

On a different thread recently, people have asserted that resources cannot/should not be diverted to help those who need additional help to succeed in college.

It's true that the word 'Black' does not appear in that post, but the net effect is few people of color who come from low SES get a good college education or indeed any college education.

Diverting college resources to nursing to be checkbox inclusive seems like a bad idea when the goal should be more nurses graduated or more anyone getting a college education by being more inclusive of what college students need to be successful.

[polly_mer]

If someone is disabled in a way that prevents them from succeeding in the relevant career, then I'll concede your point. However, we don't allow places with limited parking to not bother with handicapped spots.

I was sort of thinking this way, but noticed something strange in the article.

Perhaps the most disturbing implication is the marginalization of underrepresented populations, especially students with disabilities. If a supervisor at a clinical site perceives a student's needs to be burdensome, it may impact that person's willingness to accept additional students from the institution. Similarly, accommodations for third-party examinations may be more difficult to control and monitor than accommodations for instructor-developed assessments, leading to fear of a negative impact on pass rates. In dire need of clinical placements and good pass rates, administrators may feel torn between what is right and just for individual students and what will sustain the program.

What struck me about the first highlighted sentence is that the concern of a student's needs being preceived as "burdensome" could lead to unwillingness to hire, not someone with that disability, but someone from that institution. Given the other two highlighted sentences, it occurred to me that the issue may really be grade inflation; specifically, if an institution with low pass rates tries to fudge by labelling lots of students as having "learning disabilities", and then being really generous about "accomodations", their students' weaknesses would show up in clinical evaluations. That would explain why it would deter accepting students from that institution in future.

To keep accreditation, the nursing program must have almost perfect NCLEX pass rates by graduates.

To get graduates, the program must have sufficient clinical slots at local hospitals etc.  Being harder to work with than other nursing programs in the area will mean lower priority for those limited slots.

Being unreasonable regarding the day-to-day accommodations (e.g., on the job) will be a mark against the college program and they won't have the necessary clinicals during the program, let alone the ability to place graduates.

[writingprof]

Reed's comment about the demand for a cosmetology program reminds me of a comment my own barber once made:  "Half the little girls in town who don't know what they want to do for a living go to [the local beauty college] to learn to cut hair.  They don't realize how hard it is to open your own shop and build your own clientele."  The market for hair stylists is permanently flooded because there's only room for so many, and yet, such is the lack of imagination among youths looking for a career, there are legions who can't figure out what else to try to be.

This reminds me of a piece in The New Yorker or Harper's some years ago.  The subject was the permanent-disability system and the extent to which getting on it represented the only life-goal for many of the article's subjects (in eastern Kentucky).  One woman, who was trying to claim permanent-disability because she couldn't stand up all day (to be, e.g., a cashier), was asked to imagine a job that would allow for occasional sitting.  She could only come up with one answer: working at the disability office.

Perhaps education is the answer, but I sometimes wonder if we're asking education to do too much.