Critical issues in vocational education: an industrialist's view

American Education, Oct, 1984 by Peter J. Elliman

In Japan I watched a delivery truck arrive at the Datsun plant where it was stopped at the security gate and directed to a loading dock. A foreman immediately unloaded the materials and placed them right on the assembly line. I asked the Japanese foreman how he knew the supplier had shipped the right quantity. He told me he knew because he had asked them to ship that many. I asked him how he knew the quality of the items was satisfactory. He told me it was because he was paying for them. At many GM plants, today, they have eliminated inspectors on the loading docks and are beginning to trust their suppliers.

Another thing Americans can learn from the Japanese is to maximize the potential of people. The goal of an industrialist and the goal of an educator are the same, namely, to maximize the potential of people. The real role of educators is to help their pupils become all that they can be. The potential of some students or workers may not be more than to be a dishwasher, but we must help them to become good dishwashers. Others may have the capacity to become doctors, engineers, astronauts, and bank presidents; similarly it must be our goal to help them become those professionals to the best of their ability.

Business and industry need the maximum that their workers can give, and so they must be careful to avoid stereotyping individuals into traditional roles. Too often, management's predetermined concept of a worker's potential can limit that worker's real contribution. For many years corporate management sought after the man, and not the woman, who held a four-year engineering degree with honors. If a man barely graduated from high school, then he remained a blue-collar worker, presumably incapable of achieving within the corporate structure.

Today, we more fully appreciate the difference between a vocational student and a college graduate. The college graduate dreams of ways to make money, while the vocational student actually makes money for the company. The private sector values the vocational graduate far more than we ever have in the past, and we want to support vocational education and get involved. This is especially true when the question of training costs is examined.

Every time my company loses an employee and hires another, it costs the company ten thousand dollars. This figure represents the estimated average industrial cost for worker turnover. Technicians cost twenty thousand dollars, and managers cost between sixty and seventy thousand dollars. Turnover is a significant cost to industry. In Europe and Japan when you hire workers at age eighteen, they almost assuredly will stay with you until they retire. In America, 60 percent of college students leave their first place of work within two years. The turnover costs involved are astronomical.

We need to be concerned about the quality of vocational education, because 80 percent or more of vocational education students will work for companies like mine. In today's world of work, only about 25 percent of the available jobs require a college education. Yet the colleges and universities keep recruiting and graduating people in fields that are already saturated. Interestingly, in the state of South Carolina, one of the largest groups attending technical colleges is composed of college graduates who cannot find jobs. Universities and higher education serve an important role in America's future; they make an invaluable contribution to the areas of basic research and the professional fields. Without higher education our society would not be nearly as technically advanced and culturally alive. However, higher education is not appropriate for everyone, and here in America many students and parents have been deceived into believing that they must possess a four-year degree to maintain a good standard of living.