It's the season of what is called "graduation" in Britain and "commencement" in the US (Americans, typically, look forward, not backward). That is: the moment when the year's crop of mature students leave academe for the real world.
Commencement ceremonies tend to be glitzier affairs in the US, with music and star speakers (Maya Angelou and Bill Cosby are the most sought after) who pull in US$10,000 or more for the required valedictory platitudes before a rousing chorus of Land of Hope and Glory, the throwing of mortarboards in the air and the last monster party. I'll offer my platitude for summer 2000 (no charge): "The world is your oyster, but the pearl isn't where it used to be."
For most university teachers, graduation is fire-and-forget time. They have done their job. Education is done; let the employers take over. But thoughtful professors will be conscious that the young people into whom they have put their best efforts are entering a strangely changed employment world. The nature of that change is summed up in two terms that are creeping into general use: salary inversion and salary compression.
The pay scale problem
The first, inversion, is relevant mainly to Miss Brodie's creme de la creme -- students graduating with high honors, particularly in computer science and business studies. This year I shook the hand of a such a student, Eric, as he bade farewell to the California Institute of Technology. A humorous fellow with a country-boy grin and the de rigueur reversed red baseball cap, Eric shone in the computer lab and had good-naturedly done his bit on my English course (a "requisite").
What was he going to do after graduation? He'd had an offer from Bill Gross's IdeaLab (Gross, a 40-year-old Caltech graduate, made his multi-millions by setting himself up as e-commerce's equivalent of a literary agent). That would pull in a salary of US$70,000 or so, he thought. Tempting. But, in fact, he would probably join a friend in New York, set up a lab in a garage, go public, and make his own multi-millions. What then? Well, he gave himself about seven years before his skill base eroded, and younger Erics ran him out of town.
Then he'd come back to the west coast and try his hand at scriptwriting. Or just hang out.
The best and brightest, unlike their predecessors, expect their highest-earning years to be at the beginning, not the end, of their 40-year career. Realistically, there is no such thing as a career any more -- that escalator carrying you from apprenticeship to gold watch and pension. There are just good years in which to strike it rich.
Early years, probably, and very rich, perhaps.
Salary compression is what the majority of lower-flying graduates will confront. It goes like this. You enter a profession and get modest annual increments. Meanwhile, the market is roaring ahead. The boom never ends. To get someone as good as you were five years ago, your employer must offer considerably more than you were offered.
The new recruit gets the going price for their skills. Your salary is meanwhile "compressed" into an earlier pay frame. The result? Disparity, festering discontent and disloyalty.
Politicians not providing solutions
Tony Blair and both of the current American presidential candidates have made education their big idea. Neither government will make progress unless they find some way round the compression problem afflicting that profession.
There is, everyone agrees, a shortage of good teachers in the areas where they are most needed: maths, sciences and -- most urgently -- computer studies. But anyone with even a smattering of such skills can earn more working in Radio Shack than in a classroom. The only solution is to pay the incoming 23-year-old science teacher US$60,000, while the 40-year-old English teacher is stuck at US$34,000. And the fact is, to recruit today's best English teachers, you'll need to offer a substantially higher salary than you did 10 years ago.
This is a bullet that no goverment will bite. Instead, they fiddle with pittance-sized "golden handshakes," or "performance-related" bonuses of US$3,000 as a prelude to decompression by stealth ("new pay scales") in a doomed attempt to square "incentives" with "fairness." In America, the latest wheeze is a five-year tax amnesty for teachers.
In their hearts, both British and American governments know that schools won't work until teachers are paid not the rate, but the rates for the job. Until then, it will be bad education, bad education, bad education. And lots of spin, to stop us noticing.
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