Ed Board Takes Practical Approach To The Real World New Rules Call For Career Planning Beginning In Eighth Grade

Idaho’s school system needs to recognize that 70 percent of the jobs awaiting graduates don’t require a bachelor’s degree, the president of the state Board of Education said Monday.

“People have obtained a bachelor’s degree, then gone to our technical institutes to get a two-or three-year certificate in order to get a job,” Carole McWilliam told the Legislature’s budget committee.

The reverse statistic also is true, McWilliam said: Seventy percent of Idaho students won’t complete a bachelor’s degree.

“Yet they need post-secondary training in order to achieve success,” she said.

The state board’s “70 percent committee” has been working on ways to address that need. But its first proposal, an education “passport” or scholarship program to encourage undertrained adults to learn job skills, was nixed in Gov. Phil Batt’s proposed budget for next year.

Batt instead directed the state board to work with his new workforce development program, which funds job training tied to attracting businesses to the state.

McWilliam said Monday that the passport was the committee’s first idea, and it will continue to work on the problem.

“For the last 40 years, we’ve said ‘go to college to be successful,”’ she said.

But that’s caused some to pursue college without firm goals, and others to assume that because they don’t intend to go to college, they can just take the minimum that’s required of them and coast by.

With adolescents, McWilliam said, “It doesn’t dawn on them that to get a job, they need skills.”

That’s part of the reason Idaho’s newly revamped rules for public schools, which are being reviewed by the Legislature this session, call for career planning to begin in the eighth grade, with students planning which courses they should take through high school and parents signing off.

“They don’t focus soon enough,” McWilliam said.

Idaho long has encouraged students to go to college, but it’s not cost-effective to offer high-school level courses at universities. Nor should the public foot the bill for students who dabble in college without clear goals or chances of success, she said.

“It comes back to who’s going to pay. We’ve had an open system that everyone was entitled to go and stay as long as they want. If we look at the rest of the world, it’s based on merit.”

She added, “We haven’t had rigorous requirements for entrance into the university system. Maybe we need to look at that.”

McWilliam, who spoke on behalf of the Board of Education, noted that the board trimmed back other areas of its budget in order to propose the $3.3 million education passport program.

“If we’re going to expand training, where’s it going to come from?” McWilliam asked. “Part of it is from higher education.”

Rep. Robert Geddes, R-Preston, co-chairman of the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, asked McWilliam to get the committee a list of the other items the board cut back in favor of the passport program.

Other topics addressed in McWilliam’s presentation to legislators included:

A new board policy, imposed last June, that ties college and university coaches’ salaries to their athletes’ academic success.

All coaches hired since then have been required to submit plans for how they’ll promote the athletes’ academics.

“It’s been interesting to see the kinds of plans that they’ve presented,” McWilliam said.

The board wants to make sure for the young athletes, many of whom will not go on to careers in professional sports, “that there is life after the program.”

By the fall of 1998, students will be able to fill out a common application form for any of Idaho’s colleges or universities, including North Idaho College, and file it either on paper or electronically.

Gov. Phil Batt has proposed $1 million for “salary equity” - bringing Idaho university professors salaries up toward those paid in surrounding states.

McWilliam said some beginning professors make less than public school teachers, and that makes it hard to attract good people.

Sen. Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, was skeptical.

“To the average person out on the street, they can’t identify right now with professors’ salaries,” he said.

, DataTimes