Business & Tech

Lt. Gov. at State of the Valley: U.S. Education 'Stuck in Old System,' Needs to Train for More Tech Fields

By Bay City News Service:

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday the United States is not keeping with up with information technology and globalization that are changing the world and higher education in California is failing to prepare students for jobs in technical fields.

"The merger of IT and globalization - more IT, bringing us more globalization, more globalization is bringing us more IT -- is radically changing everything, the way we work, the way we live, changing markets, changing the way we educate, and I would argue, government," Newsom said Friday during his keynote address at the "2014 State of the Valley" conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara.

 But the United States "is stuck in an old system, an old mind set, that has to give way to a new system," Newsom said.

 The annual event, sponsored by non-profit groups Joint Venture Silicon Valley and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, features guest speakers on the status of the technology economy of Silicon Valley, which the two groups define as all of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, Fremont, Union City and Newark in Alameda County and Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz County.

 Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco who was elected state lieutenant governor in 2010, criticized the American education system and California's in particular. He said the state system is too concerned with minor issues such as school class sizes and university professor seniority and tenure.

 He said that a recent study found that the top 15-year-old students in mathematics in the United States were performing at the equivalent of 2.5 years behind children that age in Shanghai, China.

 "Average is over," Newsom said. "You can't continue to do what you've done and get what you got. It's not as if we are collapsing. The world is rising. It's the rise of the rest. It's no more dealing with cheap labor, but cheap genius."

 Even quality schools such as the University of California at Berkeley are offering "the same old pedagogy" of teachers lecturing students while "the world is changing," he said.

 "If you were frozen 100 years ago and you came back," he said. "If you could make it to U.C. Berkeley. Oh boy, you'd feel right at home walking into the theater, into that lecture hall. Nothing has changed."
 Newsom said that a senior vice president for the search engine giant Google told him that he could not "care less" about traditional colleges and that "'GPAs are useless. Fourteen percent of the folk on some of our critical teams never went to college.'"

 "Higher education, give me a break," Newsom said. "We're educating people to unemployability."

 Newsom compared university leaders in California to board members of the now-defunct film camera company Kodak, who used to assume the company would do well indefinitely.

"Just like Kodak, right?" Newsom said. "'We're doing fine.' Meanwhile we are educating people who have no real skills that are relevant to the world they're entered into, into this hyper-connected world."

 "Remember those days of high wage, middle skills? That's what bolstered up our middle class. Those days are over," Newsom said. "You know that. I mean a college degree is like a high school degree now. Big damn deal. It's a must, but it's just the beginning."

 Newsom cited as a positive example the San Francisco firm General Assembly, which offers certification classes in specific tech fields such as software engineering and web design for jobs with Silicon Valley tech businesses. Companies with tech field certification programs like General Assembly "are popping up everywhere" and placing more of their students into jobs "because we ain't conveying the talent from San Jose State and all of these other universities," Newsom said.

 "We're not getting people trained in the skills they need," he said. "There is complete disconnect between the business community and higher education."

 "I love the U.C. system. I want it to thrive. But we're playing on the margins. We've got to be more efficient," he said.

Copyright © 2014 by Bay City News, Inc. -- Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.


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