Overeducation: A Tough Nut to Crack

It's a bizarre concept. At a time when there is almost universal agreement on the importance of education, both for individual well-being and for national economic prosperity, how on earth can we think of people as overeducated? To compete successfully in the global economy nations must provide high quality goods and services, produced by a highly-skilled workforce. To survive in today's knowledge-based society, an individual must be well-educated, and capable of continually updating his or her skills in a process of lifelong learning. For more than a decade, the complaint in Britain has been of insufficient investment in education and training. So how could anyone argue we are investing too much? Of course they're not--or at least not in the way you might think. But there is an argument for saying that "overeducation" is a serious problem in the UK, and that this phenomenon should lead to a reassessment of the way resources are used for education and training.

Is overeducation a real problem?
As most people know, there's been a rapid and sharp increase in the provision of higher education in Britain.
Table 1 shows that in 1997 3 percent of the working-age population had a higher degree, more than double the proportion 12 years earlier; over the same period the proportion of people with a first degree went up by almost half. Yet there has also been an increase in the number of people who are overeducated, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s.

How much is too much? This is from Fathom, which makes it difficult to point to. The original appeared in CentrePiece, The Magazine of Economic Performance.

posted by jay cross on 9:43 AM | link

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Thursday, October 18, 2001

Images in Practice - introduction

posted by jay cross on 9:50 PM | link

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bauhaus-archiv museum of design

posted by jay cross on 5:24 PM | link

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LiNE Zine Fall 2001 - Communicating Meaning by Nate Burgos

In his book Art is Work, the graphic designer Milton Glaser states, “The act of drawing has nothing to do with being an illustrator. We draw because it enables us to see.... Drawing is the path to observation and attentiveness.” The key phrase here is “to see.” How many times have you encountered something like this? You are involved in a meeting and you have difficulty absorbing what the meeting leader is actually saying. At the end, someone asks, “Did you understand?” Your body language may say, “yes” with a hesitant dipping of the chin, but your mind nods left to right and right to left realizing you didn’t understand at all. If you could only see what was being said. If you could only see the criteria being addressed. If you could only see the ideas being relayed.

Drawing allows you to see and provides a tactile relationship between subject and interpreter. Drawing can be described as making adjectives of nouns (data). Drawing toggles between what is and what can be. With a few quick strokes, you can capture multiple views of a concept and crystallize possible solutions. Drawing is conversation of minds over matter: you can see what is being thought and said

posted by jay cross on 5:21 PM | link

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Saturday, October 13, 2001

History of Education and Childhood -- legenda what is the meaning of all those icons used in this site?

This is an interesting collection of navigational icons on a Dutch site on the History of Childhood and Education.

posted by jay cross on 8:09 PM | link

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Sunday, October 07, 2001

Our eyes are only glass windows; we see with our imagination
William Gilpin (1792)

posted by jay cross on 1:42 PM | link

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Web designers should know better. The whole idea behind HTML was its universality. HTML should be environment-agnostic.

Many of the people who design websites had a problem with this. They prefer control to interoperability. In the early days, the David Siegels of the world used "single-pixel" gifs, images of text in lieu of the characters themselves, and other sleight of hand to try to grab back the level of control graphic designers exercise over printed material. Siegel told us that Creating Killer Websites meant mimicing books. Siegel named his company "Verso," which means left-hand page, a decidedly print-based term.

As presentation on the web matures, designers returned to purity of form. Better that pages be usable on screens large and small than look fantastic on one size of screen and crappy on others.

And then along came Cascading Style Sheets. I like being able to specify fonts and colors and what-not in one place rather than throughout a site. But I HATE sites that specify absolute font sizes. Why does a designer presume that I want to read fly-spec type or gigantic letters? Font size should be relative. Otherwise, a webpage is not user-friendly.

I like to sit about a yard from my monitor. This position leaves real estate on the front of my desk for papers, makes it easy to look at the redwood trees through the window, and keeps my brain out of the reach of radiation. That's my privilege. And when View/Text Size/Large is deactivated because the person creating the page I'm trying to view, the word "jerk" springs into my mind.

posted by jay cross on 12:23 PM | link

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Saturday, October 06, 2001

Nooface: In Search of the Post-PC Interface

posted by jay cross on 1:50 PM | link

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Visualize Lower Manhattan

posted by jay cross on 10:56 AM | link

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