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employment, Patrick Michels, placement, Texas Observer, TSTC, TSTC Harlingen, TSTC Marshall, TSTC Waco, TSTC West Texas
Texas Observer reporter Patrick Michels does a great job of discussing both sides of the placement claim issue in this 9/16/2014 article titled “How Do Technical College Grads Fare in the Job Market? It’s Complicated.” For my money, the bottom line in this article is that nobody really knows the percentage of grads who get jobs related to their technical field of study. Here’s a revealing excerpt:
TSTC System Vice Chancellor Eliska Smith is familiar with these sorts of charges. But the truth, she says, is that there’s no systemic way to know which jobs are truly training-related. Unemployment insurance data doesn’t track graduates who leave Texas [and] is prone to broad generalities that could accidentally list a graduate as working outside their field of training.
This is worth repeating: “there’s no systemic way to know which jobs are truly training-related.”
There you have it, sports fans. Keep that statement in mind the next time you hear some gargantuan employment rate or percentage of grads who have jobs. The jobs cranked into those percentages could be just about anywhere doing just about anything.