Recessions such as the current one have always encouraged people to think about education, whether traditional or trade, and that always bring out the sharks—especially when federal money is involved.

“At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service,… tuition that can exceed $30,000 a year.”

They borrow to pay it because they are sold the idea that there is a job at the end of the tunnel; too often the jobs don’t materialize, but the debt is all too real.

Even worse are the promises made by for-profit colleges to the tens of thousands of young Americans who serve in our armed forces.

The five largest provide classes online and charge $250 a credit (as opposed to $50 a credit at local colleges on bases), which allows them to receive the maximum reimbursed by U.S. taxpayers…

Taxpayers picked up $474 million for college tuition for 400,000 active-duty personnel in the year ended Sept. 30, 2008, more than triple the spending a decade earlier… degrees from any accredited college provide a boost toward military promotion, credentials from online, for-profit schools can be less helpful in getting civilian jobs, especially in a tight labor market.

But this is America, land of opportunity and if they are anything the for-profit colleges are focused on opportunity.

With Congress and the Defense Dept. making noises the colleges followed a tried and true path of other for profit companies—when you can’t do it in-house acquire it from outside. So they are buying smaller, weaker colleges and, presto, instant accreditation.

ITT Educational Services didn’t pay $20.8 million for debt-ridden Daniel Webster College in June just to acquire its red-brick campus, 1,200 students, or computer science and aviation training programs. …the Nashua (N.H.) college’s “most attractive” feature was its regional accreditation… Regional accreditation, the same gold standard of academic quality enjoyed by Harvard, is a way to increase enrollment and tap into the more than $100 billion the federal government pays out annually in financial aid.

Make no mistake, this is our problem, yours and mine, and it doesn’t matter what your politics are.

These are the people who will form the bedrock of the US workforce in the coming decades; who are struggling to improve their lives or who have given up years building their own career and spent those years protecting yours.

They deserve better than an apathetic public or lobbied Congress that turn a blind eye or timid efforts as education funds are plundered so a few can gain wealth on the backs of America’s talent.

Next week we’ll take a look at another source of lost talent. Please join me.

Image credit: Alan Cordova on flickr

Most of you know that I write a feature every Thursday called Leadership’s Future; it’s the outgrowth of articles written by CandidProf, who guested regularly last year, and is written around education, kids, parents and Millennials.

The trouble is that I find far more articles than I can write about, so today I’m giving you links to the best of them. I hope you take the small amount of time necessary to click through and read them, because they are important to y/our future.

First is a question that has been asked for decades and still has no real agreement. Do advanced degrees in education make for a better teacher or just a higher paycheck? But below the surface of this question lurks a larger problem—what happens when the schools conferring the degree has a second rate, or worse, program?

Next is an article about “effortful control” in toddlers and the value of guilt, or what the kids call “a sinking feeling in the tummy,” with a link to the actual study. The researcher also spells out the substantial difference between guilt, doing something bad, and shame, being a bad person—guilt is productive, shame is destructive.

Third is Boston Public Schools has reinstituted their Parent Academy after killing it earlier this year in the midst of budget cuts. Call it a parent engagement project and they are sweeping the country. The one in Boston cost between $50-100K, a cheap price for getting parents actively and positively involved in their kids education.

Last is an update on an article that CandidProf wrote last year regarding the dismal graduation statistics resulting from tying funding to college recruiting. Now the results are starting to show. “The United States does a good job enrolling teenagers in college, but only half of students who enroll end up with a bachelor’s degree.” Only Italy has a worse record; pretty sad. Be sure to read the comments for a number of interesting views.

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Today’s quotes are a sampling of comments I found in Business Week’s profiles of CEOs Of Tomorrow. Take a moment and click through the whole series, I think you’ll find it interesting.

“Numbers tell only part of the story. People get things done.” –John S. Watson, Vice-Chairman, Chevron

“It’s important to have fun as a team. When it is time to hop in the pine box, you’ll wish you had high-fived more people and taken more risks.” –Tim Armstrong, Chairman and CEO, AOL

“Revenue is important, but customer satisfaction is even more crucial. I’ve always believed that it’s not just what you do but how you do it that’s important.” –Natarajan Chandrasekaran, Chief Operating Officer, Tata Consultancy Services

“We have a company we believe absolutely has to be the fastest-growing-and you have to take some chances to grow faster than everyone else.” –John C. Compton, Americas Foods division, PepsiCo CEO

“Act with urgency; keep things simple; it’s all about the execution.” –Jeff Henderson, Chief Financial Officer, Cardinal Health

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By Wes Ball. Wes is a strategic innovation consultant and author of The Alpha Factor – a revolutionary new look at what really creates market dominance and self-sustaining success (Westlyn Publishing, 2008) and writes for Leadership turn every Tuesday. See all his posts here. Wes can be reached at www.ballgroup.com.Building future leaders takes creative nurturing, because leaders are both born AND made.  It’s up to us to do the “making” part.

There is a lot of failure on the track to leadership competence.  It’s doubtful any of the leaders I know could have gotten there, if they had not been nurtured through failure.  Even so-called “natural” leaders that have the combination of dominant and influencing personality styles need nurturing to make them successful.

A couple of weeks ago, CandidProf (guest blogger every Thursday) made note of the 2008-2009 standards for grading policy of the Dallas School District.  He expressed some concern about the fact that, in an effort to reduce the high school dropout rate, this school district mandated that teachers give students multiple chances to pass tests, not give any student a “zero” score for any test or assignment (no matter what they did or did not do), and accept overdue assignments with no or minimal penalty.

While the policy seems like an easy one to condemn and seems to embody all the laziness and attitudes of entitlement we see in young persons applying for jobs these days, there are some interesting aspects of this that have application in business leadership development.  Many persons have complained that this kind of approach to education in no way mirrors what those students might encounter in the working world.  The reality, however, is that good management that has as its objective to develop strong leaders does use similar techniques.

The problem may be not so much in the policy itself, but rather in the lack of accountability that this approach seems to provide.  I would go further and say that the real problem is that students are not given any vision for why they need to learn what is being taught.  Every person needs to understand why they must do something painful — and learning can be very painful for children without a proper vision for the future.  Employees also need that kind of vision-casting.   Without a clear vision for why they are required to work harder and learn more, most people will resist.

Every leader I know has been nurtured by a mentor.  Every one has been given the opportunity to fail along with support to understand how to succeed. Everyone has been given the opportunity to make mistakes within defined boundaries, because learning happens best in such an environment.

Within my own company, I made a point of creating mentoring relationships with and among employees.  I continually created opportunities for employees to learn through failure while providing a “safety net” that meant they knew they would not be fired for failure, except in certain areas of behavior or where there was a clear indication that they were not capable of doing the job needed.  They certainly were not put in a position where a failure could irreversibly harm the company, because that would have been bad leadership.  But they were given the chance to experiment with making decisions and even making recommendations to our customers where appropriate to the level that they had proven themselves capable.

I was extremely successful in taking persons with little or no experience and making them not only highly-skilled in the difficult and somewhat obtuse business of strategic innovation consulting, but also capable of leadership of others.  In fact, I discovered that it was far better for me to develop an inexperienced but motivated and qualified person into a leadership role over time than it ever was to hire a person already experienced through another company.  It was far too painful trying to overcome the bad learning that the experienced person had gained somewhere else.

The secret to nurturing and developing these future leaders was simple in concept:

• Give them a vision of what the future could look like for them.
• Give them an “identity” as being part of a great organization that is doing something of real value.
• Give them the basic skills and relational training they needed.
• Provide them with “safe” ways to fail, followed by nurturing learning as to how to succeed next time.
• Encourage them in failure and success.
• Let them grow as quickly as they can take it, always supported by continuing encouragement, nurturing, and training.
• Give them public praise when they have proven themselves of real leadership value.

The results were a highly motivated team that was (by measurements common to our industry) about twice as efficient as the average per salary dollar invested.  They also were a cohesive team that liked each other and liked working there.  And we were able to gain the kinds of clients that even much larger competitors only dreamed of getting.  The biggest problems we had were from experienced persons who thought they should be given the chance to “lead” before they even understood what our company was all about.

So, if you want to develop strong future leaders (or just good employees), I would say the Dallas schools idea is not a bad one; it just requires strong vision-casting, nurturing, and encouragement to make it work.  

What do you think?

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