Your objection is perfectly justified. By any conceivable measure, younger Americans have more cognitive skills than older Americans. As it turns out, the much debated National Adult Literacy Survey itself shows that older Americans have lower scores than younger Americans, even after controlling for educational attainment:
<blockquote>Contrary to popular impression, age is negatively associated with test scores even for those under 65, lending no support to the idea that younger Americans have poorer literacy skills than older ones. Those age 55-64, who would have graduated high school in the reputed golden years of American education (1946-1955), clearly have lower scores than more recent cohorts, who supposedly bear the effects of less rigorous schooling. Many fewer in the older group actually finished high school but a significant gap remains even after controlling for educational attainment (Smith 1995:214; Freeman & Schettkat 2001; cf. OECD & Stat. Can. 2000:147f.). The NALS data provide no evidence that more recent cohorts have lower cognitive skills than older cohorts. (Michael J. Handel, "Skills Mismatch in the Labor Market," <http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~mhandel/ars.pdf>, December 2002, p. 17)</blockquote>
Michael Dawson MDawson at pdx.edu, Fri Mar 4 10:25:37 PST 2005:
>If we were to list the Top Ten Myths About Life In America, wouldn't
>this whole "educational attainment ---> employment patterns" be one
>of them? The truth is "employment patterns ---> educational
>provision," right? 25% of U.S. jobs require something like what a
>decent society would consider a basic high school level of literacy
>and critical thinking. Ergo, lo and behold!, roughly that
>percentage of the population possesses that package or better.
Pretty close, but the reality is even worse than your functionalist hypothesis of "employment patterns -> educational provision." As I mentioned above, younger Americans are, in truth, smarter than older generations of Americans, but, against all evidence, the ruling class and their ideologues keep putting forward baseless propositions that education today is worse than education in the past, that younger Americans are dumber than older ones, that skill levels of workers, especially young ones, are lower than what jobs demand, and so on.
In the 1970s, when workers were on the offensive on the class struggle as well as social movement fronts, the power elite in fact fretted that workers were overeducated and overskilled relative to available jobs, bleeding discontent due to relative deprivation: "A prominent government report considered the dilemma of how to make work more satisfying when job complexity at all levels seemed to fall short of workers' rising education levels and aspirations for meaningful work (US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare 1973)" (Handel, p. 3).
Since then, workers' educational attainment has risen, and their cognitive skills have improved, as measured by not only the National Adult Literacy Survey (see above) but a battery of other tests:
<blockquote>Taking education as the measure suggests that the workforce is considerably more skilled than in the past. In 1964, prior to the perceived deterioration of public education, the share of all Americans who were high school dropouts was 47% and the proportion of young people age 24-29 with less than high school was 31%, compared to roughly 13% for both groups in 1997 (author's calculations, March Current Population Survey). . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
IQ tests show large gains for Americans throughout this century, including every postwar decade for samples as recent as 1995, the most current, and there is no obvious recent change in the slope of growth (Flynn 1998: 27,35ff.). . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
One of the most frequently cited are college entrance exams, such as the SAT, whose decline beginning in the mid-1960s initiated the recent concern over the state of public education in the U.S. However, less widely reported is that math SAT scores started rising around 1980 and exceeded 1971 levels by the mid-1990s, despite the growing share of high school students taking the exam, though verbal scores did not recover, while the pattern for the rival American College Test (ACT) shows English scores exceeding earlier levels while the rebound in math did not fully offset the earlier decline (Economic Report of the President 2000:148; Boesel & Fredland 1999:72). Contrary to popular impression, the SAT and ACT test score declines are highly cohort-specific and ceased or reversed long ago.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The best time series of inter-cohort data is the U.S. Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), sometimes called the Nation's Report Card, which has a continuous series of reading and math scores for representative samples of 17-year olds since the early 1970s; the test instrument has remained roughly the same over this time. Reading scores did not change significantly between 1971-1999, in contrast to SAT scores. Math scores dipped about 2% between 1973-1982 and then rose until reaching a level in 1999 about 1% higher than 1973 (Campbell et al 2000). Overall test score inequality for both math and reading also declined since the 1970s, due mostly to gains at the lower percentiles, contradicting the impression that the lower part of the distribution is losing ground (Campbell et al 2000:9ff.). Black math and reading scores rose and closed roughly one-half of the black white gap during the 1980s, also contradicting popular impressions, before losing some ground in the 1990s, a development that is still poorly understood (Campbell et al 2000:36ff.). (Handel, pp. 11-14)</blockquote>
Moreover, the supply of college graduates is larger than jobs that require college education (the requirement that is due more to credentialism than to actual skill demands of the jobs or actual skills supplied by college education):
<blockquote>Hecker (1992:4) found that the percentage of college grads in occupations not requiring a college degree or unemployed rose from about 12% (1967) to 18.6% (1980) during the "over-education" years, and continued to rise modestly to 19.9% during the years of ostensible shortage (1990).1 Further, the supply of college graduates grew 62 percent between 1979-90, while employment in managerial, professional, technical, and high skilled detailed occupations in other broad occupational categories grew only 57 percent (Hecker 1992:7). (Handel, p. 37)</blockquote>
Given that the rises in workers' educational attainment (even producing an oversupply of college graduates) and test scores took place at the same time as the proportion of well-paying manufacturing jobs contracted and that of poorly-paying service jobs expanded in the US economy, one would think that the question of "how to make work more satisfying" is more urgent than in the 1970s.
But technocrats self-servingly responded by expounding the "skills mismatch" theory, claiming that workers' skill levels fall short of the demand of the job market. Evidence, however, does not support the "skills mismatch" theory at all: "Sum (1999) and Barton (2000:15,19) replace DOT measures of occupational skills with mean NALS scores and find job literacy requirements almost completely unchanged over the periods 1990-2005 and 1986-2006, respectively, based on BLS occupational data and projections for the terminal years" (Handel, p. 27). -- Yoshie
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