Connecting Rural Teenagers with High-Paying Jobs

Kevin Burke, Seva Mandir

The problem

The first step on the economic ladder for most citizens is a job requiring skills slightly more advanced than day labor. For rural villagers, the economic and personal returns on these jobs are quite high; workers may be able to get a high-paying job without having to migrate to Gujarat, for example. Seva Mandir, in partnership with Ajeevika Bureau, offers trainings in areas like plumbing, electrician, auto repair, stitching etc. but take-up for these courses is low.

The goal

The goal is to investigate the reasons why take-up is low, and after a field survey has been completed, to propose solutions or possible training modules to increase take-up among rural teenagers.

Implementation

A)   Get information from Abhay (Seva Mandir employee), members of Ajeevika Bureau (training organization) to estimate the education level, amount of training, job opportunities and pay schedule for various possible jobs like plumbing, auto repair, etc. Research Government of India statistics on the average salary for a worker with no primary education, a worker with primary, secondary, and a high school degree.

B)   Conduct field surveys in 8 villages. The goal is to conduct 15 surveys per day, and 30 surveys per town. Visiting two towns per week will allow us to complete the survey portion of the study in 4 weeks.

C)   Analyze data

D)   Propose solutions/possible randomized experiment

Tentative Hypotheses

1)    Some workers do not sign up because have the required skills to even sign up for a 2 month training course. There is no quick fix for this problem.

2)    Workers are credit constrained; to sign up for trainings they would have to forgo two months worth of wages and possibly pay part of the cost of the training. Loans are one possible solution, although collecting the loans has been tough; there’s no easy source of collateral to secure the loan.

3)    Workers do not properly estimate the returns to education, or the possible salary in a city job. If their internal estimates of future pay are too low, then they would not sign up for training or education that has a high present cost. Fortunately, Trang Nguyen (2008) found a quick solution to this problem; hold a meeting and display the statistics about how much a 25-year old can make in various professions and with various education levels. She used a graphic with bags of rice; no primary education means avg. pay is 3 bags of rice, a primary education means 6, etc. After the intervention the local people estimated the return to education correctly and their test scores improved.

4)    The teenagers possess the skills but have difficulty applying for available jobs, or there are not jobs available.

5)    Workers are not aware of the Seva Mandir training programs.

We will test these hypotheses in the survey, and propose an appropriate course of action.

There’s a good essay in the Atlantic on what makes a great teacher. Teach for America recruits 4,000 new teachers out of college every year and keeps detailed data on which ones succeed and which don’t. This allows them to provide better instruction in the summer cram before they hit the classroom in the fall, and select candidates that are most likely to succeed. This seems like the sort of data that you would expect schools to collect, but because of teachers unions and a lack of competition, most schools and states go out of their way to avoid collecting this sort of data.
The most successful predictor of experience in the classroom is the ability to manage and complete a large project in college. Grade point average (especially in the final two years of college) and “leadership experience” are the two most powerful predictors of classroom success. Teachers that report high life satisfaction and high perseverance – Angela Duckworth’s “grit” – also did well.
Successful teachers are constantly getting feedback, evaluating their teaching style and checking to see if the students are learning. They also expect high performance from their students, and work backwards from that goal to make sure they can get it.
The author misses the somewhat obvious point that these traits are valuable in any profession. This means that schools are competing with other industries for good teachers, who probably have opportunities elsewhere. I don’t know a finance firm that wouldn’t want someone with a good GPA, who demonstrated the ability to manage large projects in college (and is happy with their life to boot). Teaching is an alluring profession, maybe because it’s an easy way to gain high status, at least inside the classroom, where 30 or so kids do as you say (and you can run the classroom however you want). But the pay isn’t great, and schools are not good at compensating teachers for excellent performance, or at retaining talent. Until they devise more effective pay structures (and Race to the Top, President Obama’s $4 billion funding carrot, is helping), great teachers will remain diamonds in the rough.

In school anything you write or do will be read and graded by a teacher paid to do so. In the real world nobody wants to read your shit, and you have to earn their attention every single day.

Last year in a post titled You Have to Make People Give a Shit, I extolled blogging as a way to learn this value.

Teachers can’t just give a 0 to someone because their writing is boring, even though in real life, that’s what happens when you send in a crappy cover letter, and even though the goal of most educational writing is to prepare for real life writing. This means that students don’t really have an incentive to be interesting. When we’re told our writing needs a rewrite, often we just slap a few changes on the old piece, maybe Thesaurus a few words, and send it back in. It’s tough to grasp the concept that no one wants to read your writing, especially when you know the teacher’s going to read it, and you’ve spent the last ten hours writing it; it feels like your baby, even though your feelings about it are better than anyone else’s. And it shows; former college admissions official Michelle Hernandez admitted that 90% of student essays that she read didn’t make an impact.

It’s probably true that teachers give better grades to interesting papers, because after reading 20 boring ones, it must be nice to read a paper that reads smoothly. But this isn’t an explicit part of the grading rubric.

How can we make students’ writing more interesting? Ben recommends blogging, as do I, except it’s a lot of work for many students. The two things that will make anyone’s writing better – read more and write more – require a large time investment. Here are simple changes to the class incentive structure that could work.

Students are too accustomed to writing for an audience of one; get them to practice writing for a wider audience. Turn papers into competitions, where the winning piece gets published on the school’s website, or read aloud to the class, or published in the local newspaper. This could be pretty easy; if you have kids write every day, just set up a class website and post “only interesting pieces” there. Unlike parents and most people in academia, I tend to regard competition as a good thing. One winner out of 20 is about right; think about how many applications employers get vs. how many applicants they end up hiring.

Another alternative is to make a small part of every writing assignment – say, 5 points out of 100 – based on its interestingness. This is a simple exercise; the teacher simply flips through every paper and discards the ones that don’t grab her right away. The ones in the discard pile get a 0 for interestingness.

It’s tough to peel away the layers of hackneyed phrases and tricks that accompany bad writing, to get to the interesting substance. Only recently have I started looking at whole paragraphs and pieces I’ve written and deciding that they need to be entirely rewritten. At the margin, if students spend more time writing (and more time writing interesting things) they will be better off, as will our society.