After Admission: From College Access to College Success

CHAPTER TEN. TO TEACH OR NOT TO TEACH “SOCIAL SKILLS”?

201 CHAPTER TEN TO TEACH OR NOT TO TEACH “SOCIAL SKILLS”? Along with institutional procedures, instructional activities are also part of the equation in fostering student success. The first part of this book describes ways that college procedures help students during college, and the second half describes ways that college procedures can enhance graduates’ transition to employment. However, labor market success does not depend solely on institutional charters and employer links. Students also need subtle soft skills to find, secure, and maintain jobs. Traditional college procedures assume that college students already possess such skills, yet many two-year college students come from disadvantaged backgrounds and often have not been exposed to the behavioral codes and social cues necessary to succeed in the professional world. Besides helping students to catch up academically, colleges can also help many students catch up socially, providing them with direct guidance about how to dress, speak, and interact in job interviews and in the professional workplace. In many cases, if colleges do not provide this soft-skill training, the benefits of the academic education that they offer may be lost in the labor market. Here we explore the mandatory teaching of professional social skills, a different form of college procedure that can help two-year college students overcome culturally specific professional barriers and achieve their goals. We find that community colleges assume that students possess, or are aware of, the kind of professional social skills that employers expect, whereas occupational college procedures provide mandatory training in such skills. These institutional procedures represent a dimension of instruction particularly relevant to colleges’ occupational programs, in which students are explicitly trained for a specific role in the labor market. Given the overwhelming evidence that employers strongly emphasize social skills (Baxter and Young 1982; Cappelli 1992; Cappelli and Rogovsky 1993; U.S. Census Bureau 1994; Murnane and Levy 1996; Rosenbaum 2001; SCANS 1991), it is unfortunate that research has not examined if and how social skills are handled in schools and colleges. It is imperative that research attend to these issues. These results are not intended to be definitive, but instead to provide initial findings on the topic and contribute to further research. THE NEED FOR SOFT-SKILL TRAINING Many of the students we interviewed reported that the soft-skill training gleaned through college courses and experiences was essential in preparing them for the labor market. Ron Gonzalez is one such student. In high school, Ron was a gang member and a “hip-hop b-boy.” He gave schoolwork little attention, took six years to finish high school, and was a few feet away from getting shot, or as he says, “popped,” by gun fire from an opposing gang in his neighborhood. One of his closest friends did not survive the attack. Ron’s father works as a supervisor at a factory. Ron explained that the pay is decent, but you look at the workers though, and it’s a hot-ass factory. I mean, I work there in the summertime and it’s hell. . . . All the kids that like drop out go work over there, you know. They go there to work, and this is like a nasty job. That’s why I decided, nah . . . they’re working there, you know, but not me. If I get my degree, I’ll be just at my computer doing my stuff, . . . No sweat. I’m in my own chair, you know. Nobody to scream at you. At his family’s urging, Ron was just about to join the Navy when he decided to use his artistic graffiti skills and apply them to a two-year degree in information technology with a specialization in web design. However, his style of clothing, “G-clothes”—dickies, bandanas, hair nets, goggles and Adidas—clashed with the dress code at the occupational college he had decided to attend. “A lot of these were typical styles, you know that I was around. In my school, everyone was a b-boy, and in the streets.” He described the transition to what he calls “casual 24-7” as a “big time . . . dramatic change.” He actually felt extremely uncomfortable at first. Wear202 After Admission ing collared shirts and slacks was so foreign to him that he thought he looked “stupid” dressed in them on the first day of college: So you know what’s kinda cool? The first day I came to school I felt like uncomfortable, you...