Month: January 2020

Google IT Certificate Program: Post-Secondary Education Of The Future?

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Google’s certificate programs that it offers at community colleges provide a snapshot of how future corporate-academic cooperation could better match college curricula with needed job skills.

Despite the stock market’s doing well and low unemployment, Millennials are still underperforming relative to previous generations, despite being better educated. No other generation in history has wasted more money and time taking college courses and learning skills that do not translate into earnings.

This owes largely to the fact that universities aren’t teaching students the skills that companies want.

For decades, colleges did their thing, companies did their thing, and students did their thing (made good grades, graduated, got jobs, and moved up the corporate ladder). Before the internet, it mostly worked out because the skills companies demanded in employees didn’t change much from decade to decade.

But unless a student is planning to become a professor, universities are training students to work for otheremployers in an internet world with changing technological demands. Why should universities, taxpayers, and future employees have to foot the entire bill for training conglomerates’ future workers? Corporations too should have some skin in the game in preparing their next generation of employees.

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Why Was England Late To Colonize?

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No nation ever dominated global trade and geopolitics more than Great Britain from the mid 18th century until World War I. But the English, who united with the Scots to form Britain in 1707, arrived late to the scene of colonization. The Age of Discovery—when Western Europeans explored Africa, Asia, and the Americas—began in the early 15th century. The English, however, didn’t establish any permanent colonies until the early 17th century.

The English lawyer John Rastell lamented this development, in the 1510s, in a play he wrote about a failed expedition he took part in toward America. “Oh, what a thing,” he wrote, if “they that be Englishmen” had been the first to “take possession” and “make the first building and habitation” in the New World.

So, what delayed the people who soon created the greatest empire the world has ever known?

Why did they sit back on their island and watch Spain conquer the most advanced peoples in the Americas and take South America’s riches for itself?

Why did they allow the Portuguese to gain the initial footholds in Africa and Asia and only much later wrest some of these regions from them?

To answer these questions, let’s first look at where the English were in their civilizational development when this exploration and colonization began.

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