In her new book, "Bait and Switch", Barbara Ehrenreich puts forth the theory that, since there are more female college graduates these days and since they are scoring higher on tests and grades, they should be in the higher positions in US corporate life. To her consternation, however, the male college goof-offs are still populating the higher reaches of corporate life. Why? Is this fair?
Ehrenreich likes to accept certain parts of American mythology and then cry foul when this contradicts another tenet of American mythology forgetting that it's all only mythology anyway and maybe her time could be better spent debunking the myths and giving people sound career advice instead of complaining about how irrational it is that the myths aren't consistent. Myth #1: The more highly performing a person is in college, the better in terms of position and earnings that person will do in real life. This is a bunch of BS put forth by the educational system to insure that they have a steady flow of customers lusting after college degrees. The educational system myth would have you believe that the key to success is success in learning a bunch of technical crap that's in high demand by corporate employers. The reality is that people who are just good technically are at the bottom of the corporate totem pole. What they would not have you believe and what the truth is is that a good salesman in whatever field is worth ten times what a good technical person is any day because they are the people who actually bring home the corporate bacon and these skills you don't learn in school unless you learn them by goofing off and developing social as opposed to intellectual skills. 
I worked in the military-industrial complex for 15 years so my experience is limited to that area but the same principal applied. At the Navy research lab where I worked, I noticed that there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the projects, the departments, how they were organized or anything else. That's because the single most important organizing principle was that a department was only as successful as the department head's ability to pry money loose from Congress or the Pentagon. That is to say each department head was essentially a lobbyist who spent most of his time in Washington, DC tapping Congressional pots and selling them a bill of goods about whatever they could in order to bring money into their department and hence into the lab.
This would explain why the Antenna Department, whose technology was well established 50 years ago, had more workers and a larger departmental budget than the Microelectronics Department, a department whose field of endeavor was a current hotbed. The simple explanation is that the Antenna Department head was a better salesman than the Microelectronics Department head was. That was all there was to it. That was simply the main organizing principle. It had nothing to do with the needs of the Navy, the needs of defending America or anything else. It had simply to do with who could successfully sell Congressmen and other Pentagon types who were sitting on pots of money to part with that money. That's the way the system worked. The Department head didn't need a PhD from Cal Tech or MIT. He needed salesman skills which he would more probably have learned at the local bar rather than in calculus class.
The MIT and Cal Tech types would be just the worker bees at the bottom of the corporate totem pole. Of course, in Barbara Ehrenreich's world she thinks that just because men are at the top of the corporate totem pole and not nerdy women this proves prejudice and discrimination toward women. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that women who have barely the least in educational credentials but who do have great faces, bodies and/or personalities will have a far better chance of ascending to the higher, more rarified spheres of corporate life. So you see, Barbara, it's not quite as unfair as you try to lead people to believe. It's just that the mythology is false.
In the military-industrial complex, the lowest level is occupied by those who only do technical work. Then you have many levels of middle management all progressively at higher GS levels (in civil service) until you get to the department head who is at the highest GS level because he brings in the most money. The dirty little secret is that all the engineering, math and other hard technical subjects you studied in college only position you to be the lowest paid workers in the complex who are doing essentially the crap work, most of it make work with hardly any real life consequences other than to produce some bogus report that some Congressman's intern might look at approvingly so the next round of funding can continue. As far as making the US a safer place, you've got to be kidding. As far as those who do well in college being in the upper echelons, that's a joke.
When I was in college studying to be an Electrical Engineer at Georgia Tech, in one of the advanced electronics courses I had a professor who proclaimed, "Every Electrical Engineer should know how to work a Thyratron problem!" You knew there would be one on the final which I worked correctly. They only cared if you put the right number in the box. It didn't matter if you had the right approach but made a little mistake. No credit for that! This was hardball, baby. The real world. No hand holding! If you had the right number, you got full credit. If you were off by one decimal, you got zilch. Needless to say, I went forward with full confidence that I could tackle any Thyratron problem in the real world that I was asked to do. I was ready to apply my engineering skills that I had worked so hard to acquire. Only problem was, not only was I never asked to do a Thyratron problem in the corporate world, I was never even asked to do a circuit design problem of any sort.
The truth is that most engineers in the military-industrial complex are nothing more than contract monitors or liasons who travel a lot. Any serious work that needs to be done is sub-contracted out to Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) which is an adjunct to Cal Tech or Lincoln Labs which is an adjunct to MIT where they have a lot of really top notch PhDs who are ready and able to do the highest level technical work. The BSs and MSs who populate the military-industrial complex, whether in the civil service or in the corporations (I have worked for both), will seldom get a chance to do anything of any meaningful technical value for which they were trained, but will instead continue to receive what amounts to middle class social welfare for the rest of their life. Their life consists of a mixture of meaningless work combined with boredom. Those who want to climb the corporate ladder go into management and get out of technical work at the earliest opportunity. Those with budding salesmanship skills (for which they've had no training except at the local bar) can move on up the ladder.
This makes Myth #1 - that you will do better in life if you did better in school - a total farce, one for which Barbara Ehrenreich totally falls. Myth #2: If there weren't a "glass ceiling," women who did well in college would do better in corporate life than men who didn't do well in college. The reality: Nerdy women won't get any farther in corporate life than nerdy men. Women with social skills who are good looking but with a bare minimum of credentials will ascend to the top echelons of corporate life just as men with similar attributes do. The key thing is salesmanship or saleswomanship skills. Physical appearance and personality combined with an ability to be persuasive and convincing are key elements for both men and women.
Consider another field. Who do you think makes more money: a good car mechanic or a good car salesman? The answer should be obvious. But do they teach you to be a salesman in school. I don't think so. Instead they teach you mechanistic, technical skills because those skills are easier to measure. Imagine a final exam in which the highest score is obtained by the student who manages to sell the professor a bill of goods?
Take another field: the law. The most money is made by defense lawyers who manage to get guilty, wealthy clients off. What are his or her skills? The ability to "sell" the jury on his client's innocence even if he knows his own client is guilty. These are literally salesmanship skills - the ability to be persuasive, the ability to be convincing. The same could be said for prosecutors who manage to convince a jury that an innocent person is guilty. It works both ways and has nothing to do with establishing the truth of the matter. It has everything to do with the relatve salesmanship skills of the attorneys involved. Those who have a better track record can command a higher price. Those who can't manage to get their clients off become public defenders.
Barbara is right that there are many "throw-away" workers who have gone to college and done everything right only to find themselves in the position of not being able to get a job in their chosen fields. If there was truthiness-in-advertising, colleges and universities and, to say the least, high school guidance counsellors should flat out tell people that educational degrees in themselves are no guarantee of a job and you might want to think twice about investing all the time, money and effort into something that will only put you in a position of being able to compete for a job. You will have to pursuade some interviewer to hire you and not the next guy. Corporations love nothing more than to pick and choose among a number of qualified applicants. It's the law of supply and demand. Not only does having far more qualified applicants than jobs keep their salaries low, it also puts the employers in the position of cherry-picking the best (in their terms) applicants. The best just might be those who have superior salesmanship skills or those with better personalities or those who are better looking.
Barbara makes a good living writing about those who have been disposed of in this disposable society - books such as "Nickel and Dimed," about America's low wage workers, that somehow made the New York Times best seller list. It is somewhat ironic, I think, that Barbara, who has managed to carve out her own self-employed niche, is obsessesd about telling others not how to carve out their own niche but why they should feel resentful because America hasn't lived up to its own mythology. And basically the whole reason for the mythology in the first place has to do with selling. People in the education field are selling the mythology that education is so important to success in life because, if they didn't, their customer base (namely, students) would dry up. They're not likely to tell you the truth just as any other salesman is not likely to tell you the truth. He's only trying to make a sale so he will tell you that his product (education) is the greatest thing in the world, the sine qua non of a successful life.
I knew someone once (who will remain nameless) who barely made it through high school. The prognostication by my parents (who were educators) was that this poor fellow would be a dismal failure in life. However, he had a winning personality, and, after leaving school, in short order became a top salesman for a company selling industrial machinery. He was making $200,000. a year at a time when the average PhD in a highly technical field was making maybe $60,000. This guy was a total non sequitur. It does not follow, according to American mythology, that someone who does not do well in school should do well in life. However, like the hummingbird, who by the laws of aerodynamics shouldn't be able to fly, this guy defied all predictions. And there are many more like him. The fact of the matter is that good salesmen do well, selling is an essential part of any field and that it is something you don't learn in school.
The problem is that rather than turning out employees, the colleges should be turning out entrepreneurs, persons in any field capable of making a living irregardless of whether or not they happen to be able to be employees of corporations. Interestingly enough, some colleges are changing their orientation in that regard. The Jacobs Schoool of Engineering at UCSD advertises its "entrepreneurial atmosphere." I can't vouch for this school's change of approach from the time I went there, but, I think, it's a step in the right direction. Ehrenreich's approach might have been to recommend that a person's education should be aimed at self-sufficiency rather than a place "in the system." This self-sufficiency should include self-employment as one alternative if one finds that he or she has been "disposed of" for whatever reason by the system.
