Building on the Future: Corporations Look to Make Employees out of Today's Students

Marketing not only takes place through media channels and public advertisements, but also in lesser-suspected areas such as a high school classroom. Companies have been known to advertise their products within schools to generate new customers in the student body, but now some corporations are looking to gain the students interest in the company itself with the hope that they will consider being a future employee with the business. Marketing lesson plans and even a few year-long courses in a subject which offers training in the field of the corporation’s business are being offered at some high schools and middle schools across the nation. There are differing opinions on this kind of education that is designed to produce future employees; from one perspective the schools benefit from the funding, another opinion says the education that students receive suffers because employees are being formed instead of focusing on a well rounded education, and through the arguments the well-being of students is the most highly debated aspect of the issue. The students can benefit from these courses in a few ways but it can also be seen that these companies who may or may not be interested in their actual education are manipulating students into a job position. Taken as a whole, classes conducted by corporations should be allowed because not only do they expose students to the working world which can further a their education, but the classes and programs also open students up to opportunities they may not have otherwise.

In-school marketing has been a growing concern for The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. The CCFC holds events to prevent companies from marketing directly toward young people because they are an impressionable market and can be taken advantage of. The Wall Street Journal reports on classroom marketing in the article entitled “High School Classes Scripted by Corporations”, which is posted on the CCFC website. The report calls attention to the situation of corporations imposing their brand on students and attempting to mold them through exposure to the company’s field of work. Groups such as Deloitte LLP have used lesson plans in high schools that show students different lines of work that they may be interested in upon graduation, these lines of work including several positions available with Deloitte. This program does not hide that the company is looking to interest students with the offers that they make available to their employees, but the companies that have these school programs do more than that. In most cases they offer classroom materials that accompany their lesson plans and design valuable professional development courses that can benefit a school and would be hard for teachers to turn down.

Similar to the Deloitte agenda, Project Lead the Way is a program that is designed to interest students in engineering and provides eight full-year engineering courses for high school students and five ten-week units in areas such as robotics for middle school students. Project Lead the Way has been sponsored by engineering companies such as Lockheed Martin who have made it clear that “increasing general interest in math and science for all students is not [their] goal. Nudging students toward Lockheed…is”. The engineering field has especially made an effort with these high school programs to ensure a steady workforce because in the past years overall interest in the career of engineering among college students has been quite low and corporations are expecting work shortages in the coming years. Corporations are trying to get a grip on the future workforce in order to ensure their survival, and interesting students in their programs has worked for them so far. Students who have been involved in the courses have taken one or more and many of them have expressed interest in majoring in engineering in college based on what they have learned in the Project Lead the Way program.

Disputes over these programs come about in many forms, mostly with concern for how students are being positioned by the businesses. Schools are in the position to decide what is taught to their students and should keep in mind that their job is to build upon a student’s education, not to appease companies who make them offers. Lead the Way’s vice president of operations, Niel Tebbano, has said that these kinds of programs are what schools need; they show students how their education is applied in the work force, which make their work seem more valuable to them. On the other hand some of these programs are intensive and are designed “to start training students for professions that often require university degrees”. Programs like this can be beneficial to students by expanding their academic world but they can also end up being a distraction from other subjects and hold their focus on future work rather than the education they are receiving presently.

These kinds of courses are using students to interest them in companies that they may or may not have heard of before, but students at a high school level have the ability to know what they are and are not interested in. Classes offered by corporations can open doors for students and get them accompanied with a business that they may have never known they’d have an interest in otherwise and so far these classes have not been shown to distract from other coursework. These programs are all optional and solely available for students who may be interested. In some cases students and young people are seen as being passive in their decisions and easily influenced, but I do not believe that this is one of the cases in which there should be an excess of concern.