Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
“Brain hubs” with well-educated workers, such as Austin and Raleigh, also create middle-class jobs for middle-skill workers. Opportunity spills over — or, at least, trickles down. But, in most of the country, less-skilled workers face bleak job prospects.
Where will the jobs (and middle-class wages) will be in the next few years for people without four-year college degrees? Retiring baby boomers will open up manufacturing jobs for male high school graduates. Women will need a certificate or associate degree — preferably in a health-care field — to have a shot at earning at least $35,000 a year.
Also on Community College Spotlight: To provide realistic training in restaurant work, a college culinary arts program has opened its own bistro.
Salon’s “New Declaration of Independence,” which calls for a “jubilee” to wipe out student debts, annoyed Matt Welch, who thinks adults are responsible for their choices.
The “99 percent” complain they’ve “played by the rules,” then learned the game was rigged. Salon writes:
For the young, higher education was said to be a ticket to class mobility, or at least a secure career. Instead, middle-class students have taken on billions of dollars of inescapable debt during a prolonged jobs crisis. Lower-income students are blatantly ripped off by usurious scam artists working for educationally dubious for-profit schools. Even those seeking to join the professional class, through medical school or law school, find themselves with mountains of debt and dwindling job prospects. The rapidly rising cost of higher education pushes bright students into lucrative but socially destructive fields, like finance. [...]
“Cradle-to-grave employment (at least outside the public sector) has been dead since at least the end of the Cold War,” Welch responds. English, Film, Sociology, Philosophy and similar degrees “have had debatable workplace utility” for a generation or more.
Adult human beings have agency, the ability (even responsibility!) to run their own cost/benefit analyses and choose accordingly. You could go to a state school (or community college) instead of an over-inflated prestige mill. You could pay for a 10-year-old car in cash, instead of a new one on installments. . . . offloading 100% of the blame for your own mountain of debt on a group of Greedy McBanksters who “forced” you to “play by the rules” is more than a little pathetic.
“A ‘debt jubilee’ will not be a party, unless your idea of a wild time is to eliminate consumer credit as we know it,” adds Welch. No repayment? No new loans.
A “free” (completely taxpayer-funded) higher education system is likely to be much smaller. The taxpayers will be willing to fund bright students to train as engineers or nurses, I suspect, but balk at funding students interested in English, Film, Sociology, Philosophy or (see Florida) Anthropology.
The U.S. education system trains students to follow the rules and collect degrees, writes Michael Ellsberg in a New York Times op-ed. Dropouts are the job creators who can save America, he argues.
I typed these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.
American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.
From kindergarten through undergraduate and grad school, students learn few entrepreneurial skills or attitudes, Ellsberg writes. Students don’t learn about sales, unless they take a class on why sales and capitalism are evil. They don’t learn to network with others. Creativity is stifled. Worst of all, they don’t learn how failure can lead to success.
Our education system encourages students to play it safe and retreat at the first sign of failure (assuming that any failure will look bad on their college applications and résumés).
While some jobs require a college degree, many people find jobs in the informal market, where who you know and what you’ve done matter more than paper credentials, he writes.
Parents could refuse to pay for useless degrees, but most are ”caught up in outmoded mentalities about education forged in the stable economy of the 1950s (but profoundly misguided in today’s chaotic, entrepreneurial economy).”
Employers could overturn the system “if they explicitly offered routes to employment for those who didn’t get a degree because they were out building businesses.”
OK, for the exceptionally talented and self-educated few. But most college dropouts aren’t Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. And some people do learn useful things in college.
Vice President Joe Biden went to York, Pennsylvania to sell the teacher stimulus to fourth graders, notes Mark Steyn. Biden told the kids that York is broke, but the federal government can send money to hire teachers.
Public school employment has increased 10 times faster than enrollment since 1970, Steyn writes.
In 2008, the United States spent more per student on K-12 education than any other developed nation except Switzerland – and at least the Swiss have something to show for it. In 2008, York City School District spent $12,691 per pupil – or about a third more than the Swiss. Slovakia’s total per student cost is less than York City’s current per student deficit – and the Slovak kids beat the United States at mathematics, which may explain why their budget arithmetic still has a passing acquaintanceship with reality. As in so many other areas of American life, the problem is not the lack of money but the fact that so much of the money is utterly wasted.
York schools employed 440 teachers and 295 administrative and support staff in 2006 (the most recent data available), Steyn writes.
For every three teachers we “put back in the classroom,” we need to hire two bureaucrats to put back in the bureaucracy to fill in the paperwork to access the federal funds to put teachers back in the classroom.
. . . when a nation of 300 million people presumes to determine grade-school hiring and almost everything else through an ever more centralized bureaucracy, you’re setting yourself up for waste on a scale unknown to history.
The teacher jobs bill doesn’t have unified Democratic support or any Republican support, so it’s not going to happen.
Who are the 99 percent of Occupy Wall Street, asks Ezra Klein in the Washington Post. Most are people with college loans they can’t afford and lousy jobs — or no jobs at all.
“We Are The 99 Percent,” posts the stories.
“I am 20K in debt and am paying out of pocket for my current tuition while I start paying back loans with two part time jobs.”
. . . “I am a 28 year old female with debt that had to give up her apartment + pet because I have no money and I owe over $30,000.”
“College debt represents a special sort of betrayal,” writes Klein. “We told you that the way to get ahead in America was to get educated. You did it. And now you find yourself in the same place, but buried under debt. You were lied to.”
“i am a 19 year old student with 18 credit hours and 2 part time jobs. i am over 4000 dollars in debt but my paychecks are just enough to get me to school and back. next year my plan was to attend a 4 year college and get my bfa, but now i am afraid that without a co-signer i will have no shot at a loan and even if i can get a loan i am afraid that i will leave college with no future and a crippling debt.”
If bfa stands for bachelor of fine arts, this 19-year-old is wise to make a new plan.
. . . “I went to graduate school believing that there might be some financial security afforded by a higher degree, and that with that security I could finally buy my mom her own house and take care of her. Instead, I have wasted six years of my life.”
Graduate school in what field? At what point did you realize there were no jobs in that field?
Klein thinks the protesters don’t want a revolution. They want to restore “the fundamental bargain of our economy — work hard, play by the rules, get ahead.”
Hard workers usually get ahead of the slackers, but there is no rule about a college degree guaranteeing a good job. Beheading bankers won’t change that.
Times are hard. A few days ago, I ordered lunch at Burger King. Instead of a teen-ager at the counter, a white-haired woman in her 60s asked if I wanted the value meal.
The recovery isn’t jobless, a new report finds. However, most new jobs are in lower-wage, lower-skill occupations such as cashier, shelf stocker or food preparation worker, according to The Good Jobs Deficit (pdf), a National Employment Law Project report. Sixty percent of jobs lost in the recession were in middle-wage occupations, while 73 percent of jobs added pay less than $13.52 an hour. That explains all those college-educated bartenders.
Source: National Employment Law Project analysis of Current Population Survey
The number of lower-wage jobs is close to the pre-recession peak, while mid-wage jobs are 8.4 percent below the peak and higher-wage jobs are 4.1 percent below their former peak.
The lowest third of the nation’s occupations pay $7.51 to $13.52 an hour, according to the report. That would equal $15,621 to $28,122 a year for a full-time worker. In the middle third, workers earn $13.53 to $20.66 an hour or $28,142 to $42,973 a year. High-wage occupations in the top third range from $20.67 to $53.32 an hour or $42,994 to $110,906 for yearly full-time work.
Real wages are down 0.6 percent since the recession’s start, the report concludes: Median wages fell 2.3 percent for the bottom third and 0.9 percent for the middle third. Wages rose by 0.9 percent for workers in the top third.
California has passed the “Half Dream Act,” which opens state-run private scholarships to undocumented students who’ve graduated from the state’s high schools. But, even if they earn a college degree, undocumented immigrants end up in the same jobs as their parents, concludes a University of Chicago survey. Without legal immigration status, they typically work in construction, restaurants, cleaning and child care.
Also on Community College Spotlight: Most community college students are women, but most athletes are male, reports the New York Times. A Florida college has achieved gender equity by spending to recruit female athletes directly from college and by limiting men’s sports.
Recent Comments