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That's the problem. We exported the jobs our nation needs in order to maintain a healthy economy. (We also imported tens of millions of poor immigrants and we imported many educated foreigners on H-1B and L-1 visas.) We stopped producing tangible wealth (goods) in the hopes that we could exchange intellectual product for tangible goods. The great miscalculation was the failure to realize that people in other nations also want to produce intellectual products and services and that we don't have a magical American racial monopoly on producing intellectual forms of wealth.
The higher education madness is not being driven by a desire to obtain higher education for education's sake, but rather by the hope that purchasing a higher education will result in secure, solid middle class earnings. By and large, people don't want the education itself, at least not at it's current cost. They want solid middle class jobs.
The situation we are in now is that people are spending time and money obtaining education so that they won't have to work menial jobs only to discover that they will end up working menial jobs--but with student loan debt.
Instead of "throwing education" at our nation's economic problems, we need our leaders and the populace to grow up and address the real, fundamental economic problem.
Basically, what you advocate is a return to a world that we can't return to as a nation. We can't simply go back to the days of the high tariffs on imported goods and protectionism. That's the only way this country could keep super high paying jobs in manufacturing industries such as steel and automobiles.
If we did attempt such a policy it would be disastrous. Other nations would retaliate and stop buying those goods and services that we produce here in this country and export abroad. The job loss from that would be staggering. Our own standard of living would deteriorate just from the fact that high tariffs and restrictions would keep high quality foreign goods and products out of our country. Our industries, protected from foreign competition, would lose their edge and be unable to produce products that anyone outside America wanted to purchase. One example: Imported Japanese cars have been hard on Detroit and our domestic auto industry. Yet, at the same time, the presence of these cars spurred our auto industry to make a better, safer product of higher quality. Does anyone else remember American cars in the early to mid-1970's? I do. They were big, gas guzzlers that constantly needed repair.
I hear uninformed people complain constantly about NAFTA, CAFTA, and free trade agreements on CDF. They're here to stay--whether we like it or not. I've just explained why nations and their governments are moving towards free trade.
Now, let's talk about higher education. The only way in this world, we have any hope of competing is to have a highly trained and educated labor force. Such a labor force is our nation's best hope for being able to compete in this new global economy. Doing the same job you've done for the last twenty years is simply not going to cut it. Educated people tend to be more flexible and easier to retrain to do new jobs than uneducated people are.
Its a tough world that we and are children are living in. However, claiming that higher education is not necessary is simply a blind alley for us. The key is to make it more affordable, more relevant to our needs, and more accessible. That's the only path forward.
while the college thing is a big issue with many factors to it, for my part I will say going to college requires planning. We are well past the days when "Get a degree and you will get a good job". That may have been true in the past and the employer would be willing to train someone with say a history degree for a sales or office job but we are at a time when there are many more college grads, when the employer can be more picky, when getting an internship (paid/unpaid) is just as hard as finding a job.
that does not mean everyone has to major in STEM and come out as engineers and nurses, what i am saying is plan. No work is below you, if the work is not in your major so what, take it anyway.
while the college thing is a big issue with many factors to it, for my part I will say going to college requires planning. We are well past the days when "Get a degree and you will get a good job". That may have been true in the past and the employer would be willing to train someone with say a history degree for a sales or office job but we are at a time when there are many more college grads, when the employer can be more picky, when getting an internship (paid/unpaid) is just as hard as finding a job.
that does not mean everyone has to major in STEM and come out as engineers and nurses, what i am saying is plan. No work is below you, if the work is not in your major so what, take it anyway.
Some good points. Another thing to realize is many who start college do not finish. The % of college grads has not changed that much. There are a lot of people wasting money and time at for-profits these days.
The average income and unemployment rate for college grads over 25 doesn't agree with most of your claims. We were in a depression and now a slow recovery. None of what is happening should be that surprising.
Who says we're still not in a depression? The country still has a lot of unemployed people and underemployed people. Do you really believe the unemployment number is at 7.8% like what this web link says????....... U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
There maybe around 30 percent of the population that has a college degree or several college degrees, but they can still be hurting in trying to find a decent paying job compared to someone with only some college or a high school diploma who does have a good paying job.
Last edited by ryhoyarbie; 10-14-2012 at 09:27 PM..
I don't think that college is a conspiracy, per se. But I agree that many people who can't benefit from a college education get funneled into the system.
One blog I really enjoy is 100 Reasons NOT to Go to College:
http://reasonstoskipcollege.blogspot.com
It's a running list that looks at some of the downsides of a college education.
Who says we're still not in a depression? The country still has a lot of unemployed people and underemployed people. Do you really believe the unemployment number is at 7.8% like what this web link says????....... U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
There maybe around 30 percent of the population that has a college degree or several college degrees, but they can still be hurting in trying to find a decent paying job compared to someone with only some college or a high school diploma who does have a good paying job.
Every economist by the definition of a recession. I can't help you don't like the data.
Basically, what you advocate is a return to a world that we can't return to as a nation. We can't simply go back to the days of the high tariffs on imported goods and protectionism. That's the only way this country could keep super high paying jobs in manufacturing industries such as steel and automobiles.
They're not all super-high paying. But, yes, we need some form of protectionism to keep from merging our economy and standard of living with that of the third world.
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If we did attempt such a policy it would be disastrous. Other nations would retaliate and stop buying those goods and services that we produce here in this country and export abroad.
Our annual trade deficit is on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars per year. If we were self sufficient and didn't engage in international trade we would realize a game of hundreds of billions of dollars per year. According to the Economic Policy Institute, our 2011 trade deficit was $558 billion.
If 1 of every 4 of those $558 billion could be translated into American jobs, it would mean that we lost 2.79 million jobs at $50,000/year. (Divide $558 billion by 4 and by $50,000.) If 1 of every 2 of those $558 billion resulted in jobs, then we have lost 5.58 million such jobs.
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The job loss from that would be staggering. Our own standard of living would deteriorate just from the fact that high tariffs and restrictions would keep high quality foreign goods and products out of our country.
Obviously, rebuilding America's infrastructure and industry isn't something that can be done overnight, but it's the direction we would want to head in so that we can produce our own high quality products.
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Our industries, protected from foreign competition, would lose their edge and be unable to produce products that anyone outside America wanted to purchase.
According to EPI, our trade deficit for manufactured goods was $737.1 billion. We're not really selling too many manufactured goods in other countries--because it's difficult to compete against nations with impoverished labor and few or no environmental or labor standards.
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One example: Imported Japanese cars have been hard on Detroit and our domestic auto industry. Yet, at the same time, the presence of these cars spurred our auto industry to make a better, safer product of higher quality. Does anyone else remember American cars in the early to mid-1970's? I do. They were big, gas guzzlers that constantly needed repair.
The Japanese competed on product quality and not so much on wages and standard of living (and environmental policies) for their own workers. This is an example of beneficial trade. Presumably the Japanese people could afford to purchase American-made products in other industries.
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I hear uninformed people complain constantly about NAFTA, CAFTA, and free trade agreements on CDF. They're here to stay--whether we like it or not. I've just explained why nations and their governments are moving towards free trade.
In the first world nations, it benefits the wealthy people who control the politicians.
I'm not opposed to trade--to real trade--an exchange of goods and services for an equivalent value of goods and services. What we are doing with our trade deficit is exchanging IOUs and long-term wealth in the form of capital assets (ownership of land and business entities) in exchange for ephemeral consumer goods. We are impoverishing ourselves long term. Warren Buffet wrote a great essay that illustrates the problem:
Now, let's talk about higher education. The only way in this world, we have any hope of competing is to have a highly trained and educated labor force. Such a labor force is our nation's best hope for being able to compete in this new global economy. Doing the same job you've done for the last twenty years is simply not going to cut it. Educated people tend to be more flexible and easier to retrain to do new jobs than uneducated people are.
This is a dogma. Right now our nation has an oversupply of highly-trained and educated labor, including people with PhDs in the sciences:
The problem is not that people are unwilling to train to work with computers and robotics to produce high-value-added manufactured goods, but that the jobs to do that simply are not there at wage rates that would sustain an American middle class or lower-middle class quality of life. Such jobs exist--in India, Mexico, and China at Indian, Mexican, and Chinese wage rates and quality of life. We can have all of those jobs back--just as soon as we're willing to work at those wages and for that quality of life.
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Its a tough world that we and are children are living in. However, claiming that higher education is not necessary is simply a blind alley for us. The key is to make it more affordable, more relevant to our needs, and more accessible. That's the only path forward.
I never said that higher education was not good or necessary--just that we should keep from wasting huge amounts of time, money, and resources on excess, unneeded higher education. For example, it doesn't make economic sense to produce twice as many scientists (or history majors, or engineers, or women's studies majors, or lawyers, or teachers) as your economy can actually utilize.
I hope that you will give some deep thought to these issues and question the free market, blue-skies benevolent universe premise dogma and religion that we have all been taught.
All the schools that I attended taught me how to memorize and regurgitate worthless knowledge. I have an English degree and know how to diagram a sentence. When was that last taught? I was required to teach my high school English students Romeo and Juliet, MacBeth, etc. Shakespheare was a playwright. He wrote plays that were meant to be acted and watched, not read. Until I started letting the students "act" Shakespheare, it was boring and irrelivant to read and study a play. I watched all the video and I agree with most of it. I do not nor did I ever put my faith in man made institutions.
No, what this country needs is better paying jobs that people enjoyed back in the 50's, 60's, 70's, and mid 90's.
No, what this country needs is lower middle class taxes so workers can keep more of their earnings. Compare the percentage of taxes deducted from an average Americans paycheck in 1960 to today. It is really obscene how much in taxes are stolen from worker's paychecks.
As the politcians you keep electing continue to raise your taxes, do you expect employers to keep increasing pay just to offset the higher taxes?
I pay more in state taxes than I did 25 years ago, so why does state university tuition continue to increase at obscene amounts?
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