College in America has been over-glamorized, and the effects have been damaging to the country. Consider two issues we currently face:
• Millions of kids, fresh out of university, are jobless and deep in debt with student loans, kind of like me.
• Our country is in debt as well, mostly to China, a powerhouse nation whose low-paid workers mass produce the products we import and consume.
These two issues became married in my mind recently, after listening to an episode of the Adam Carolla Podcast in which he interviewed Mike Rowe, host of the show Dirty Jobs.
They discussed how college rose to prominence and became the main societal indicator of success while physical skills jobs, like construction and agriculture, became careers left to the uneducated.
A strong PR campaign
College, according to Rowe, got a strong PR campaign about 30 or 40 years ago. Like any campaign, it went too far, to the point that college now represents the assumed starting point for anyone aspiring to a successful life. Rowe asks that we consider the term "alternative" as it relates to education:
"Anything that's not a four-year degree has become alternative. Once upon a time, alternative meant another way to get to the place you'd like to wind up. But now, if you think about the way the word is used, the alternative is the basketball player that sits on the bench and waits for the starter to break his ankle. It's the understudy in the wings, waiting for the lead to go hoarse. It's the loser."
We've promoted the college path at the expense of all other accumulated knowledge. By making the university the benchmark, trade jobs vital to our survival have been reduced to "vocational consolation prizes," and now we're either forgetting how to do those jobs, or they're being shipped overseas.
"The whole thing is so fundamentally self-defeating and counter-intuitive," Rowe says. "And people scratch their head and go, God, how is it that we have rising unemployment and a widening skills gap? Well, c'mon. It's because every time you see a plumber on TV, he's 300 pounds with a giant butt crack. He's the brunt of the joke. He's the punch line. He's not the solution."
"Yeah," Carolla says. "It's like, Go to college or your going to end up being a pipe fitter."
"They're paying $27 an hour for pipe fitters in Alabama right now," Rowe says. "And $29 for welders."
I am not suggesting that I'd jump at a chance to trade my college degree for a pipe-fitting job in Alabama, believe me. But it is worth pointing out that I make half of the aforementioned wage and I'm about $80,000 in debt, both of which are burdensome. Also, my perception of pipe fitting has admittedly, I'm sure, been shaped somewhat by Hollywood's butt-crack imagery.
Best days behind us?
America has grown accustomed to continuous improvement from one generation to the next, Carolla says, with each one living a slightly more privileged life than the last. Could it be that the days of steady generational progress are behind us?
"For the first time ever," he says. "People are going to start thinking: Maybe I'm not going to do better than my dad."
But Rowe insists we've simply reached a point where we need to redefine "better."
"If you're not going to celebrate the kind of things you ultimately need, you're going to end up with precisely what you deserve. Mathematically, your kids can't have it better than you did and so on and so on and so on. It just doesn't play out at all. So, rather than scratching your head over the algorithm, why not just step back and say, We're all screwed up as to what better means."
The college loan situation in America is a total mess, and so is the unemployment situation. As a country, it's a perfect time to start celebrating the kinds of jobs we need.
Follow Justin Cox on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CoxJustin
An intelligent, high-quality plumber can make as much as $200k a year while being his own boss. Would I trade away my education? Absolutely not, but I certainly could have gone to night school.
I've seen several engineers who were great with drawing up the diagrams of a new plant but couldn't change their own oil-discuss politics-do anything artistic or musical-grow a tomatoe-or had a lick of common sense. A better life for my kids would be one that was options,is open to new experiences, and included the time to persue all kinds of interests- something that is getting rare. A plumber can quote the classics. A college grad. can be expert in parties and the latest drug of choice.
I was a lab tech, some college( chemistry), after about 10 yrs. company decided new lab techs. should have a degree.. so they hired a English major! It didn't really matter, so many of our tests were just for our organic chem. lab they barely got a mention in my old text books...the point is it was a job that required on the job training..so why was a degree necessary? I think front office didn't have a clue, so they decided a degree (any degree) meant they could do any job necessary--they were wrong "English" lasted about 4 weeks.
One word of caution I will add is high school training. This issue has been belabored, but there's only so much one can do at the college level if the foundation hasn't been set in place from before. A lot of students really need more one-on-one training for skills like writing (I assume math also, but I deal with writing and language myself) but it's hard to find the time to help them in a big university. That's partly why it feels so awful to suggest it (to me, anyway): some people are smarter when it comes to physical tasks, and some have genuinely been let down long before they arrived at a university.
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You meant to say China produces nearly 40 times more engineers, IT technologists, scientists, network specialists than we do.
Their universities are hubs of technology - our universities on the other hand are places where people learn to "think critically" in other words get a useless degree in something like philosophy and we give people tons of funding to do this.
Hello, cheap labor one can find anywhere in the world including the USA - if it was just cheap labor then all the companies would do is get illegal immigrants in to fill the spots.
Burying one's head in the sand as far as the tertiary sector needing a massive overhaul is the problem. Its not just cheap labor and one is living in a fool's paradise to think that jobs are going to China solely because of cheap labor.
You also should add: our funding at university level goes into making useless departments like the philosophy and religious studies departments even more bloated and bigger than they already are.
China has made sure they are in touch with the needs of the future and are way more progressive than we are.
you are wrong it is ONLY the labor cost that causes US manufacturing to move to China... otherwise why go to the expense ?
PROOF tell me what labor costs are in China then tell me the lowest here...find me one Chinese production worker that makes even a dollar an hour.....I await your facts.....
Sorry universities in the USA have become isolated from the economic situation of the country - too many useless majors like philosophy being trained and funded for and too little going into the needed departments.
Lets not even get to the chronic shortages of health sector workers due to either lack of space or lack of funds meanwhile universities pay big bucks to enlarge their philosophy and religious studies departments and refuse to make their medical campuses bigger in order to take more students.
Just remember this: the financial crisis was brought to us by people who majored in business.
Go look at the Aussies. Their main claim to fame is digging dirt and exporting it. You hardly would call them third-world, would you?
This month the silliness is preventing the coal depot on the west coast from going forward. That alone would represent loss of tens of billions in coal exports and over 100,000 high paying mining and export terminal jobs. Multiply that by ten thousand times around the nation, and it adds up.
One thing I do think this conversation affords is the discussion toward the college graduate's versatility in the American workforce. I speak for myself but anticipate that I am not alone when I say that I certainly don't want to do the same thing for 30+ years, especially if manual labor is involved. I need to know that I have options when it comes to making a living, and I believe that my investment, similar in dollar amount to yours, is worth it. American dream, yes, but it wouldn't be possible without those in the alternative sector.