I never let my schooling interfere with my education. - Mark Twain
God made the idiot for practice, then He made the School Board. - Mark Twain
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. - Albert Einstein
We had Eisenhower warn us about the military industrial complex, but not a single statesman on the way out of public service has bothered to stop at the door frame, turn around, and warn us about the ugly menage a tois between government, the banking system, and big higher education.
When my father began his adult working career, he didn't have two nickels to rub together. He had a bit of machinist training from Froebel High School which served him as a summer hire at the mill, but after his Army service, he hired back in general labor, then trained into pipefitter and plumber, learning on the job as he got paid. Today, to be hired in about any job that allows you to feed a family, you need to be able to whip out a degree. So you start out $40-60,000 in debt and have to work for years to get back up to zero.
A recent survey of college presidents shows that 63% feel that parents, and not grants, should underwrite higher education. Let's end the tuition problem by killing the student, making him and his family foot an incredibly inflated school cost that he had no hand in raising.
How did we get to this problem of putting a yoke of debt onto millions of necks by requiring a ticket punch that was not needed before 1980? Business offloaded the responsibility of teaching the workers they need onto higher education. I understand the need for university for rarefied professions such as medicine and law, but the mantra of "you're going to need a degree to pump gas or bag groceries anymore," which was meant as sarcastic hyperbole in 1980, has become hard, cold reality. Today, you need at least an Associates to qualify as a NIPSCO meter reader, and I had to spend $4000 on truck driving school of all things before I spent a month and change with a company driver/trainer. The idea of hiring in somewhere and making small intern/trainee pay while the old hand Fred over there gives you some tasks, sees if you'll wash out or catch on, then advance you to being his protege, then fully trained hire, are as gone as the analog TV. I wish I bookmarked it, but recently a CEO gave an interview where he said if he tried to hire in today and rise through the ranks, working while learning, he would never get hired in the door in the first place. And he emphasized that he would NOT have been interested in front loading a ton of education before starting a career he didn't know was the one he wanted in the end either, so he wouldn't know where he'd end up in today's workforce.
The road to hell was paved with a lot of genuinely good intentions; a GI Bill to reward returning vets, the Pell Grant to give the poor a bootstrap upon which they can pull, Guaranteed Student Loans to get banks to eliminate the fear of loaning money for the tuition of someone who has yet to prove his ability to be responsible and adult. It was meant to break exclusivity of higher education, to make those with the drive to be a doctor or lawyer be able to finance it. But now the banks have this chunk of their business from Sallie Mae that they'd like to grow, office holders do not want to be seen as against their voters' ability to get a well paying job, and universities want to continue to grow, so you have three powerful entities keeping Big Higher Ed growing, tuitions skyrocketing, and job entry prerequisites making the bar higher and higher for those trying to get that family feeding career in a Lake Woebegon world where everyone has to be "better than average" just to be Joe Lunchbucket.
Anecdotes are not data, but nearly everyone I know who entered the workforce up to the 1970's walked in young and dumb and offered a living body to the company or government, and rose to better positions while working and feeding a family, while from the 1980's on they needed a degree with some experience in the field with some other company before they could get considered by where they ended up working. And I've known my share who did the education without getting the brass ring.
I'm not a troglodyte against learning or an able workforce. I am against the government, banks, and universities making the sheepskin something that you need to indebt yourself without a guarantee of being able to pay it off, when an IQ test, a personality test, and maybe a routine physical exam and background check (along with live interview to explain things if you were a fitful lad or lass) are all you need to know if you want to train Joe to walk around Lake Station with the meter reading wand, or Wendy to get her in real estate training to get her Indiana blue card and list houses.
Shrinking the Pell Grant, like Congress is considering, is a horrible first start. It's like walking someone into a forest, taking off the blindfold, and saying, "Well, you were smart enough to follow me here; you're smart enough to find your way out on your own." How can government make a graceful exit or at least a reduction while getting companies to quit using the college degree as the new high school diploma and requiring it for every position? The Brooklyn Bridge, Statue of Liberty, Chrysler Building, and railroad beds 180 years old still being used without a rebuild are products of a few college grads designing something the other 99% of un-degreed workers putting it in place, and the past had jobs of great skill and wisdom that you trained into.
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