Today is Labor Day and in honor of labor I have to say that our nation is not doing it's level best at providing opportunities for labor for all, at least not opportunities that pay a decent wage and allow people to live a decent middle class life. There are a great many factors that play into this scenario. A lot of manufacturing has been outsourced to cheaper labor pools overseas, leaving a great many Americans searching for work that does not require a college degree. A huge chunk of the available service sector jobs pay pitifully low wages and their accompanying benefit packages all too often do not meet the needs of the employees. Then there is that factor that I, as an educator, know most about. The public schools are not doing their jobs in preparing American kids for their futures.
Just this last week I was subjected to the platitudes of one more career administrator who put forth the proposition that we need to prepare all students in our high schools for college. While this sounds great on the surface, it simply is not realistic. Not all students want to go to college. Not all students have the ability financially to go to college. Not all students have the innate academic talents to go to college. We need to be thinking about how best to meet the needs of these kids who will never graduate from college. Continuing to pretend that college is best for all kids is doing a disservice to the kids of America, and to America itself, a sprawling nation of 310 million with needs for citizens who are very real rocket scientists to garbage collectors.
Let's get real about this college thing. A full 40% of all students who begin college never complete a 4 year degree. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 30% of Americans have at least a B.A. Advanced degrees fall into the 10% and less category. What this means is that fully 70% of our population does not have a college degree and in all likelihood will never possess one. What about these individuals? What about the 70% of public school students who will never get a college degree? What are we doing for them?
What would happen if every high school graduate went on to college? Honestly, that would mean that a 4 year degree is meaningless, and to get a good job you would have to have an advanced degree. It would mean a lot of dropouts or it might mean that there would be massive grade inflation to assure the graduation of scads of kids who don't have what it takes to realistically complete a B.A. or B.S. as we know it. Come to think of it a lot of that is already in progress and 4 year degrees have become devalued already. Makes me really glad that I have an advanced degree.
To be honest, America needs people to repair cars, to work as carpenters, plumbers, electricians. America needs people to work in technical capacities in healthcare and electronics. America needs people to do any number of things that do not require a college degree. So why are we insisting that every child should go to college? Why aren't we training kids to do all of these other things and reserving the college prep programs for those kids who really want to go to college and have the ability? We're setting these kids up for a lifetime of struggle instead of training them for careers that will pay a reasonable wage and allow them to live a middle class existence.
Truthfully, America needs to be finding ways to bring industry back to America, instead of farming it out to foreign countries and foisting unemployment on those who staked their lives on factory labor with a living wage. Even if we bring back manufacturing, though, it will need to be higher tech. Lower tech manufacturing will continue to be a place where 3rd world nations can provide jobs for their citizens while their nations develop. Instead of low tech manufacture, we can focus on green technologies, on high tech technologies.
Changing our focus in education to one where not everyone is college bound will mean providing vocational and career training to some on the high school level and providing further technical training in 1 and 2 year programs beyond high school. Community colleges are perfect venues for such a thing. Furthermore, industry could provide internships and apprenticeships to give kids the skills they need while on the job. This could assure us of continuing to have a viable middle class in America. Should we not adapt, America will continue to widen the gap between rich and poor and continue the process of moving citizens out of the middle class and into the lower classes. Unless we do this, we risk becoming another 3rd world nation with a small wealthy class that lives in gated communities with armed guards and a huge underclass living in squalor.
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