7 thoughts on “The Higher-Education Bubble”

  1. Every time I read an article about the current education system, all inclusive pre-school through PhD level, I think the same thing.

    If every kid in America either goes to college, or doesn’t finish high school, who will fix the cars, build the houses, wire the offices, snake out the toilets, of those who DO go to college?

    It certainly CAN’T be the HS drop outs, they have NO training.

    The college kids WON’T do it because they’ve ALL been told to go to college to get THE BEST jobs.

    Who does that leave?

    Call for a plumber a roofer or an electrician, take your car in to get it fixed, chances are the guy, or even the woman, who does that work will be over 30, many are over 50. And we are NOT creating their replacements.

    My son is in school right now, taking welding and then he’ll do a two-year, ASE backed automotive curriculum at our community college. He’s half-way through the 1st semester in welding. Every guy in his class has been, all but, guaranteed a job at graduation by various companies that can’t find welders.

    My son is 30, the guys in his class are mostly his age or older. Of his class, 3 guys are HS age, and went straight to the trades as a first job. The majority of people in OUR community college system are in a transfer system, They do the off topic courses at the community college, then they transfer to the state university system to do the core classes to finish a four year degree.

    They are actually “clogging” the community college system with those people. Currently, half the students in English 101 are there to transfer. That means half those seats don’t go to the Associates Degree people, like they once did. They are blocking out the people who WILL be fixing the cars, stringing wire in your new garage or running a plumbing crew to get your new sewer system tied in to the city system.

    We’ve got a friend who is a GM mechanic. Tom says they’ve been short of mechanics for the last 10 years, in every dealership and shop he’s worked in and it’s only getting worse. Where he works now, there are 30 bays in the shop, they have 17 mechanics.

    At some point, someone in this country is going to have to stand up and say that there is NOTHING wrong with getting dirty to earn a living. Sweating (at work) does NOT make you inferior to a guy with a corner office. In fact, it might keep you working (and yes, sweating), when the guy with the corner office gets laid off, downsized or his job gets outsourced to India, or Pakistan or Guatemala. You can pick the nomenclature but they all mean corner office dude is OUT of his job.

    Every HS in my county, and the one I just left, has computer classes. But the shop classes no longer exist. “Teaching” kids HOW to “use” a computer at that age seems about as sensible as teaching them to use a cell phone or having a three year, graduated level, class in texting!!

    But even that system is skewed toward college.

    My niece took computer repair and maintenance classes in HS. She said her teachers was always telling them it was a good stepping stone through the basics, so they could, “…go to college, become an engineer and DESIGN the next generation of computers and software…”.

    Great idea, someone does have to do those jobs.

    But if they ALL do that, if they all go to college and become design or programming types, who the hell will install the new computers, repair them, build the networks, attach the peripherals, set up the WiFi, do on site security, create the databases, administer the networks….

  2. It certainly CAN’T be the HS drop outs, they have NO training.

    A high school diploma is practically worthless but those who drop out do have a harder time in life. Quite a few of them do get their act together in time. For example, my brother Steve dropped out of high school around 1971. He later got his GED and trained to become a machinist and welder. He’s very good at what he does and makes a very good living.

    A few years ago, I read an interesting article that made the following assertion:

    If young people do three things, their chances of ending up in poverty drop to about 20%. Those three things are:

    1. Graduate high school.
    2. Don’t have children until you’re married.
    3. Don’t get married until you’re at least 22.

    Personally, I’d urge them to wait until they’re 25 and I’d add a 4th thing to the list:

    4. Don’t become an alcoholic or drug addict.

    The push by Obama and those who think like him are leading to a bachelor’s degree becoming almost as worthless as a high school diploma. There are millions of jobs out there that don’t require a college degree and a lot of them are being filled by college graduates. They attend college for 4 or more years, often run up a lot of debt, and still lack the skills needed to get a good job.

    Take a look at the table in this article. As the article states, the demand for college graduates isn’t keeping up with the current supply – the very makings of a bubble.

  3. Bubbles are a normal feature of free markets. Or would you prefer the government ration and socialize education?

  4. Thomas, this bubble doesn’t have that much to do with the free market. Like the housing bubble, it was driven by government subsidies and encouragement.

  5. Rand,

    Student loans have been around since WWII while the belief that education will lead to a good career goes back to when Confucius set up an academy to train the best and the brightest to be civil servants to the Emperor.

    What you are seeing is a natural consequences of unregulated (i.e. free) markets when you have a supply with a long lead time (4 yrs for a Bachelors, 2 for a Masters, 3-4 for Ph.D.) and a demand that is able to fluctuate quickly, namely that supply over runs demand when there is an economic downturn.

    Whenever that happens you see the same type of articles questioning the value for higher education. The only difference between the articles being written now and similar articles from the recessions in the early 1970’s and early 1980’s is the use of the fad term “bubble”. But the basic content is the same, too many folks going to college for too few jobs.

    What will happen is simple, as the economy recovers and the jobs return those with degrees that stick to it will get employment again and then folks will be writing about the shortage of workers with degrees as there were a few years ago.

  6. Another problem with the system is the inbuilt bias towards pretty well useless, easy degrees as opposed to degrees that give useful skills. Examples; media studies vs. chemical engineering.

    Drastic cuts in funding for sociology, media studies, wimmin’s studies and so on might well help the problem.

    I’m using the UK as an example. We desperately need more chemical engineers and solid-state physicists. We certainly do not need more sociologists.

  7. This has been coming on for a long time. Say, the 40’s and fifties.Teachers teaching what they have been taught. They havent worked in their chosen field of endeavor so they send out graduates that were taught mechanics of the field but not the “facts of life” about the field of endeavor.

    In other words, what about the business aspects of the chosen field of endeavor? “THIMK” was a really true expression of the problem at that time. That “How to”was never taught.

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