As I have been saying and writing for years, our educational establishment, from pre-school through the universities, has one primary purpose: To produce young adults with marketable skills. That is to say, young people who can produce value, who have worth in the workplace. That isn't a single-step process; it starts with teaching kids to read and write, how to interact with their fellows like civilized people, and later, specific skills and knowledge that make them useful to employers. And, in this context, "useful" means "capable of producing value that exceeds the cost of their employment."
A big part of that, traditionally, was education in the trades. The small-town Iowa high school I went to had a full wood shop where kids could gain skills in carpentry and woodworking, a metal shop where kids could learn machining and welding, and a full auto shop where kids learned to be mechanics. One of my best buddies in high school took every metal shop course the school had, spent a lot of his spare time in the metal shop making things, which was encouraged. He got a job in a local machine shop the week after graduation and has been a tool-and-die guy ever since, for almost half a century now.
We're evidently starting to see some of this focus on the trades reaping new benefits now; non-college educated kids are seeing a spike in employment. But college graduates?
Not so much. An Issues & Insights editorial has some sense of why.
A recent analysis from Burning Glass Institute found that unemployment among those 22-34 years old without a college degree is lower than it’s been in decades, but those with college diplomas are having a much harder time finding work than before.
“For most of the past two decades, the two groups largely tracked each other, in good economic times and bad, the Wall Street Journal reported. “Now, though, just as job hunters without degrees are having one of their best runs, those with college educations are having one of their worst.”
But it's later in the editorial where they hit at the heart of the matter:
Students who attend most colleges today get a steady diet of leftist propaganda about how terrible the U.S. is, how evil free markets are, and the wonders of Marxism. Polls consistently show that the more time spent in college, the more likely people are to be socialists.
Employers are finding that degree holders today lack basic workplace skills but are very adept at complaining about corporate practices, staging walkouts, and embarrassing their employer on social media, when not demanding loan forgiveness.
In simple English: These people are unemployable. They would not produce value for their employers, and what's more, the prospective employers know this. Our nation's universities have, outside of the STEM programs and a few other areas, become a huge, expensive waste of time. And when universities are offering a plethora of crap, the waste becomes even more pronounced. Case in point: New York's Columbia University boasts of a "Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race," which has to be one of the most egregious examples of utter road apples that we've seen in some time; what possible value does the product of a program like this offer to an employer?
None.
The kids in the trades are doing a lot better. A recent Wall Street Journal piece notes:
The more physical and in-person the work is, the lower the unemployment tends to be by that occupation’s own historical standards. Friday’s booming jobs report reinforced the trend: Food services and drinking places added 59,000 jobs in August, more than a third of all 162,000 jobs added to the U.S. economy last month.
By contrast, college-educated workers ages 22 to 34 years old have only seen worse unemployment in the past two decades during the pandemic and the economy’s slow rebound from the 2007-09 recession.
It's all about value. The non-college educated kids, the kids who know how to do things, to make things, to fix things, or who are just willing to learn, are producing value for their employers. The young adults with purple hair and multiple facial piercings who are waving their Underwater Ethnic Dog-Polishing Studies degrees cannot and never will produce any value for an employer; just the opposite, they would be a liability.
Increasingly, our institutions of higher education are failing to equip these young skulls full of mush with marketable skills, although they have grown quite adept at producing young skulls full of mush with six figures of student loan debt. And that's the nub of the matter.
The solution? Again, as I've been saying for years, decouple government from education. Make the financing of education a matter for private financial firms. A kid with a great high school grade point average pursuing a degree in petroleum geology or software engineering would be a good risk, and therefore qualified. A student intending to study Sub-Saharan Basket-Weaving Colonialism Studies, not so much — and that kid wouldn't qualify for a nickel in finance.
We need to produce young people who can produce value for their employers. Right now, the trades are showing us how that's done: With marketable skills. And our universities are providing a stellar example of how not to do this.
