This afternoon I heard a piece on the radio that brought out something I hadn’t considered. A guy who owns a small manufacturing company in Massachusetts was complaining that he couldn’t find capable blue collar workers. I couldn’t help but wonder about this relates to the “education is the future” theme that has been sounded by (at least) three consecutive administrations. Do people get college degrees so that they can take jobs as blue collar workers in factories?
If you have a college degree in a wishy-washy subject like history, English, or International Studies but can’t do math, science or economics, you can go to law school and get a job on the Supreme Court, so why would you do something useful like blue-collar work?
Setting aside malthus’s inane comment….
Dave, as a longstanding reader I think I underestand your views on the value of higher education. Let me put a different cant on this. As an employer, I can unequivocally tell you that attracting and retaining high quality employees at all levels, including, “blue collar” is one of the most vexing problems owner/managers face today. Whether it is basic skills, work ethic, or the problem of a general sense of entitlement this has become a maddening problem.
Is it because yesterday’s “craftsmen” now go to college? Perhaps. But because I see similar issues at both the blue collar and professional level, I wonder. I’m thinking it is more a general social issue.
In recent months you have shared insights into how your parents conducted their lives. I haven’t come away with the impression that they wiled away the hours at a Starbucks – and by that I mean the social distraction of their day. Nor, dare I say, did you. If I might toot my own horn, I basically sacrificed my 20’s to position myself for later (financial) success.
My point simply is this. I’m willing to acknowledge the notion that there are people going to college who should not (aside – why??? Ding, ding, ding – government subsidy – but I digress) But I think the deterioration in the quality of the labor pool owes more to social standards than crap, worthless degrees.
I saw a big story on CNN a month or so ago about this very issue. There are actually TONS of open, high-skilled manufacturing jobs open–but very few qualified applicants.
In the specific case of my own family both of my parents had college educations and both had post-graduate degrees long before it became commonplace. There was never the slightest doubt in my mind that I would go to college or that I would get a post-graduate degree (both of which I did).
The beginning and end of my views on education is that there is no magic formula for success. People must adapt to what the needs are. And, of course, that we should be cautious in interpreting the implications of higher education because of fallacies of education, e.g. those who go on to post-graduate degrees also got undergraduate degrees and very highly compensated fields, e.g. neurosurgeon, are bundled together with masters degrees in art history in the statistics on the income effects of education.
Wonder what the guy considers the pool to consist of? I ask this because of another Massachusetts manufacturer I read about. This guy owns a pin factory and hires primarily elderly retirees. He does this for a number of reasons. 1) They all are on Medicare, so his health care costs are low; 2) The elderly, as you youngsters will find out, have sleep issues. The factory owner allows his employees to set their own hours–some of them cannot sleep at night, so they work at night, etc. The factory runs 7×24. Finally, 3) the elderly, he’s found, have a rock solid work ethic and are always there when they say they will be there.
It’s also important to consider local conditions. As a military family, we move frequently and have lived in most parts of the country, so I’ve seen the disparities first-hand. A college degree than can potentially land a person a good job in some parts of the country is worthless in other places. Same for some of the trades and blue collar work. The only exception based on my experience is nursing – there’s been a shortage of qualified nurses (of all types) everywhere I’ve been for the last 20 years.
So this brings up a couple of issues:
– How willing are people to move to where the jobs are?
– Add in that most families today are two-income families. The job prospects can and do conflict – there may be a great job for one, but not both at a particular location.